https://noshthemag.com NOSH Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:02:44 +0000 https://noshthemag.com en https://noshthemag.com/Caffeinated-Homebrew-White-Claw-with-Ketamine Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:02:44 +0000 NOSH https://noshthemag.com/Caffeinated-Homebrew-White-Claw-with-Ketamine Caffeinated Homebrew White Claw with Ketamine by Gabriel Smith <img width="1050" height="1305" width_o="1050" height_o="1305" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f47e4630676e9d35fb4f551244675012789689067edadf902ef0a91e3f6fbcfb/soap_bubbles_1_1050.jpg" data-mid="246824849" border="0" data-scale="53" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f47e4630676e9d35fb4f551244675012789689067edadf902ef0a91e3f6fbcfb/soap_bubbles_1_1050.jpg" /> Boy Blowing Soap Bubbles by Karel Dujardin, 1663 I have recently started taking Vyvanse (a dexamphetamine) daily, prescribed by a real doctor for my fake ADHD. While it’s wonderful to have an excuse to be on speed literally all the time, it does have some side effects: my heart goes faster, my blood feels more pressured, I want cigarettes all the time, and my mouth is extremely dry. I can deal with the first three side effects. What I can’t bear is the dry mouth. I Googled it and some users on the r/Stims subreddit say it goes away with time. It hasn’t. The only cure for the dry mouth seems to be sparkling water, applied frequently. Something about the bubbles fixes it. Don’t ask me why! The result is that I am constantly drinking sparkling water. Maybe six litres a day. I do not wish to keep track. I began to bulk-buy crates of Perrier and San Pellegrino, though my very favourite is San Benedetto in a can. It is the softest sparkling water in the world, and it’s so salty it almost tastes like seawater. It’s impossible to get in London, but the wonderful Meghan &amp; Bruno who run the Il Sovrano (https://ilsovrano.com/) deli in Brixton will import it for you if you ask nicely. Having it on deck was a nice move: the cans are aesthetically pleasing, and it’s a minor flex to be able to offer guests a cold, crisp sparkling water on a hot summer day. Unfortunately, after my more environmentally-conscious friends discovered the rate of my consumption of pre-packaged sparkling water, they began to nag me about the vast amounts of plastic, glass, and aluminum waste my consumption was generating. They implored me to think of the oceans. Some suggested I buy a SodaStream (a device that carbonates water in your own home). When I mentioned the SodaStream concept as a solution, other friends told me that it was bad to buy SodaStream products. So I was in a situation where some friends told me that plastic packaging was bad, and other friends told me that SodaStream was bad. I purchased the SodaStream Spirit One Touch, and it’s a pretty cool device. You attach a gas canister to the back and then affix a water bottle to the front and press a button and a cool noise happens and the regular water turns into sparkling water. The machine is sleek and black and very militaristic, especially when you have to change the gas canister. The gas canisters are like miniature versions of the ones used to kill Jaws the Shark. You can buy flavours for your SodaStream from the SodaStream corporation: little syrups that change the sparkling water you make into lemonade or imitation Coca-Cola or imitation La Croix. And naturally, as a health-conscious alcoholic, it did not take me long to realise I could also use the SodaStream to produce imitation White Claw — the delicious, low-calorie, fruit-flavoured sparkling water drink that has taken London and New York by storm. So my best friend and I began making our moonshine White Claw in the SodaStream. It is not quite as delicious as the real thing, but it’s cheap, effective, and fundamentally funny. A key moment in the development of this particular recipe that I am sharing with you came when I&nbsp; — whilst carbonating — looked over at the spice rack, where we keep our medicines, and clocked the caffeine pills that sit between the Vitabiotics Ultra D3 Tablets and the Clarityn. Caffeinated White Claw! Wow! And once we’d tested that idea (a resounding success), a natural progression followed: what other drugs could we put in the White Claw? Crushed xans? Cocaine? Codeine cough syrup? MDMA? More Vyvanse? The possibilities are limited only by your imagination, physical tolerance, and modern pharmaceutical science. Here is our favourite recipe that we have discovered thus far: it's cheap, effective, gets you fucked up whilst providing an energy boost, and doesn’t actually taste too bad. Some notes: Obviously, I recommend familiarising yourself with ketamine and its interaction with alcohol prior to consumption.Ketamine, for some reason, seems to hit way fucking harder when it's suspended in liquid. So the dosage might look a little low, but trust me, you wouldn’t want it to be higher, probably.The grain alcohol I get is like double the strength of vodka, but I guess you might want to use more alcohol if your alcohol is weaker than that. Vodka works fine. Tequila’s good. Gin not so much. You do you, baby.This recipe does kind of fizz up too much and fuck up the SodaStream device, but not terminally.I recommend making it in bulk prior to a party you are hosting, or bringing it as a party favour if you are a guest. The other attendees will be delighted. But don’t forget to take your SodaStream bottles home with you — they’re like eight quid a pop to replace.I do not recommend leaving this in the fridge until the next day, forgetting about it, and then saying ‘help yourself to the sparkling water in the fridge’ to an unsuspecting visitor.
 Caffeinated Homebrew White Claw with Ketamine Recipe Prep-time: 30 minutes Ingredients (makes four servings): 750ml Tap Water 1 Portion SodaStream Flavouring Juice 75ml Grain Alcohol (plus more to taste) 500mg Ketamine 600mg Caffeine Powder (or like 12 crushed Pro Plus, but this tastes bad and I would not recommend it)
 Method: Dispense tap water into your SodaStream-branded bottles, then chill. I like to put it in the freezer so it goes cold more quickly (don't let it freeze).Once chill, remove your water from your fridge or freezer.Using a funnel (we fashion one from a torn-up piece of A4) add your ketamine and caffeine powder to your water.Affix lid and shake.Remove lid and add your grain alcohol and SodaStream Flavouring Juice.Affix lid and shake.Remove lid, then affix SodaStream bottle to SodaStream machine.Carbonate to your desired carbonation level.Remove and serve.
 ** Gabriel Smith is from London. His debut novel, BRAT, was published by Scribner (U.K.) and Penguin Press (U.S.) in 2024. His fiction has appeared in The Drift, New York Tyrant Magazine and The Moth. &nbsp; https://noshthemag.com/Rebecca-Brill-whatsylviaate Mon, 26 Jul 2021 16:32:07 +0000 NOSH https://noshthemag.com/Rebecca-Brill-whatsylviaate A Talk with Rebecca Brill of&nbsp;@whatsylviaate by Julie Goldberg <img width="400" height="400" width_o="400" height_o="400" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b7c65f1609dbecab7c928f9ff715ab98761e58c35d0ea56de81e88df55b4e5c6/fooJopVZ.jpg" data-mid="114728784" border="0" data-scale="51" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/400/i/b7c65f1609dbecab7c928f9ff715ab98761e58c35d0ea56de81e88df55b4e5c6/fooJopVZ.jpg" /> Over the past year, Sylvia Plath’s Food Diary (@whatsylviaate) has amassed over 20.4K followers, becoming one of the most beloved accounts on a certain corner of twitter. Rebecca Brill, the woman behind the action, first fell in love with Plath as a teenager, counting herself among the many female literary types who turned to The Bell Jar in times of adolescent turmoil. I was lucky enough to speak with her about how what it’s like running the account, and what it’s taught her about literature’s favorite enigma.&nbsp; We begin by agreeing we don’t know a single woman who hasn’t had an absolutely demented relationship with food at some point in their lives. To try to characterize Plath’s habits as normal or abnormal, healthy or obsessive, seems to be a futile, and arguably invasive, pursuit. If anything, the more one learns about what Plath ate and, more significantly, how Plath documented what she ate, the more questions one has. Brill was moved to start this account for a number of reasons. The food diary was, at least in part, borne of a self-soothing habit of transcription. “It’s just something I do when I’m stressed in my own writing,” she says. “I just type other writer’s work in general and I think it helps you feel connected to them in a way, like I’m writing exactly what Sylvia Plath wrote so a part of me is Sylvia Plath.” One might also deduce from the old “you are what you eat” adage that if they could eat like Plath, perhaps they could write like her — popular articles titled “how to eat like your favorite authors” imply such a connection. Embarking on this project at the start of lockdown, Brill was looking for something to do that could be both active and passive at once, or what she describes as “soothing in a mind-numbing way.” Scanning Plath’s texts for alimentary buzzwords — a process she calls a “mental highlighting” — she found a kind of escape from the chaos occurring off the page. Both of Brill’s accounts are projects of research, transcription, and ultimately of curation. Plath did not keep a food diary, per se; she kept a diary, or journal, in which food was often mentioned. In extracting these instances from their original context and posting them in sequence as she does, Brill — aided by the list-like quality borne of Twitter’s limited word count and eternal scroll feature — reassembles these excerpts into a bonafide, if manufactured, food log. While @whatsylviaate is of course limited to food-related musings, Brill’s Susan Sontag account excerpts content of all sorts from the Against Interpretation writer’s journals. As someone burdened (or blessed) with a food-centric brain, it seems only natural to me that she would search Plath’s journals for what she ate, but I know this isn’t an obvious choice to everyone. When I asked her why she imposed this additional constraint when considering Plath, she notes the association most people have with Plath and the kitchen, explaining that she was motivated to re-contextualize this space as a site of joy and comfort for Plath, as it was through much of her life. “It’s important to me for even people who don’t care about Sylvia Plath to know that she was a complicated person who did a lot of things besides stick her head in an oven,” she says. If you’re wondering how much of the complexity of Plath’s character could be revealed through what she ate for lunch, then you probably haven’t taken a good look at Brill’s account. Far from providing simple sustenance, food offered Plath a means of expressing — and sometimes obscuring — her innermost feelings. In this way, her descriptions of food can simply not be extricated from her thoughts on other matters. Tacking adjectives like “brooding” and “monstrous” before ordinary food items like “soup lunch” and “bread pudding,” respectively, Plath animates and assigns various moods to what she eats, often to a subtly comic effect. From the reticent “Tom brings me juice” to the impassioned “listen to these two outrageous menus and be rightfully indignant […] starches! starches!” her tone might indicate how she feels about what’s on her plate but, even more so, it tells a whole story about her emotional state at that moment&nbsp;— both of writing and of eating. “The way she’ll describe food is so poetic because it’s not just about food, it’s about everything else going on,” says Brill. You can track the ebbs and flows of Plath’s relationship with Ted, she notes, through the way she describes their meals together. While their early repasts are described with soft and complimentary adjectives, moments of tension between the two are crystallized through Plath’s recollections of what they ate and drank. When he makes coffee, she describes the resulting beverage as “poisonous brew.” Something about their relationship has turned bitter and venomous; unswallowable. Brill’s quotes come not just from Plath’s journals, however, but from her letters as well, and while the distinction between the private and public doesn’t quite come through on twitter, Brill herself has taken note of the ways in which Plath fashions food descriptions differently when she’s cognizant of an audience, even if its just an audience of one. “She writes about food really brightly sometimes when talking to her mom and it seems that’s almost a mechanism to conceal the less pleasant things that are happening in her personal life or with her mental health,” Brill notes. “I don’t think, for example, if she says to her mom, ‘omelettes are delicious,’ that that’s a lie but I do think it’ a way to obfuscate important information about her mental state or her marriage to Todd. A lot of times she just goes on and on about cooking at the expense of other things.” Interpersonally, food becomes a kind of crutch for Plath, convenient material for an epistolary diversion. In her private writings, however, it is something of a delicious secret, one of which she can not get enough. “It’s kind of perfect, though,” laughs Brill. “if you’re really trying to avoid talking about something you can just start talking about what you’re eating.” This seems right: sharing what one eats can be deeply personal, but it can also be a tactic for dodging unpleasant truths, like a proffering of one kind of intimacy to avoid another, more perilous kind. <img width="768" height="512" width_o="768" height_o="512" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fc658cf4c25893f23de4b6c3a5d78076092270c843973c108e4398cb76d10b0a/plath_00020.jpg" data-mid="115327613" border="0" data-scale="67" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/768/i/fc658cf4c25893f23de4b6c3a5d78076092270c843973c108e4398cb76d10b0a/plath_00020.jpg" /> From a breakfast of&nbsp; “2 doughnuts, a hamburg, a glass of milk &amp; a cup of coffee,” to “three wonderful slabs of cheese…a gooey ripe brie, a superbly mouldy blue stilton &amp; a fat round of Wensleydale,” Plath demonstrated a proclivity for the decadent. On more than one occasion, she mentions that she has drank six cups of milk in one meal, with one account even bringing the record up to seven cups. The quote tweets formed a chorus of disbelief. Brill’s account has also managed to reach another sector of Twitter, however, one too preoccupied with nutritional content to register emotions like disgust or disbelief. Last summer, she started to notice a cropping of shares and likes from young women who seemed to exist on the margins of the pro-ana twitter community. With anonymous avatars and bios describing themselves as “vent” accounts — a term indicating they don’t wish to promote anorexia, but rather to indeed vent about their struggles, even if that means sharing things like weight, calories and wishes to be smaller — these accounts took a sudden interest in Brill’s account, speculating over how many calories Plath might have been eating. Neither decisively pro-anorexia or pro-recovery, these anonymous food diarists exist in a kind of in-between space. “I’m really interested in that truly ambiguous morality around food and documenting it,” says Brill. It seems that it was only a matter of time before a community like this got their hands on the account. Despite the fact that there is no real evidence Plath suffered from anorexia or any other kind of eating disorder, fans and foes of the poet have been making posthumous diagnoses for decades. The only incidence that might suggest Plath struggled in this way is when she records burying a hot dog in the sand when no one was looking — but again, Brill interprets this more as an exhibit of Plath’s eccentricity than evidence of genuine food avoidance. It’s certainly not substantive enough to justify the curiously widespread assumption that Plath was anorexic. Brill instead attributes this phenomenon to the writer’s reputation as a waifish depressive. “She’s this poster child for female depression, and depression is often associated with eating disorders, and anorexia in particular,” says Brill. Perhaps female sadness is irrevocably conflated with an at least aspirational disembodiment; the same might be said of female genius, with which Plath has become synonymous. For some, reading Plath talk so passionately about such rich, indulgent foods comes as a shock. The tortured genius, we assume, is also the starving poet, un-encumbering herself of flesh so she can emerge a purely intellectual, spiritual being.&nbsp; Of course, Plath’s impulse to document so much of what she ate certainly indicates some level of fixation with food. When she writes self-deprecations like “at lunch I stuffed myself like a hog,” it’s unclear whether she is simply being playful about her perceived indulgence or expressing genuine shame over it. Brill shares that her mom is appalled by many of the posts, and “just super convinced that Plath is a bulimic just based on the quantity of food that she ate.” Though many feel the same way, Brill herself doesn’t have the same suspicion, characterizing Plath’s intake as indeed “abundant” but “not crazy or necessarily bingey.” Ultimately, she argues, it comes down to the fact that Plath was skinny; no one could believe she was eating all that food and really keeping it down. “Plath is conventionally attractive and skinny,” Brill states. “Everyone loves, like, that picture of her on the beach in the bathing suit.” Everyone does love it; this image of a literary Marilyn Monroe, symbolizing the sexual and cerebral all at once, titillates the public. And the image of that same pin-up of American poetry scarfing down fresh bread and meat, chocolate pudding and apple cake and all kinds of decadent confections, excites us even more. “When she’s eating all this food with relish and joy — it’s something we might not celebrate if Plath was fat,” says Brill. “And I think I'd be remiss not to say that maybe part of why it’s compelling to people to watch Sylvia Plath eat is because it feels divorced from her body.” <img width="1222" height="764" width_o="1222" height_o="764" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8ca3fdc6a6d64d18752123a298d3dc6df680984bd1ad877b64741fac23130843/14silwjh3bs51.jpg" data-mid="115327395" border="0" data-scale="66" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8ca3fdc6a6d64d18752123a298d3dc6df680984bd1ad877b64741fac23130843/14silwjh3bs51.jpg" /> Accused, on a few occasions, of romanticizing Plath’s depression by broadcasting her so-called “depression meals” for entertainment, Brill mantains is that she is open to these criticisms but doesn’t, ultimately, believe that’s what she is doing. “I am making an editorial choice by removing the food descriptions from their context,” she acknowledges. “But just because I’m putting it on twitter does that mean I’m romanticizing it? […] I’m not sure you can even differentiate what is a ‘depression meal’ for Plath from what is simply a strange concoction she took genuine joy in putting together.” Indeed, she argues that it is Plath’s lack of reservation about delving into the abject side of eating that makes her food writings so compelling. “The stuff that she eats by herself is, like, a little bit gross or abject or smelly — like, I don’t know, liver sandwiches,” says Brill.” I just love knowing about the kind of strange concoctions which are not for company but just so private and personal and a kind of pure bliss…it’s that leap [from the pleasant to the abject, the aesthetically perfect to the dangerously messy] that I guess separates something nice from, like, something genius.” Brill also figures that, aside from the poetic side of things, “there is just a sector of people that just want to know what other people are eating.” After a moment’s pause, she adds that she herself probably belongs to that cohort. Who, I dare ask, doesn’t? There is a unique intimacy to seeing what other people put into their mouths, one that is heightened when the eater doesn’t know they’re being watched (or read) — in some ways, it is the ultimate form of voyeurism. It’s no wonder that the food diary genre has become a prolific - and profitable — one, from the quotidian shopping list to pro-ana twitter to the trend of “what I eat in a day” videos on youtube and TikTok. Though she lives primarily on “cheerios and string cheese,” Brill finds herself fascinated by other people’s eating habits, citing Grimes’s unhinged food diary video for Harper’s Bazaar as one of her all-time favorites. It is not cooking, then, and perhaps not even eating, to which Brill is most powerfully drawn, but rather to the unlikely connection that can form between strangers simply from getting a glimpse into what the other has eaten. While a lot of the “what I eat in a day” type content is centered around dieting and restriction, which doesn’t appeal to Brill, she find herself returning time and again to the kinds of videos and blogs that document the everyday eating habits of everyday people. As it turns out, it’s not only literary icons whose diets we long to unveil, but also those of random strangers. Much of Plath’s accounts of what she ate revolve around the who, what and where of the meal. Brill also takes notes of how Plath seems to vacillate from states of deprivation to states of indulgence, dipping her toes into luxury then retreating again. “It’s kind of weird because sometimes she can’t really afford delicious foods but then she’s like having dinner at Auden’s and shipping champagne,” she says. “Or she doesn’t eat at the fancy restaurant that her fancy friends go to because she can’t afford it, but then she’ll compensate later with a bunch of lamb chops. She ultimately has access to these spheres of, I don’t know, elitism or fancies.” Ultimately, that one eats has everything to do with their social standing. To dine in company also means to be included, to have a seat at the (literal) table, to share in the banquet that is life. Her invitations to W.H. Auden’s, which seem to appeal to her mainly for the endless quantities of champagne they provide, also draw her into certain circles. In draining Auden of his champagne, Plath asserts her right to be present, to take part in the festivities. “It’s so easy to mythologize her,” says Brill as our conversation draws to a close. “Number one because she’s such a genius but number two because she just has that mystique around her that we were talking about, that just gets borne out of the fact that she died young, and beautiful, and a genius.” Premature death can indeed keep one immortalized as a mystery, before the years have robbed them of their mystique — in our youth-obsessed culture, the loss of such beauty often means the displacement of intrigue with irrelevance. With @whatsylviaate, Brill aims to complicate rather than reinforce the image many of us may have of Plath.&nbsp; For many, she believes, the account serves as an inspiration to find some element of the sacred in the everyday. “I think that it hits a nerve with some other people that with the very language Plath uses she really elevates the mundane into something really beautiful and theatrical,” she says. “She uses the same heightened language to describe, like, her lunch as she does in her poetry to describe depression or love or sex. And eating does become as interesting as death or love or sex. To some people I guess it already is.” *** Julie Goldberg is a writer of fiction and essays. Her work can be found in Hobart, The Los Angeles Review, Tablet and more. She is the editor-in-chief of NOSH.&nbsp; &nbsp; https://noshthemag.com/Eating-Like-Sylvia Mon, 26 Jul 2021 16:32:07 +0000 NOSH https://noshthemag.com/Eating-Like-Sylvia Eating Like Sylviaby Aurora Huiza Sylvia Plath is talked about often in the same tired ways. She’s a cultural cipher for&nbsp; the sad and teenaged, as if it’s bad or immature for young people to like her writing. Plus, everyone compulsively thinks of her head in the oven. Like many girls in their early teens I was always drawn to her intensity, to the fluctuating moods in her writing. But all I actually knew about her personal life was her death. Later on, in college, my T.A. lectured for maybe five minutes about Plath, before concluding by saying “sometimes she romanticized her depression.” Then he moved onto Ginsberg for forty-five minutes. Knowing both Plath herself and her work more intimately was something I would do on my own. Over the years, I read more. It was recently that I read through her journal entries and letters. She was introspective and sensitive, detailing things as simple and standard as dates with boys with an articulate grimness: It was inestimably important for me to look at the lights of Amherst town in the rain, with the wet black tree-skeletons against the limpid streetlights and gray November mist, and then look at the boy beside me and feel all the hurting beauty go flat because he wasn’t the right one—not at all. In other entries, I see a certain buoyant excitement for her future that sometimes surfaces, that someday she’d be happy. It also becomes clear that one source from which she consistently derives immense pleasure is food— not only in preparing and eating it, but also in searching for the exact language with which to describe it. The white hard boiled egg, the green head of lettuce, the two suave pink veal chops dared me to do anything with them, to make a meal out of them, to alter their single, leaden identity into a digestible meal. Like my T.A. mentioned off-hand, there are profuse accusations of her supposed romanticization of both sadness and of food. I personally think these accusations are dull and unnecessary, and that there’s no need to assign a good or bad label to romanticization in the first place. I like romanticization; I think sometimes that’s what people feel they must do with pain. I’m also not sure what anyone would do without reading their pain reflected back at them through others. More to the point, even to say that she romanticizes her depression is inaccurate and reductive. The act of mentioning sadness or mentioning food isn’t inherently romanticization, and neither are her dissections of her moods, nor the beauty and specificity of the language she uses. I actually think her talent lies in making her sadness seem exactly as horrible as it was. She describes food meticulously and associates it with her emotional states. When things go wrong, she figures dread through bad food: Some sleep is like a pile of garbage, with egg shells jagged, and vermin swarming over lurid orange peels, coffee grounds and sick wan lettuce leaves; that is the sleep of nightmare fragments, when the operation or the exam is coming the next day. Sleep goes rotten and it’s alarming how the joy drops out and the menace of what’s to come magnifies. Plath mentions her snacks and recipes frequently, so I decided to try some to see if it would make me feel more connected to her, somehow. I wanted to eat like her, and to think about this intimate aspect of her life; to know her better, to make up for the adolescent years gone by when I didn’t know her. Some food combinations that she documents are more bizarre than others, or maybe just seem off-beat given the decades of difference between us. I was pleased to discover her love of the savory and salty because that’s what I like too. I just wanted to know how her food might make me feel, how much comfort or discomfort it might bring, how food would magnify my moods or change them. I wondered where our tastes and feelings might intersect and what more I could learn. I’m also a terrible cook and don’t know a lot about preparing food, so I thought that also might make things interesting. “I strolled into the kitchen, dropped a raw egg into a teacup of raw hamburger, mixed it up and ate it.” 1963 I decided to start out strong. This one isn’t technically Sylvia herself, but it’s from The Bell Jar. I enjoyed the thrill of maybe getting salmonella. I was a little bit drunk when I got home one night, not in a bad mood, but not in the best mood, and geared up to eat something that looked like cat food and would make me feel terrible, or small in a sad, feline way. And then it was totally bland and inoffensive. I wanted it to be way more abject than it was. The egg broke apart and basically disappeared once mashed into the cup with the ground beef. My roommate made sure to purchase higher quality ground beef knowing I was planning to eat it raw but I wouldn’t have known the difference. I tried adding excessive amounts of spices—I shook out salt, pepper, chili flakes, and onion powder. I mixed it around with a fork and carved out a hearty chunk. It still tasted pretty much like nothing, just wet and vaguely unpleasant, absorbing and folding the spice into itself like a sponge. Then I spread it on toast, like pretending it was actually beef tartare. Still nothing. A genuinely flavorless dish. I don’t know why she writes that Esther ate this. I was mildly annoyed it didn’t trigger something more wretched in me, because it seemed like one of the more fun, gross receipts. I felt weird after having eaten half of a teacup of raw meat. “I drink sherry and wine by myself because I like it and I get the sensuous feeling of indulgence I do when I eat salted nuts or cheese; luxury, bliss, erotic-tinged.” 1953 I didn’t necessarily feel sensual eating cheese and nuts. I felt a little sad, actually. It was a Tuesday and I’d been busy, running around doing errands. I was sweaty and tired and hungry, so I stopped by my home to eat this combination, though I really just wanted a deli sandwich. It was nearing 6 so I poured some red wine to go along with it. I love cheese. This was Gruyere—richly harsh, stiff. I cut myself another slice or two. I actually could’ve eaten the whole block and wanted to put aside the knife and just bite into it, but I didn’t. Even though I was alone, I suspected it might’ve made me feel sick and vaguely disgusted with myself. I was contemplating whether&nbsp; maybe, sometimes, Plath did that. In a few entries she’d written about how she’d over-eaten because certain dishes were so good, so I know she, too, had a capacity — a proclivity — for indulgence. I was swaying absent-mindedly in my kitchen and then the song,&nbsp; I Never Knew Love Like This Before took its turn on my playlist. The song and wine masked my stress after a few sips. I don’t usually like nuts, but with the cheese, it was paired nicely. I felt briefly meditative and pleasantly alone before leaving my apartment again. More errands to run. “I had a revulsion at the cold herrings on cold toast.” 1962 The herring was amazing. I’d never tried it before. I could imagine being repulsed&nbsp; in a different mood, maybe, but not really; it wasn’t that gross even if I tried to see it as gross. It was kind of limp, just floating, and the liquid it was kept in was sort of murky, not exactly pleasant to look at. I could sometimes be revolted by pickle juice in a similar way. But the kind of herring I bought was from Whole Foods, soaked in a wine sauce—salty and delicious, kind of tangy on a piece of warm grilled sourdough toast. The sauce itself tasted great. My roommate and I liked the herring so much we threw it&nbsp; last minute onto some sandwiches the next day. We constructed sourdough sandwiches with mozzarella slices, thick tomato, and arugula. We added balsamic, salt, and pepper. Then seeing that we had herring left over in the fridge, we decided to add it too. It was salty and briny, and though it was at first unclear if this would actually jive with the rest of the flavors, it thankfully did. Our sandwiches bulged with herring, leaking balsamic onto the kitchen table. It satisfied the fishy craving I have a few times a week. We both finished the herring within a couple of days. It’s definitely all about how the fish is flavored. The sauce it was kept in was left in our fridge for a few days, kind of milky-looking, and then again maybe I could understand certain revulsion. “By the age of nine I had developed a passionate taste for cold vichyssoise and caviar and anchovy paste.” 1963 I found this disgusting. I love savory, fishy stuff but this wasn’t like the herring. I should’ve put the anchovy paste on a cracker to mute the taste, but couldn’t really even bear to because I didn’t like it; it was so disconcertingly salty and grey. I like anchovies on pizza and in some other contexts but this tasted too concentrated. The caviar was cheap caviar — 20 dollars at Whole Foods — so that’s probably why it tasted so terrible. It was bright orange and bulbous and fun to look at but I didn’t want to eat any more than a bite. It actually made me upset, like I was eating fake food. This seemed to definitely be a matter of price range. Plath had access to finer foods, and this is when I realized this. I don’t know if she ever realized it herself, that she regularly ate things others couldn’t. I probably could have been more creative with my consumption of these things, even if they weren’t the highest quality, but I didn’t want to even try because I was so genuinely disgusted. <img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/DWzth21edbsMbTzf9seIo1Nri_Qf7cccTw4Fa3BMkPJUpzjy2wQfYOFR1Yg1_QmrqR4dDAc2HiMFQEU93MzKcXoD1vTJAijxnUPcoab73MLsNgqwyNbi4_YwRfnVjEMKvPq1BawK" width="306" height="230" style="width: 306px; height: 230px;" data-scale="100"> <img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/UwInNfRLHvHeUg-cr-jM2z0Wufv6cBZRSw-hXnOv0kKNxxjC5T7TzOqNua-RMyQrQaLz_10O2AdR1hauWd0kKaEh9Ht7fJA8-X_oS2hRDy6kcbjQiB73YbrsmA03lcDgdMVgMaoI" width="291" height="218" style="width: 291px; height: 218px;"> “My favorite dishes are full of butter and cheese and sour cream.” 1963 I mashed potatoes and added cheddar cheese, a few blobs of butter, and some scoops of sour cream. That’s when I guess one does start to wonder about her eating habits, about how conscious she was of staying thin and what exactly she thought of her body. The thought seemed too intimate, like prying, but I did wonder. Having had mildly disordered eating in the past, I started thinking briefly about calorie counts, dropping shreds of cheddar cheese into the pot over the stove, watching them cling to the potatoes before mixing them away. The potatoes turned out so cheesy they were tinted orange. This was a comfort food I remembered always loving, and my roommate and I scraped the pot clean eating all of it. I served it with breaded panko chicken and some green beans I lazily fried with butter, salt and pepper. It was more of a classic and satisfying dinner than I ever usually cook and I did it by myself, which made me feel vaguely accomplished, contentedly domestic. My roommate, shocked by my solo arrangement of a full course meal, told me it was like Christmas dinner. “Making mayonnaise, and it coming out well.” 1957 I was warned by my friends it would be very difficult to make—all this talk about the emulsion—and that it would not come out well. I was nervous. Not too nervous, because I love mayo. But nervous because I don’t understand emulsion, and I knew it would be unsuccessful. It was severely unsuccessful. It got tedious and my arm got tired, and it didn’t turn out well at all. I was whipping it best I could but it was stubborn. It was clear I needed an actual food processor to be able to mix vigorously while slowly incorporating&nbsp; the canola oil in a steady stream; regrettably, I have only two arms. I tried tasting just a bit, and I thought I could see how this could potentially transmogrify into mayo. I couldn’t get the texture right at all—the thick consistency. I also realized that, as far as cooking goes, I give up too quickly. Sylvia worked at cooking the way she worked at getting the right words for things. In her journal, she’ll even string some through a sentence like she isn’t sure yet which one is quite right. …the central need of my nature: to be articulate, to hammer out the great surges of experience jammed, dammed, crammed in me… Persistence and exactness are both key and I guess I don’t always know how to make myself keep cooking when it’s going totally awry. It appears my friends were right.&nbsp; <img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/rRcqBH1o5kGDe7ib2KFSSboYXtuYcJYx_yTf5fhz-D3QKxASifeOvjoL0eTuPFdTYHgh5ipqDKUoIFjFaIeaSOEM4i-2zTFZDw7AbxOLHoGSsGU22kSlcI-5Gv20pWVFldPkcU6L" width="277" height="208" style="width: 277px; height: 208px;"> Sylvia’s Heavenly Sponge Cake 1959 This was by far the most successful! I had my friend who’s a very talented cook help me make it. I’d never made a cake before because I’ve never liked it. It’s too sweet and I always turn it down at parties. But this was a sponge cake so I thought it might taste more muted, more lemony than outright sweet. She told me I’d need to use a mixer to fluff up the egg whites successfully, so I went over and borrowed the one she owned. I realized how poorly I’d tried whisking the mayo and how naïve I’d been. We separated the egg whites and watched them fluff up in the KitchenAid like clouds, and it made me think it was right Plath called the cake heavenly. I learned whisking technique from my friend and forcefully stirred the yolks separately, making a figure-eight shape, and added the rest of the ingredients. We folded the batter into itself. We placed a glass in the center of the baking pan, then poured in the batter so there’d be a hole in the cake, like Plath writes in her recipe that there should be. It’s unclear why exactly, but we agreed it looked nicer that way. We sprinkled sugar on top and placed it in the oven. Then we made whipped cream and decorated it with blackberries. The cake was heavenly—brightly flavored and yellowish and mildly sweet with baked sugar on top. It was lemony, and not too dry or moist. We were picturing Sylvia in heaven with wings watching us through the bright blue window in my friend’s kitchen, spilling light across the kitchen countertops. We imagined she would be happy that she made us happy with her cake. This was when I felt most connected to her, in a very simple way. I felt grateful for Plath and her cake, and knew then that she sought out pleasure and happiness where she could find it, and often tried baking it herself. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <img width="786" height="590" width_o="786" height_o="590" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e012c0f239ab51d17aedd4976501f423471f4775a0e399c0563aaa94d02b2cf7/image7.jpg" data-mid="115327920" border="0" data-scale="76" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/786/i/e012c0f239ab51d17aedd4976501f423471f4775a0e399c0563aaa94d02b2cf7/image7.jpg" /> &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/qpyO9vp0zG8Vh1-4KMj3L8h-ZyokwIKKMkNxpBUzt_wcfZ2VxQaW95gN7PCT95erC6by72tyUXZIAKQbWi_-4GEDrF9KCP5aG2FDnt3pjOoE7IuuxxBRbtGpAiIMzd_sEJ1ZhAbw" width="419" height="314" style="width: 275.63809082031247px; height: 206.56410624720314px;" data-scale="73"> *** Aurora Huiza is from Los Angeles and most recently lived in Brooklyn. She studies fiction at the Syracuse MFA program. Her writing and interviews can be found online at Entropy Magazine and Neutral Spaces among others. https://noshthemag.com/5-More-Ways-of-Considering-the-Oyster Mon, 26 Jul 2021 16:32:07 +0000 NOSH https://noshthemag.com/5-More-Ways-of-Considering-the-Oyster 5 More Ways of Considering the Oysterby Jack Petersen <img width="668" height="668" width_o="668" height_o="668" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9f9ef30edde4cec3919e3bafec603ea56dc2020a5a51a319d236d903d29c74fd/IMG_6228.jpeg" data-mid="114728057" border="0" data-scale="35" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/668/i/9f9ef30edde4cec3919e3bafec603ea56dc2020a5a51a319d236d903d29c74fd/IMG_6228.jpeg" /> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Jack’s oyster tattoo In 1941, the mother of American food writing, M.F.K. Fisher, published a tiny series of charming, dogmatic essays about her ideal bivalve, called Consider the Oyster. Like a Kumamoto, say, the collection yields its sweetness readily and compactly (96 pages in total), with epigraphs from writers that preceded her but which may as well have been written retroactively for each fragment. And like all west-coast oysters, with their ridged, wavy edges made to scrape the gums of the overzealous, it seems there may be no pristine copy of this book in existence. Almost every article or review I’ve read has included a photograph of the critic’s copy, its pages sun-curled, soiled and craggy, its half-centimeter spine cracked enough times to make a reader briefly consider the workings of infinite divisibility before returning their thoughts to just how good, how unimpeachable Consider the Oyster has remained. So many of my favorite writers have written about things-as-themselves, the power of the ontological: Roland Barthes’ chapter on I-Love-You in A Lover’s Discourse, the salt in the eye of Clarice Lispector’s roach in The Passion According to G.H., Didion’s hand on a valve of the Hoover Dam in The White Album. An oyster seems like a perfect candidate for this list—briny, hardly-sentient, pure material. Fisher sometimes exalts oysters in this way, but knows that there’s something too divine, too romantic not to turn the oyster into a never-ending springboard of metaphors. As a fan of hers, and of oysters, and of froth, I won’t even try to resist the urge. Outside of ocean filtration, that violence done, oysters are not a necessity, and so how can we not look for ourselves using them as our little, unlikely vessels?&nbsp; 1.<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/PH4kE6S3Cg3rYyAxcLFQ7eYmeDarVTWQ6u1wOzCsw5MZZVFiVfpA_tVZNrIwY0S1xTp8MszOfY47jR89qkxexEOaiU9eM6jwT0ZUfWvhnW6UtSNWJ4aPyU5Ip8q0V7HKQKPqSFPb" width="34" height="34" style="width: 34px; height: 34px;" data-scale="100">I read M.F.K. Fisher’s Consider the Oyster somewhere at the basin of an eating disorder. A shocking contingent of my most disordered-thinking friends love Fisher’s writing, as well. At best, her language is something of a vice for us; at worst, it’s the guilt without the pleasure. I read mostly on the subway, using my destination as a sort of guaranteed finitude—Spring Street or Franklin Avenue is next; best not to get sucked into the euphoria--or the void--of good food writing. Perhaps it’s that consuming her words is a cleaner alternative to consuming their referents. A guilt-free menu option. We giggle reading her. Camaraderie. Friends of Fisher. At the bookstore where I work, I love to shelve Fisher’s books. I make a habit of keeping her row tightly-packed, squeezing her one-woman anthology, The Art of Eating, in between slim, unassuming copies of How to Cook a Wolf and The Gastronomical Me, then buying her books at the end of the day as if only to make space. There’s enough there that I’ve done this more than once. Too often, the rest of the food section sends me to dark closets in the store to take shallow breaths, staving off attacks of something or other. Not Mary Francis. For her, I make an exception. A concession. Most of the time, at least. Reading and re-reading the pamphlet-sized book for this essay, I skimmed a few recipes for oyster stew and didn't think too hard about the&nbsp; breadcrumbs on the Rockefellers. 2. <img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/PH4kE6S3Cg3rYyAxcLFQ7eYmeDarVTWQ6u1wOzCsw5MZZVFiVfpA_tVZNrIwY0S1xTp8MszOfY47jR89qkxexEOaiU9eM6jwT0ZUfWvhnW6UtSNWJ4aPyU5Ip8q0V7HKQKPqSFPb" width="34" height="34" style="width: 34px; height: 34px;"><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/PH4kE6S3Cg3rYyAxcLFQ7eYmeDarVTWQ6u1wOzCsw5MZZVFiVfpA_tVZNrIwY0S1xTp8MszOfY47jR89qkxexEOaiU9eM6jwT0ZUfWvhnW6UtSNWJ4aPyU5Ip8q0V7HKQKPqSFPb" width="34" height="34" style="width: 34px; height: 34px;" data-scale="11">The last time I ate oysters, they came from the fish counter at Union Market on East Houston, unshucked. A man who, though twice my age and devoid of any cooking ability, ended up being unattainable, paid for them. In his apartment, I opened the knife drawer, looking for something blunt and sturdy, unlike any of his delicate cutlery. Breakability, that funny trapping of age and money. “Do you have a knife I can use to open these?” He offered--or I found--a spoon he’d lifted from a memorable flight, somewhere, sometime. I jammed it into the hinge of an easy-looking oyster, and the butt end slipped. My thumb scraped the edge of the shell, splitting my nail, making my cuticle bleed. In the living room, the man was lighting a Duraflame in the fireplace. Fall was on its way. We’d need some warmth for the night. “Shit. You have a screwdriver or something? “ “No. Should I?” Charming, seriously. “How do you do things? What if you need to fix something?” “I’ll go buy one,” he said. “Do we have time?” We did have time, because I was cooking and would make time, and because when he came back it was with a whole set of tools and two bouquets of white lilies decidedly not from a measly bodega, and I’d finished making a mignonette and stopped the bleeding on my hand and petted his mutt which had warmed to me over the past eight or nine such nights when some other fiasco of unpreparedness had left me forgiving and thanking and acting as comfortable as I could. He hugged me from behind as I shucked the oysters with a screwdriver and a kitchen towel. To think I’d ever been the delicate one, he the tough one. My hands turned white with tension, and I really was grateful, and I really was willing. 3.<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/PH4kE6S3Cg3rYyAxcLFQ7eYmeDarVTWQ6u1wOzCsw5MZZVFiVfpA_tVZNrIwY0S1xTp8MszOfY47jR89qkxexEOaiU9eM6jwT0ZUfWvhnW6UtSNWJ4aPyU5Ip8q0V7HKQKPqSFPb" width="34" height="34" style="width: 34px; height: 34px;"><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/PH4kE6S3Cg3rYyAxcLFQ7eYmeDarVTWQ6u1wOzCsw5MZZVFiVfpA_tVZNrIwY0S1xTp8MszOfY47jR89qkxexEOaiU9eM6jwT0ZUfWvhnW6UtSNWJ4aPyU5Ip8q0V7HKQKPqSFPb" width="34" height="34" style="width: 34px; height: 34px;"><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/PH4kE6S3Cg3rYyAxcLFQ7eYmeDarVTWQ6u1wOzCsw5MZZVFiVfpA_tVZNrIwY0S1xTp8MszOfY47jR89qkxexEOaiU9eM6jwT0ZUfWvhnW6UtSNWJ4aPyU5Ip8q0V7HKQKPqSFPb" width="34" height="34" style="width: 34px; height: 34px;"> An old roommate who made a slow and eventually incomplete transition to veganism once told me that many vegans eat tinned oysters for the protein. Sometimes spineless myself, I took personal offense to the correlation between a little meekness and a complete lack of sentience. How far, anyways, is a shell from a backbone, if only in terms of its brittleness? I feel; I feel; I feel a lot! I wanted to say to her. An oyster, too, is soft, but only after being pried open alive. Do we not both spill saline when cracked? One must be thankful an oyster has no voice box. Don’t be fooled: the boys at the world’s raw bars are trained to make it look easy, treating their dull knives like cul-de-canard, masking the effort, tasing off the bluntness as the easiest of memorized movements. Calm psychoanalysts. When I am unlocked, broken open, we call it a breakdown, or a breakthrough, if we push it far along enough that levity follows. On claim forms I send to my insurance, I not only get the language for my disorders of feeling my antipsychotics, my dosages, but complex code, numbers and punctuation, feeling and its cause transcribed, if only for reimbursement. In this sense, I’m the lucky one. Poor oyster, exception for the vegans, its unlocking relegated to stretched onomatopoeia. Shuck, slurp. How quaint, how salty. I sometimes wish they’d squeal like lobsters. 4.<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/PH4kE6S3Cg3rYyAxcLFQ7eYmeDarVTWQ6u1wOzCsw5MZZVFiVfpA_tVZNrIwY0S1xTp8MszOfY47jR89qkxexEOaiU9eM6jwT0ZUfWvhnW6UtSNWJ4aPyU5Ip8q0V7HKQKPqSFPb" width="34" height="34" style="width: 34px; height: 34px;"><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/PH4kE6S3Cg3rYyAxcLFQ7eYmeDarVTWQ6u1wOzCsw5MZZVFiVfpA_tVZNrIwY0S1xTp8MszOfY47jR89qkxexEOaiU9eM6jwT0ZUfWvhnW6UtSNWJ4aPyU5Ip8q0V7HKQKPqSFPb" width="34" height="34" style="width: 34px; height: 34px;"><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/PH4kE6S3Cg3rYyAxcLFQ7eYmeDarVTWQ6u1wOzCsw5MZZVFiVfpA_tVZNrIwY0S1xTp8MszOfY47jR89qkxexEOaiU9eM6jwT0ZUfWvhnW6UtSNWJ4aPyU5Ip8q0V7HKQKPqSFPb" width="34" height="34" style="width: 34px; height: 34px;"><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/PH4kE6S3Cg3rYyAxcLFQ7eYmeDarVTWQ6u1wOzCsw5MZZVFiVfpA_tVZNrIwY0S1xTp8MszOfY47jR89qkxexEOaiU9eM6jwT0ZUfWvhnW6UtSNWJ4aPyU5Ip8q0V7HKQKPqSFPb" width="34" height="34" style="width: 34px; height: 34px;"> Every woman I’ve ever dated (two), I’ve taken to an oyster farm. Both times, I drove us north on Highway 1, which at a certain point circles an unromantic part of Northern California’s seaside, Tomales Bay. The first stop is a raw bar in a shack called the Marshall Store, where cool, leather-clad motorcyclists and yuppies in Teslas sit at long tables right off the roadway eating garlic bread and deep-bowled oysters (a beautiful cashier once explained that the shape there had to do with a cinched growing bag turning in the tides). After the Marshall Store, the next destination is a farm and outdoor restaurant called Hog Island, which is famous, if not a little too much so, in California. Most times, it’s packed, and one has to stand in line waiting for a stand-up spot where, if you’re a teenager with a little bit of money saved, your reward for your idling will be a half dozen B+ oysters and none of the other expensive menu items. But when you are trying to impress a girl, or convince yourself of something, and when the valet’s name is Jack and it feels like some kind of sign, it is distinctly worth it. Trust me, please. The first girl was from New England and grew up shucking and eating all types of molluscs at a raw bar in Martha’s Vineyard. She was a veteran compared to me. The intensity of whatever we went through has the nuance of a gallon of tartar sauce, and so won’t be discussed here. She liked the oysters, but said they were better out east. I don’t know if we were really dating. She was visiting for a week; then we broke up. The second was serious. Intimate and formative and miraculous, the way things are supposed to be. We drove up and did not feel disgusting kissing after slurping our raw purchases. We were in love despite it all (all, that is, that came afterwards). I have written much about her, and likely will write more in the future. But this is an essay about oysters, so I will only say this: she had not eaten many in her life, but she loved them because of some internet video in which a French seaman said that eating oysters was like kissing the sea. I think she felt romantic about this, as if it meant being close to something mystical and blue. It really is too bad that the ocean is so unknowable, I should have said as we kissed, getting into the car to drive home. But I nodded, and I smiled. 5.<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/PH4kE6S3Cg3rYyAxcLFQ7eYmeDarVTWQ6u1wOzCsw5MZZVFiVfpA_tVZNrIwY0S1xTp8MszOfY47jR89qkxexEOaiU9eM6jwT0ZUfWvhnW6UtSNWJ4aPyU5Ip8q0V7HKQKPqSFPb" width="34" height="34" style="width: 34px; height: 34px;"><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/PH4kE6S3Cg3rYyAxcLFQ7eYmeDarVTWQ6u1wOzCsw5MZZVFiVfpA_tVZNrIwY0S1xTp8MszOfY47jR89qkxexEOaiU9eM6jwT0ZUfWvhnW6UtSNWJ4aPyU5Ip8q0V7HKQKPqSFPb" width="34" height="34" style="width: 34px; height: 34px;"><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/PH4kE6S3Cg3rYyAxcLFQ7eYmeDarVTWQ6u1wOzCsw5MZZVFiVfpA_tVZNrIwY0S1xTp8MszOfY47jR89qkxexEOaiU9eM6jwT0ZUfWvhnW6UtSNWJ4aPyU5Ip8q0V7HKQKPqSFPb" width="34" height="34" style="width: 34px; height: 34px;"><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/PH4kE6S3Cg3rYyAxcLFQ7eYmeDarVTWQ6u1wOzCsw5MZZVFiVfpA_tVZNrIwY0S1xTp8MszOfY47jR89qkxexEOaiU9eM6jwT0ZUfWvhnW6UtSNWJ4aPyU5Ip8q0V7HKQKPqSFPb" width="34" height="34" style="width: 34px; height: 34px;"> The first time I read Consider the Oyster, what shocked me most was the availability, or more rightly the abundance, of oysters in Fisher’s world. I do not mean that they were so plentiful as to become utilitarian and unspecial. Instead, Fisher talks about being able to dump several dozen of something sublime into a pool of cream, the remembered instances piling up essay after essay until the number of oysters she’s mentioned being used in stew alone outnumber the oysters I’ve eaten during my whole life. The first essay in the book, Love and Death Amongst the Molluscs, traces the unlikely life cycle of an oyster, the same way so many field guides describe cartoonishly the improbability of flower pollination or the survival of giant fig trees in shaded-over jungles. Looking at an oyster, it may appear too craggy and cement-like to seem miraculous. But Fisher reminds us time and time again that plenty does not equate to unremarkable. The ballast in so many New England roads and fortifications are made up of the durable products of countless rare occurrences. The piled up oyster shells lining the sides of docks are not less significant for their being discarded. In the ethos of oysters, most of life’s inconceivably large menagerie is worthy of intimate study. The metaphor, here, may be too heavy-handed. But so many essays devolve into paeans. This is about oysters, not about love, but the more ways I think of to consider, the more the gap thins. *** Jack Petersen is a writer and performer from New York and Berkeley, CA. Their work in fiction, nonfiction, theatre, and dramaturgy often concerns food, gender, nature, and the American West, and their writing can be found in places like The Galvanist and COPY. www.jackpetersen.com&nbsp; https://noshthemag.com/Main-page Mon, 26 Jul 2021 16:32:08 +0000 NOSH https://noshthemag.com/Main-page welcome to NOSH&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; “for us, eating and being eaten belong to the terrible secret of love. we love only the person we can eat. the person we hate we can't swallow.” -&nbsp;Hélène Cixous <img width="2816" height="2112" width_o="2816" height_o="2112" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cdf2f9837962328f768a4b1c080ca65c0c4181e844dd7dcc1293d91cbd8fbbd9/unnamed-1.jpg" data-mid="115229998" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cdf2f9837962328f768a4b1c080ca65c0c4181e844dd7dcc1293d91cbd8fbbd9/unnamed-1.jpg" /> Eating like Sylvia by Aurora Huiza I didn’t necessarily feel sensual eating cheese and nuts. I felt a little sad, actually... essay <img width="668" height="668" width_o="668" height_o="668" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9aebf0508c9c870b797b40579d7fab05ca6a95f93dc52b6643608e1289fae97d/IMG_6228.jpeg" data-mid="114727759" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/668/i/9aebf0508c9c870b797b40579d7fab05ca6a95f93dc52b6643608e1289fae97d/IMG_6228.jpeg" /> 5 More Ways of Considering the Oyster by Jack Petersen Every woman I’ve ever dated (two), I’ve taken to an oyster farm... personal essay <img width="400" height="400" width_o="400" height_o="400" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fa8a1c9d67ed677a27d19e1ca853237f8f58f82277be4ab5137916f94b8917e0/fooJopVZ.jpg" data-mid="114711370" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/400/i/fa8a1c9d67ed677a27d19e1ca853237f8f58f82277be4ab5137916f94b8917e0/fooJopVZ.jpg" /> A Talk with Rebecca Brill of Sylvia Plath’s Food Diary (@whatsylviaate) on Twitter by Julie Goldberg I mean, documenting what you eat is so personal but if you’re really in turmoil, it can turn into something impersonal. But it’s almost really perfect, if you’re really trying to avoid talking about something you can just start talking about what you’re eating... interview <img width="3575" height="2964" width_o="3575" height_o="2964" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/64864ba4fcfa1b747581a525440914d1bb89d6b2c03a55916ddfb405f50085d9/Continental_breakfast_at_Wikimania_2017-08-10.jpg" data-mid="114711710" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/64864ba4fcfa1b747581a525440914d1bb89d6b2c03a55916ddfb405f50085d9/Continental_breakfast_at_Wikimania_2017-08-10.jpg" /> Kitchen Continental by Cora Womble-Miesner Breakfast tastes better when it’s free. Maybe that changes as you get older but I haven’t found out yet... personal essay <img width="2328" height="1923" width_o="2328" height_o="1923" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f97ae6d64774c8885c8004f4b9cffa838c949d3ac4086e7ccd1ecd50f598e47c/IMG_6522.jpeg" data-mid="115139371" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f97ae6d64774c8885c8004f4b9cffa838c949d3ac4086e7ccd1ecd50f598e47c/IMG_6522.jpeg" /> Still Life in Mobile Home by Joseph Sweetnam An old&nbsp; country is still, moving, rocking-chairly. We cross the interstate moving, still, moving still, coffee&nbsp; pot on burner.. prose poetry <img width="1800" height="1100" width_o="1800" height_o="1100" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7ee0c94740e6e99e162c5373d633e285417ffcdea175dd4ab8e638641c5ab6fa/P1000715.jpg" data-mid="115307187" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7ee0c94740e6e99e162c5373d633e285417ffcdea175dd4ab8e638641c5ab6fa/P1000715.jpg" /> Meet Lottie Sweeteny, England’s Fake Food Virtuoso by Julie Goldberg It’s mince made out of mushrooms made to look like real mince. They needed to send it to the Arab emirates but they weren’t allowed to send anything that was a food product, so they asked me to make fake fake mince... interview <img width="3000" height="2077" width_o="3000" height_o="2077" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/84d358be31f03a9a27957422316a989803656d83fda211bf84fbb627f20416aa/IMG_6497.JPG" data-mid="115136846" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/84d358be31f03a9a27957422316a989803656d83fda211bf84fbb627f20416aa/IMG_6497.JPG" /> Dinner &amp; a Show by Julianna Drew Björkstén Every year in Jackson Hole, my family witnessed the talents of a singing cowboy troupe, the Bar J. Wranglers, while chowing down on chuckwagon ribs... essay <img width="711" height="500" width_o="711" height_o="500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/421f2f3e55cdfb8405640a1908583e559514464bd8cb6f3141ff129592d2ea99/633384-1474896452.jpg" data-mid="115142085" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/711/i/421f2f3e55cdfb8405640a1908583e559514464bd8cb6f3141ff129592d2ea99/633384-1474896452.jpg" /> Eating in the Beautiful Bedroom by Jeannie Morgenstern I remember the cheesecakes from the supermarket. Personal sized, punch in the gut size, whole fist in mouth size... fiction <img width="1050" height="1305" width_o="1050" height_o="1305" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ece120bfeb5c93f9373c9851ec1eb790dc050acf37c73ae1d10562ef512a23cb/soap_bubbles_1_1050.jpg" data-mid="246824992" border="0" data-scale="66" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ece120bfeb5c93f9373c9851ec1eb790dc050acf37c73ae1d10562ef512a23cb/soap_bubbles_1_1050.jpg" /> Caffeinated Homebrew White Claw with Ketamine by Gabriel Smith