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well, the article is mostly about the "best food writing" anthology (-ies) and doesn't stray terribly far from that. bourdain is the main thread. some of pollan's writing is operative, but mostly it's caricatured. as is alice waters.
the disadvantage the article puts me at personally is that not only have i not read the best food writing anthology, but after reading the article i am not at all inclined to read it. and i wonder who edited the anthology (-ies) and what their aesthetic actually is. and what the project is. and the extent to which food writing as it is collected in the anthology is a space of food-related fantasy--in which case the moral rhetoric---and it seems nothing more than rhetoric---is merely a feature of a type of food porn. because that seems what it is, really.
at the same time, i've read a bunch of pollan until i grew weary of it mostly because the assumption seems in place that reader of book x hasnt read book y and so the whole apparatus from x can and should be repeated in y. but i'd still recommend the debate between pollan and the president/ceo of whole foods about the question of scale vs. the designation organic in determining a politically informed relation to food---it's smart on both sides and well done. it's in the whole foods ceo blog somewhere. i dont remember where. what i've read of pollan has little to do with the version of pollan that's apparently in the anthology. i dont doubt that version exists--i just am not interested in it because it's a version of the omnivore's dilemma (and other) things, the less interesting stuff.
bourdain i've not read.
the sub pollans and sub bourdains that fill the anthology i dont know.
so.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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