Do you really need that much dessert?

No!



But we ate it anyway.

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Bolus.

Some readers enjoyed my use of the word "bolus" 2 posts down. (A "feminist blog is committed to chewing things into a bolus of feminism....  When the evidence is flimsy, lubricate the bolus with the notion of the subtlety of the oppression. It might be swallowable.") That's not a word that would have come naturally to me if I hadn't read Mary Roach's cool book "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal," so let me provide you with a reading:

The study of oral processing is... about the entire “oral device”: teeth, tongue, lips, cheeks, saliva, all working together toward a singular unpicturesque goal: bolus formation. The word bolus has many applications, but we are speaking of this one: a mass of chewed, saliva-moistened food particles. Food that is in— as one researcher put it, sounding like a license plate— "the swallowable state."

I don’t think the scientists are uninterested. I think they may be disgusted. This is a job where on any given day, you may find yourself documenting “intraoral bolus rolling” or shooting magnified close-ups of “retained custard” with the Wageningen University tongue-camera...

Humans, even physiologists, don’t like to think about food once they’ve begun to process it. The same chanterelle and Gorgonzola galette that had the guests swooning is, after two seconds in the mouth, an object of universal revulsion....

ADDED: From last April: Holus-bolus.

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Real Buffalo and Sweet Potato Dog Food.

That's one item from the things bought through my Amazon portal yesterday. (Thanks to all who show support for this blog shopping that way.) I like finding out about a category of product I would never have thought about, like super-specific dog food. The company that made the above-named product, Merrick, also makes Grammy's Pot Pie Dog Food, Real Duck and Green Pea Dog Food, Real Lamb Brown Rice and Apples Dog Food, Thanksgiving Day Dinner Dog Food (come on, aren't there always leftovers?!), Cowboy Cookout Dog Food, and Tripe & Liver Steak Patties for Dogs.



Alternatively, you can cook up your own pet food:

[Some lady's] standard recipe, which will feed Orion along with the other dog and the three cats in her house for around 10 days, calls for grinding 40 pounds of pasture-raised chicken necks with another 20 pounds of chicken giblets. To this, she adds five pounds of carrots, a whole cabbage and several other fruits, all from the organic fields of Midsummer Farm, [her] farm in Warwick, N.Y. Finally, she blends the mix with herbs and supplements.

And here's a less grandiose recipe. 

ADDED: A reader recommends the "recipes" at Raw Fed Dogs. Click links to laugh.

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"7 Disgusting Retro Canned Foods That You Won’t Believe Existed."

Beginning with Oscar Mayer’s “Sack O’ Sauce in a Can O’ Meat."

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Biking in Madison.

I walked downtown to meet Meade at Graze for brunch, where I had what I'd had yesterday as well, the corned beef hash. Outside the restaurant, some dumb/inconsiderate bikers U-locked their bikes to a struggling sapling. How hard would it be for a thief to saw through that tree (or even to break it off)?



Meade had his mountain bike from a long morning ride, and I got a B-Cycle for the ride along the lake path and back home



Meade stowed his bike, then rode the B-Cycle back to the nearest kiosk — at the Natatorium —  and I got in the car and drove over to pick him up, so we could go to Whole Foods and load up on supplies so we could get back to making breakfast at home.

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"I can food."

Did that look like something a LOLcat would say? If so, I guess you haven't arrived at "The New Domesticity."

I knit. I can food. I garden. I cook, and when I’m not actively cooking, I’m thinking about what I’m going to cook next... I didn’t grow up doing these things.... So you can see why Emily Matchar’s new book, “Homeward Bound,” sounded as if it could be a mirror into my soul.

This is the pithiest part of the review (at WaPo, by Becky Krystal):

Some of the new domestics think feminism isn’t just about being in the workplace; it’s also being able to choose to not be in it. 

Feminists have been saying that all along, but kind of only because they have to, and there always seems to be this qualification that if you choose the home life option, you've got to do it the right way, which is not because of tradition and not in subordination to a husband. By contrast, if you choose the moneymaker option, the conventional and/or servile aspects of what you're doing are more likely to go unnoticed (or so it may seem to the go-along-to-get-along subordinates to feminism in its most banal form).

Back to Krystal:

Or, Matchar says, it’s about reclaiming for the hipster set what used to be symbols of drudgery, such as the apron. 

Circa 1970, hippies did this. I remember seeing the women's movement of that time as a dreary and very square challenge to the hippie philosophy, which aimed at transcending commerce. But the women's movement soundly trounced hippies. Can hipsters succeed where hippies failed?

Others rebuff [feminism] entirely, blaming feminism for eating away at family life and demeaning the home arts and those who stay home to practice them....

It's appealing to stay home, but women do feel guilty and in need of justifications when they do it. (And how about men? It's even more challenging, even as one might imagine feminists smiling upon the male homemaker.)

Matchar’s dissection of new domesticity raises other, larger issues of race, class and gender. White women who stay home are praised more often than their black counterparts, who risk being called “welfare queens.”

Doesn't that more depend on whether you're collecting welfare? Who can expect praise for that? And I see no trend in America to praise white women but not black women who are doing the same thing. (The racial problem I see in the Disparate Praise category is patronizing black people with praise when they do things that are otherwise viewed as ordinary.)

Impoverished women with less disposable income and time can’t cook every meal from scratch or stay home with their children....

I'll resist saying things I've said before about the economics of the single-earner family, but obviously if you have a single-parent household, you'll need some kind of income stream to opt to say at home.

Also jarring is the notion, articulated by some of Matchar’s subjects, that it’s only “natural” for women to be in the home, that they are biologically suited for nurturing. That belief is unsettlingly close to the perverse use of “nature” that justifies discrimination, and not just against women.

I love the way the "nature" theme comes and goes in the discourse of discrimination. Nature makes a great argument — e.g., homosexuality is inborn — until it doesn't. But Krystal doesn't really try to figure out what's happening with the nature "notion." She merely calls it "jarring" and "unsettling."

Hell, yeah, nature is jarring. It will jar you one way or the other in the end.

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On the wings of giant ants, high above the 9th-floor rough-hewn floorboards, the first shall be last in order to be first again and other contra-Jesus notions.

"Rodriguez and the other bug mongers of San Juan offer their wares as 'pre-Hispanic' foods, a nod to the Aztecs, Mixtecs and other civilizations that flourished for millennia here on diets rich in grubs, grasshoppers and other edible invertebrates."

Insect-eating was long regarded with shame and disgust by elite Mexicans who viewed the practice as a vestige of rural backwardness. But bugs have crawled onto the menus of some of the country’s most celebrated eateries in recent years, as top chefs seek out esoteric regional ingredients for cuisine known as “alta mexicana” (high-end Mexican).

“These are foods that were eaten in pre-Hispanic times because there wasn’t meat, but now they’re seen as luxurious,” said Lesley Tellez, a food writer who leads tours of Mexico's markets and kitchens....

What is lowly will become lofty. What is lofty lowly. When the common people have beef and pork, the high-class people will pay $225 a pound for giant winged ants (chicatanas). When the masses of workers are sitting at desks, reading and writing, the literary writers will angst and relocate their elite enterprise onto the floor, back in that corner:

In Colum McCann’s apartment, on the ninth floor of an elegant building just off Central Park, there’s a room where he writes that looks as if it were airlifted in from the woods. It’s all rough-hewed floorboards and shelves made of unvarnished pine and two-by-fours and a long, thick cedar slab for a desk. At one end of that desk there’s a space that used to be a closet, but at McCann’s request, the friend who built the office took off the door and put a platform in there, and this is where McCann writes, “in the cupboard,” as he put it. “It concentrates my vision. No windows, two very tight walls.”

Rough-hewn floorboards and unvarnished pine? Is he inspired by splinters? What's for lunch? Termites? Bookshelf-grown West-Side-apartment termites with fresh-toasted splinter sprinkles.

When the lowly becomes lofty, how will the once-lofty become lofty again? Jesus said: "So the last shall be first, and the first last..." But the question is once the last make it to first, how do the old firsties refirstify themselves? We're seeing this idea of embracing the attributes of the erstwhile lasties, eating insects, working on the floor. Can these last become first again? Is there some sort of endless cycle to this ranking and reranking? Obviously, Jesus kept it simple. The order of things on earth would remain stable — "you always have the poor with you" — and there will be a one-time reordering upon death.

In America — I'm including Mexico — we're constantly redefining what is high or low. To quote John "Bigger than Jesus" Lennon: "No one I think is in my tree/I mean it must be high or low/That is you can't, you know, tune in/But it's all right."

No one I think is my tree... But check for ants, termites, and other bugs, because there may be someone else in your tree, quite possibly multitudes. Or, as Jesus might put it, "The least of these my brethren." Alternatively, what's for dinner?

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