Food, poetry, film, school dinners

A foodie poet has told me about a literary journal in New York, Alimentum, which is about food! I had also heard that Gastronomica publishes poetry. Good to have a couple of markets for food poetry.

Went to see How to Cook Your Life last night, a foodie delight; a German documentary about an American Zen master and foodie. I particularly liked the talk about respecting food, and about waste: treat the food, he said, as if it was your eyesight, as if it was that precious, and don't waste a single grain.

Saw the film made of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly on the weekend: wow.

It made me ask myself why I hadn't found the time to read a book that was so unbelievably painstaking for its author to write. But it has become a beautiful film, with - yes - food involved, improbable enough for a character fed by tube (significantly for a Frenchman, perhaps, one of the incentives offered by his physiotherapist is that he must learn to swallow so that he can eat normally). One of his fantasies involves a prolonged and sensual seafood feast, mostly raw oysters of course, but it looked like there were a few calimari on the table as well.

And interesting and heartening to see that the UK school system is introducing cooking classes so that teenagers leave school able to to more than operate a microwave. Jamie Oliver is credited with waking up the British public to the same sorts of issues about juvenile nutrition and food skills that Alice Waters has been talking up on this side of the Atlantic.