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Blog: December
Eating Habits
...So violent a change in a culture's eating habits is surely the sign of a national eating disorder. Certainly it would never have happened in a culture in possession of deeply rooted traditions surrounding food and eating. But then, such a culture would not feel the need for its most august legislative body to ever deliberate the nation's "dietary goals" --or, for that matter, to wage political battle every few years over the precise design of an official government graphic called the "food pyramid". A country with a stable culture of food would not shell out millions for the quackery (or common sense) of a new diet book every January. It would not be susceptible to the pendulum swings of food scares or fads, to the apotheosis every few years of one newly discovered nutrient and the demonization of another. It would not be apt to confuse protein bars and food supplements with meals or breakfast cereals with medicines. It probably would not eat a fifth of its meals in cars or feed fully a third of its children at a fast-food outlet every day. And it surely would not be nearly so fat. Nor would such a culture be shocked to discover that there are other countries, such as Italy and France, that decide their dinner questions on the basis of such quaint and unscientific criteria as pleasure and tradition, eat all manner of "unhealthy" foods, and, lo and behold, wind up actually healthier and happier in their eating than we are. We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the "French paradox," for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple creme cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn't make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox--that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.The Omnivore's Dilemma
Michael Pollan
- Posted on:
- 2007.12.27 -0600
- Tags:
- food
Jorge Yazpik
I first saw Yazpik's work in Cuernavaca in 1996. I remember the pieces and the resonance of the after-experience quite vividly... unusual. I remember feeling that I had just been given some fundamental knowledge while at the same time not knowing what this knowledge was.
If I had to reduce his work to one word, it'd be schisma. There is violent contrast and break in almost all his work; contrast and collision between the raw and the sharply worked, the carefully designed; the noise of the natural rock and the purity of the polished metal; the juxtaposition of a water bed (a natural perfectly flat mirror) and irregular heavily textured islands resting on it; the contrast between proportions in some of the pieces is also very striking: tall cubes of flat nothingness ending with tiny geometric details. Yet, with all these sharp cuts and collisions, there are also channels of communication, correlations, connections between opposing bodies: square rocks with perpendicular patterns that prolong down to the solid ground and infect it, making the stiffness of both the material and the geometric patterns appear to move and come to life, and making the space that the piece occupies part of the piece itself. His use of negative space is intricate and mysterious. Many pieces are defined by the negative space.
