Journal
Articles
The empathy machine?
A cursory Google search soon reveals that ‘VR as the ultimate empathy machine’ – as VR filmmaker and proselytiser Chris Milk calls his 2015 TED talk – is not just a niche academic research interest, it’s a movement. And like all movements, it has its prophets and zealots. According to Milk in a 2016 TechCrunch interview, VR promises the ‘democratisation of human experience’.
Tastemakers
I’m still pleasantly mystified by our obsession with food – our need to talk about it, remember it, photograph it and analyse it, to eat our feelings and compare our lives to buffets and boxes of chocolates.
Recipe for success
Fans used to approach my grandmother, Margaret, at events or book signings, professing their adoration and proudly presenting their 1969 yellow-bound original of The Margaret Fulton Cookbook. They’d tell stories about the book’s place in their hearts – it had been given to them when they moved out of home, or when they’d married, or it had been passed through two generations. Margaret would smile sweetly and flick through the pages as though looking for something. Then, often, she would close the book firmly and look mock-crossly up at them (I say ‘up’ because she was usually seated, but was also only just over five-foot-tall). ‘You’ve never cooked from this book. Where are the splatters, the markings of the kitchen, the stuck-together pages?’
Strong food
The principal reason Ju/’hoansi didn’t seek to accumulate wealth or surpluses was because they were confident first in the inherent providence of their environment and second in their ability to exploit it – so they were content to focus their energies on meeting only their immediate material needs rather than on creating or controlling surpluses.
Witches’ brew
Anthropologist Solomon Katz proposed in the 1980s the intriguing ‘beer before bread’ theory, which suggested that early agriculturalists were driven to farming not by their wholesome desire for crusty loaves but by their lust for that other staple grain product: beer.
The fight for the white stuff
Although non-dairy milks are hardly unique to the US, there seemed something distinctly ‘American’ about the consumerist techno-utopianism of engineered nutrition. In its seductive promises and dazzling abundance, in its massification and drive for profit, and its bold-yet-arrogant ambition, the world of plant milks became a metonym for everything I loved and loathed about US culture. Give me a carton of Blue Diamond Almond Breeze and you have given me America.
Fallen apples
From the twelfth century in Western Europe, the apple, scientific name malus, became the forerunner for the unidentified forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden, probably because its symbolism was already well established in Norse and Greek mythology, and the wordplay was irresistible: malus derives from the Latin word malum, which meant both evil or wrongdoing and fruit plucked from a tree.
Confected outrage
Many of us can name our favourite childhood lollies. But what if a lolly’s name, or the name of another popular food item, is out of date? What if it’s racist, harmful or wrong? What happens when the name of a lolly doesn’t work anymore?
Having and not having the cake
Everyone involved in Bake Off is always lovely; and that everyone involved is always lovely to each other I know my girlfriend credits with having helped her through the hardest months of her life, so I guess I owe it that as well.
Easter cakes
I find I cannot cry on the day of the funeral or for many nights after the news of Ellen’s death and it is as if I am stunned by this loss, as if I am too close to this absence for it to mean anything yet, until two weeks later when I take the handle of the mould in my hands and lay the flat back of it against my cheek, and I cry and I cry.
Finding the fundamentals of culture
Valuing a job that creates something tangible is probably why, on leaving school, I opted to become a chef; I liked the idea of making food, and hopefully making people happy. It’s probably why I farm, because doing something physical, to produce something you can actually touch, is wired into me.
Dried milk
THE RUIN OF the new mother is the raspberry. I give Yasmin, her eight-month-old, the bursting prize of the red...
