The opposition of the raw and the cooked, to borrow from the title of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s most cited though not best-read book, seems basic to our ideas of nature and culture. A raw prawn is part of the sea; broiled, it becomes part of our art. But for Lévi-Strauss the real work was done by the third leg of his “culinary triangle”: the rotting. Spoilage, after all, is a natural tendency of food and the most urgent reason we transform nature into culture—we’re desperately trying to keep what we’re about to eat from going bad.
The line between the raw and the cooked is, to be sure, nebulous; a plate of sushi is both raw and cooked, “made,” in the cultural sense, by a knife and seaweed. Sushi is the dream of pure sensation, but herring is the normal state of life. The more consequential point is that cooked meat decays more slowly than raw; pickling and curing postpone the unpalatable end even longer. We save the world from rotting by rolling it in salt, smoking it in maple fires, preserving it in brine. Nature is always going bad, and the most immediate form of “good” that humans know is keeping that from happening. Sisyphus’ famous boulder, rolled uphill and crashing down again, is better represented in our daily lives by the nova we eat on Sunday morning’s bagel—salmon saved from spoiling by smoke and salt—with the knowledge that lox, too, has a sell-by date. Its own bagel-shaped boulder ultimately rolls back down.
Denne historien er fra July 31, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra July 31, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.