Still Life with Ham, by Philippe Rousseau, c. 1870. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1982.

Food

Volume IV, Number 3 | summer 2011

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Still Life, by Carstian Luyckx, c. 1640. Columbus Museum of Art.

Preamble

The Midas Touch

By Lewis H. Lapham

The times change, and with them what, where, and how people eat.

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Kitchen Scene, by Peter Wtewael, c. 1620. The Metropolitian Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1906.

Death in the Pot

By Deborah Blum

Before the regulation of the food industry, there was very little preventing us from eating poison.

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Map

Food Chains

Tracing the world travels of tomato, pepper, and coffee.

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Miscellany

“As if I swallowed a baby,” said William Makepeace Thackeray about eating his first oyster.

c. 1985 | El Paso

Hangover Cure

The red badge of menudo stains.More

1906 | Chicago

Upton Sinclair Tours the Factory

A behind-the-scenes look at meatpacking.More

1764 | Paris

What the Dead Ate

The diets of the dearly departed.More

Charts & Graphs

Top Chefs

Triumphs and tragedies of French culinary masters.

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Photograph of American food writer M.F.K. Fisher with cat.

American author Alice B. Toklas.

American poet William Carlos Williams.

Statue of the Persian poet Ferdowsi.

Painting of humanist and scholar Desiderius Erasmus.

Black and white engraving of Roman author Petronius.

Painting of Benjamin Franklin reading a batch of papers next to a classical bust.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

—Virginia Woolf, 1929

Porphyry & Ted Nugent

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Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Judged by Its Covers

By Josh MacPhee

Looking back at the design of the African Writers Series. More

DÉjÀ Vu

He Just Doesn’t Like the Word “No”

2018:

A twelve-year-old steals his parents’ credit card and gets on a plane to Bali.

1723:

Seventeen-year-old Ben Franklin runs away on a boat and ends up in Philadelphia.

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Rehab Hiding the Spies in Jericho, c. 1405. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

The World in Time

Roland Philipps

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Roland Philipps, author of A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean. More

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