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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The Harvesters, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565. The Metropolitian Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1919.

Balanced Diets

By Daniel Mason

Pica is an unexplainable food curiosity—the overwhelming desire to eat the inedible.

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Map

Food Chains

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

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Miscellany

Paul Newman’s character amazingly eats fifty hard-boiled eggs in one hour in Cool Hand Luke. 141 hard-boiled eggs eaten in eight minutes is the actual world record, held by Joey Chestnut.

1609 | Jamestown

Of Such a Dish as Powdered Wife

John Smith remembers the “starving time.”More

c. 1030 | China

Acquired Tastes

A regional survey of Chinese delicacies.More

1878 | Paris

National Cuisine

They eat dogs there, don’t they?More

Charts & Graphs

Last Meals

Last Meals

Match the person with their last meal.

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Black and white engraving of Roman author Petronius.

Jonathan Swift

Photograph of Marcel Proust looking pensive.

Image of Japanese haiku poet Matsuo Bashō.

Spanish soldier and author Bernal Díaz del Castillo.

American journalist Barbara Demick.

Lewis Lapham at his desk

Portrait bust of presumed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey Homer.

When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.

—St. Jerome, 395

Australian poet and essayist Les Murray.

Ovid & Les Murray

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