August 11, 2020 Off Menu The Other Kellogg: Ella Eaton By Edward White Edward White’s monthly column, “Off Menu,” serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times. Original Kellogg’s cereal box (left), Ella Eaton Kellogg (right) Few novels in American history have had the seismic social impact of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 work set among the gore and misery of Chicago’s slaughterhouses. Though the critics were sniffy about Sinclair’s drum-beating prose, his vivid descriptions of the insanitary conditions inside America’s abattoirs caused an outcry that hastened the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Despite the sales figures, Sinclair was only partially satisfied with the public reaction to his book. His aim had been to convert Americans to socialism; instead, he lamented, he had succeeded only in turning them into fussy eaters. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he later wrote, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” 1906 turned out to be a landmark year for both the American food industry, and American cuisine. While The Jungle was lighting fires in Congress, in Battle Creek, Michigan, William Keith Kellogg struck a deal with his brother John Harvey Kellogg that would begin a new, acrimonious chapter in the peculiar psychodrama of their relationship, and spark a revolution of the breakfast table. William bought from John full ownership of the company that produced their Toasted Corn Flakes, and swiftly turned a niche health food product into one of the biggest American brands in history, changing the diets of billions around the world. Both these events, the regulation of the meat industry and the rise of breakfast cereal, were redolent of the Progressive Era of the early 1900s, in which it was assumed that a mixture of moral zeal and technocratic expertise could remedy all social ills, and alleviate individual suffering. But they are also wonderful examples of an unmistakably American approach to cooking and eating, what the academic Nicholas Bauch describes as “an obsession with getting food right … never being satisfied with the movement of organisms from nature to the eater’s body.” In the Kellogg story there was one person in particular devoted to getting food right—not the flamboyant, egocentric John, nor the embittered, entrepreneurial William, but Ella Eaton Kellogg, John’s wife, one of the most overlooked but most important names in the ever-twisting story of America’s relationship with food. It was Ella who applied the Progressive mindset to a working kitchen, sowed the seeds of dietetics, and devised a new culinary philosophy for ordinary Americans which she outlined in 1892 with her book Science in the Kitchen. In her sober, efficient way—which perfectly mirrored the sober, efficient dishes she concocted in her kitchen—Ella bequeathed a huge legacy. Beyond the content of her recipes, which promoted vegetarianism and swore off refined sugar, she articulated the heady idea that perfecting food (and the systems in which it is created and consumed) is the key to perfecting human civilization. From Diet Coke to the Impossible Burger, America has long sought to perfect its food through scientific intervention. Few have gone at it as successfully as Ella Eaton Kellogg. Read More
August 11, 2020 Arts & Culture The Unreality of Time By Elisa Gabbert © Allen / Adobe Stock. I was listening to an episode of the BBC podcast In Our Time, on which a group of English scholars was discussing the French philosopher Henri Bergson, when one of them mentioned an essay called “The Unreality of Time,” originally published in 1908, by a philosopher named John McTaggart. The phrase startled me—I was writing a book called The Unreality of Memory. It’s possible I’d heard the title before and forgotten I knew it—as the scholars note, it is a famous essay. (“Is forgotten knowledge knowledge all the same?” is the kind of question we asked in my college philosophy classes.) In any case, I had never read it. I paused the podcast and found the essay online, curious what I’d been referencing. McTaggart does not use “unreality” in the same way I do, to describe a quality of seeming unrealness in something I assume to be real. Instead, his paper sets out to prove that time literally does not exist. “I believe that time is unreal,” he writes. The paper is interesting (“Time only belongs to the existent” … “The only way in which time can be real is by existing”) but not convincing. McTaggart’s argument hinges in part on his claim that perception is “qualitatively different” from either memory or anticipation—this is the difference between past, present, and future, the way we apprehend events in time. Direct perceptions are those that fall within the “specious present,” a term coined by E. R. Clay and further developed by William James (a fan of Bergson’s). “Everything is observed in a specious present,” McTaggart writes, “but nothing, not even the observations themselves, can ever be in a specious present.” It’s illusory—the events are fixed, and there is nothing magically different about “the present” as a point on a timeline. This leads to an irresolvable contradiction, to his mind. Read More
August 10, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 21 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “It’s been a year of storms—political, viral, and, this past week, meteorological. At the Review, two of us lost power for a couple of days after Hurricane Isaias. But to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, the Daily—and our social media, our virtual events, and the production of the quarterly—could not stop for that. I felt lucky to be part of a team that didn’t hesitate for a second to offer help. Hopefully, as far as readers could tell, TPR didn’t miss a beat. And so I’m thinking a lot right now about the power of community. Throughout the pandemic and the attendant lockdown, through all the political agony, through the many major and minor crises of the past months, friends, kind strangers, public commentators, essential workers, shopkeepers, artists, and activists have been unusually generous with their time and energy, whether raising a virtual glass over Zoom, taking to the streets in solidarity, sending a donation where it’s needed, or helping to clear fallen trees. I hope you, too, are feeling the love of your community right now, and I hope these unlocked pieces from the Paris Review archive offer some much-needed respite or an opportunity to think deeply about what it means to support one another. Unlocked this week is all the work TPR has published by a writer who has been very much a part of this year’s pressing conversations, the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong. Stay safe, and happy reading.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director Cathy Park Hong. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan. Cathy Park Hong has been a regular Paris Review contributor for more than a decade. Her poems combine whimsy and humor with precise and often gymnastic linguistic manipulations to interrogate how words convey and carry history, community, and, most pointedly, racism. Her nonfiction debut, Minor Feelings, which came out earlier this year, is part memoir, part work of social criticism that explores Asian American identity and broadens Hong’s investigation of how language upholds—but also has the power to fight—hate and racism. Read More
August 10, 2020 Line Readings Comics as Place By Ivan Brunetti In his column Line Readings, Ivan Brunetti begins with a close read of a single comics unit—a panel, a page, or a spread—and expands outward to encompass the history of comics, and the world as a whole. Robert Crumb, “A Short History of America,” panel 1, 1979 Most comics focus on the actions of a figure, and the narrative develops by following that figure as it moves through its environment, or as it is commonly referred to by cartoonists, who have the often tedious, time-consuming task of actually drawing it, the background. One widely used cartoonist’s trick is to draw/establish the setting clearly and then assiduously avoid having to redraw it in subsequent panels, or at least diminish the number of background details as the sequence progresses. After all, once this setting/background has seeped into the reader’s brain, the reader can and will fill in the gaps. Moreover, sometimes drawing the background would only clutter the composition and distract the reader from the emotional core of the narrative, and so the background might judiciously disappear altogether, having outlived its graphic usefulness, until the next shift in scene. Robert Crumb’s 1979 “A Short History of America” upends all of the above. It is a small miracle of concision and grace, consisting of a mere twelve panels that span across four pages (of three horizontal panels each) and roughly a hundred and fifty years of history. Every line, every mark in this comic imparts not only texture, but vital narrative information. In some ways, this short piece encapsulates the very art form of comics: one panel becomes panels, becomes a page, becomes pages, becomes story. Here the background is not simply a component of the story; one might say it is entirely the story. Read More
August 7, 2020 The Last Year Texas History By Jill Talbot Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces in real time the moments before her daughter leaves for college. The column ran every Friday in November, January, and March. It returns for a final month this August. The Baker Hotel The Baker Hotel rose above the Texas trees so straight ahead we didn’t trust the turns we were told to take. I pulled off I-20, and my daughter, Indie, read directions from her phone. I took a left, away from the building that loomed like a castle in the distance. It felt as if we were going in the wrong direction, until we turned onto Oak Street. As we got closer to the fourteen-story hotel (abandoned since 1970), we leaned down to marvel at the top-floor balcony, at all those empty rooms towering over the small town of Mineral Wells, fifty miles west of Fort Worth. The state reopened in May, and the makeshift sign that had been hanging on the side of Applebee’s (OPEN TO GO) came down. For forty-nine days before reopening, the state of Texas had been limited to essential businesses, and while Governor Greg Abbott declared a statewide emergency, he never issued a formal stay-at-home order. All that time, I only went to the grocery store or 7-Eleven, darting with a Pac-Man savvy down aisles, away from the maskless. Only on July 2, after the reopening of Texas proved to be a disaster, did Abbott mandate the wearing of masks. When Indie began her senior year last fall, she was gone more than she was home—band practice and contests, game nights, working until one A.M. sometimes at her restaurant job, going out with friends, hanging out at their houses. I understood it was a prelude, a slow and increasing separation to prepare us for her leaving. Suddenly we were both at home, navigating a new direction. It’s hard to tell when spring turned to summer, every day the same, and for so many of those days I wondered if Indie’s last year at home would turn out not to be the last year at all. But when her university announced in June that they would hold classes on campus in the fall, I wanted to make these very last days something we’d both remember. We call them half-tank trips, because that’s as far as we go, half a tank. We never leave the car, and we’re back home within an hour or two. Indie prefers I surprise her with the direction and destination, so it’s only after we leave—about once a week—that I tell her where we’re headed. Read More
August 7, 2020 Postcards This Is Not Beirut By Elias Khoury Beirut sunset, with port in the distance (© Adobe Stock) This is not Beirut. But no—this is Beirut! A city broken and wounded, whose blood spreads like glass over the eyes. A city paved with glass, as though glass had turned into eyes, plucked out and filling the streets. In Beirut, you must tread on your eyes in order to see. And when you see, you are struck blind. A city of glassy blindness, of ammonium nitrate, and of the searing blast that swallowed the city and split the sea. This is not Beirut. For forty-five years we have been saying of Beirut that it is not Beirut. We lost Beirut while searching for it in the deficient past. “The City of Is-No-More”—that is the name we gave it, for, starting with the destruction of the civil war, we have attributed everything in Beirut to its past. This week, however, as we fell to the ground before the monster that exploded at the city’s port, we discovered that it was the destruction itself that was our city, these houses stripped naked were our houses, these groans were our groans. This is Beirut! Everyone, tear your eyes away from the ground and behold your city reflected in these ruins! Stop searching for its deficient past! Do not stand and wonder, for the explosion that turned your city to rubble was neither coincidence nor mere accident. It was your truth that you have tried so long to hide. A city handed over to thieves to violate, a city where the authority of idiots holds sway and which has been ripped apart by warlords working for foreign powers. Read More