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

“I am the emperor, and I want dumplings,” said Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria. His only lucid remark, the historian A. J. P. Taylor thought.

1854 | Walden

Civil Abstinence

To fish or not to fish, that is the question.More

c. 1945 | Bergen-Belsen

Bread Is Gold

At Bergen-Belsen, hunger crushes the spirit.More

1923 | Missouri

No Small Parts

Laura Ingalls Wilder finds the golden gleam of sunlight in the fabric of civilization.More

Charts & Graphs

Party Fouls

Shindigs that got out of hand.

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American historian Francis Parkman.

American author Alice B. Toklas.

Photograph of German literary critic Walter Benjamin.

Photograph of Marcel Proust looking pensive.

Lewis Lapham at his desk

English novelist and writer Frances Trollope.

English author Evelyn Waugh.

Comedian, actor, and writer Patton Oswalt.

Is it only the mouth and belly which are injured by hunger and thirst? Men’s minds are also injured by them.

—Mencius, 300 BC

Australian poet and essayist Les Murray.

Ovid & Les Murray

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