Tag Archives: Food

Favorite Meals of Famous Authors

By Robin Bates | Published: August 23, 2011

A playful passage in a recent New Yorker story by Julian Barnes (“Homage to Hemingway”) has me imagining author food preferences.

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The Transcendent Properties of Food

By Robin Bates | Published: August 19, 2011

“Babette’s Feast” is about a sumptuous banquet that descends upon a querulous community like an act of grace, thereby allowing the spirit to flow again. In other words, it’s a good film to watch these days when our own communities are troubled and having difficulty coming together.

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One of Literature’s Sexiest Eating Scenes

By Robin Bates | Published: August 9, 2011

Homer gains Fielding’s admiration by his ability to move seamlessly between epic grandeur and “the shameless dog of the belly.” Perhaps it is Homer’s dexterity that gives Fielding the idea for his own contribution to “Great Eating Scenes in Literature.”

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The Black Honey of Summer

By Robin Bates | Published: August 2, 2011

My son’s marriage proposal to his Trinidadian girlfriend has become bound up in my mind with a Mary Oliver poem about blackberries.

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Forgive Me for Eating Your Plums

By Robin Bates | Published: July 12, 2011

In my experience, no two people respond to William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say” in the same way. More than most short poems, it seems to function as a Rorschach test, with reactions telling us more about the reader than the poem itself.

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Blueberry Muffins and Rites of Passage

By Robin Bates | Published: July 5, 2011

Writing about her mother’s blueberry muffins in her “Books that Cook” class, student Melanie Kokolios came to understand in a new way her own passage into adulthood.

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The Round Jubilance of Peach

By Robin Bates | Published: June 28, 2011

Sink your teeth into Lee Young-Li’s poem about peaches and let it carry you into a sensation that is so deep that it banishes death.

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Nothing So Sensible as Sensual Inundation

By Robin Bates | Published: June 21, 2011

Poetry, with its eye on what really matters, can help us taste food again. Mary Oliver’s “Plum Trees” reminds us to eat with full awareness.

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Mutton Mouths and Butter Bodies

By Robin Bates | Published: June 14, 2011

Jennifer Cognard-Black notes that food, being perishable, presents museums and historians with a challenge. To study what and how people ate, we must look for related artifacts, including written recipes.

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