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Just finished this, a moment ago, on a blisteringly hot day, the kind of day that forces you into a darkened room, windows shut, blinds down, ceiling fan on. Any breeze from outside would only heat things up, and any attempt to sleep is fraught with a hot, icky pillow. It seemed appropriate, though doubtless I would have said the same had I finished it during an icy blizzard or drizzling greyness. Anything but temperate normalcy.
Robert MacFarlane’s previous book, The Old Ways, I read in partial preparation for a long walk on one of the old ways, which has yet to materialise. Underland, on the other hand, informs me of journeys I will never make. Extreme cold, cramped passageways, far-off places — all of which become, in...
This is something of an odd post. Originally published on 8 August 2006, I am republishing with today's date1 because it doesn't make sense to bury it in the back then. Back then, I weighed 10 kg than I do today and I credit this book — which is not a “diet” in any meaningful sense of the word — with much of that change. I’m not doing it any more, but I know I can go back to it if I feel the need, and it will get to work within a day or two. Seth Roberts was a fascinating person, and he is responsible for much of my interest in tracking aspects of my being. So, here’s the review …
Full disclosure: I started dieting a la Shangri-La a while ago, based on what I had picked up from various web sites. There wasn't an awful lot to it (more on that later). I certainly saw no need to spring for the book. But when Seth Roberts announced on his blog that his publisher was willing to give copies to bloggers to review, I leapt at the opportunity. The book duly arrived; I devoured it. Now to keep my side of the bargain.
When women gathered and men hunted, there wasn't always a lot to eat. Much of what there was would have struck modern palates as boring in the extreme. Nuts, roots, tubers, grass seeds, maybe sometimes ripe fruit or a bit of meat. The things that taste really good to us today -- sweet things, and salt and fat -- were in short supply. In fact, maybe that's why they taste good. So that they would be rewarding, so that we would seek them out, so that when they were available we would eat them to excess. Any calories we didn't use today we stored, as fat, till tomorrow, when food would once again be scarce. And when food was scarce, how much better it would be if we weren't ravenously hungry and focused on food all the time. We could cruise along, eating enough to stay as healthy as possible without going crazed in search of those sweet and fatty treats.
You might think, what with my interest in food and living in Italy, that I would have devoured this book when it first came out, but I didn’t, and I don’t know why. It is so glorious, in so many respects. Most importantly, it gives the lie to the idea that Italian food is a food of poverty or someho...
A friend happened to meet Edmund de Waal at this year's Venice Biennale, and in telling us about the encounter he was so persuasive about this book, which had made him seek out de Waal, that I resolved to read it. I'm so glad I did. It had been sitting on the shelf here forever, and while I had been aware of it, I thought it was about netsuke. It is, and so much more.