February 8th
Good morning!
Welcome to Issue 46.1 of Digestable, your daily mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
Today’s news, fermented:
Amid this final month of our first pandemic year, there are some changes to Digestable afoot!
Last March, on the last day I went into the office, amid setting up laptops for work-from-home, the subject of how scary it was to read the news came up. Then it came up again, and again. It was already a part of my job to read news and share it with my colleagues; I thought, why not just send around a few articles, free of pandemic panic?
A wise former desk-mate of mine suggested that we had a very special someone equipped to lighten the mood with celebrity gossip. Thus, Digestable was born.
And then, of course, it turned into something else, and continued to shift as the months passed. Almost a year later, Latifah and I have published well over 200 issues, and Gabriel, DJ M0RO, and Caro have been supplying us with bookends to the week for so many now I’ve lost count.
So friends, it is time for another shift—Digestable will be coming to your inbox now three times per week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. We’re starting our new resting (or writing science fiction?!) regimen this week, so you’ll see us again this Wednesday.
Let me know, as always, if you have thoughts or questions. Love to you all, as visualized by Venus.
(via)
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
The hill I’m deciding to die on today is that we need more songs about food. Food is a biological universal, every human and organism eats. Food is also a cultural and environmental mediator: exchanges of food forge understanding and connection across cultures and landscapes. And of course, food is one of the most important ways we regularly bind ourselves to landscapes. If you’re looking to immerse yourself in the food-labor-land connection, I’d recommend checking out United Farm Workers’ twitter feed, which regularly posts excellent videos of ag workers harvesting everything from turnips to celery.
But popular music doesn’t reflect food’s complexity. I have a larger thought spiral about what is and isn’t considered appropriate lyrical material that I haven’t quite worked out yet, but food is a big part of it. When food does show up in music, it’s often sweet indulgent things like Rihanna’s iconic cake, Gaga’s sour candy, Kelis’s milkshake, or SOPHIE’s lemonade. What’s being conveyed in these songs is the sexuality of food and the deliciousness of a partner’s body, very chocolate covered strawberry energy. But for most music only sweet and manufactured foods get to be sexy and everything else is relegated to the health conscious and educational world of children’s music.
If adult music is about eating cake in the bedroom, children's music is about eating soft vegetables in the living room. Songs like Hot Potato by The Wiggles and Dr. Jean’s guacamole dance certainly have a greater vocabulary of foods - but food’s role stops at vocabulary. Songs like these don’t attempt to explore food’s deeper meanings, environmental connections, or even their perceived healthiness. Instead avocados, bananas, and potatoes are used as tools to teach kids shapes, letters and colors. There’s nothing wrong with using veggies to teach children, but who is out there really giving food a musical life?
Well, Junglepussy of course. From the iconic Trader Joe, to the asparagus from the Nah video, to tender lyrics like “If you plant seeds, the type to grow my fruit / Then I'll make you Jamaican food” from All of You, and the song Arugula on her most recent album, JP is DOING IT! She’s even gone to Columbia and Yale to speak about eating well as a form of Black femme liberation. RIP to the time I DM’d her on twitter to see if she’d do an event with GrowNYC and she agreed but GrowNYC dropped the opportunity because of her name. Junglepussy’s music shows (good) food as sexy and complex - her music roots itself in Jamacian food culture and rejects the industrial food desert imposed on her home of East New York.
Let me know if you have other foodie songs you love - for now I’ll leave you with some other music of note:
Princess Nokia’s Excellent, whose chorus “cook cook, you know I like to cook / chefin’ in the kitchen I don’t need no cookbook” is my mantra.
Lizzo’s first album with hits like Hot Dish “I see you hungry ____, here you go some steak / I guess you are what you eat, I guess you Lizzo taint”, Bus Passes and Happy Meals, and the iconic Batches & Cookies.
A-Wa’s Hana Mash Hu Al Yaman whose chorus defines Yemen as the “land of wheat, barley, grape, olive, fig, pomegranate, date, and home.”
*Hot Goss*
Brought to you by the superb Latifah Azlan.
After the Tr*mp administration moved out of the White House, there were reports that many former staffers and aides were getting nervous about their rapidly diminishing job prospects, particularly after that attempted coup that the former president himself kind of, you know, egged on. Former Vice President Mike Pence was not immune to these rumors. Geppetto's Pinocchio prototype is reportedly couch-surfing with his wife in Indiana because the couple apparently did not own any property and had nowhere to go after the Biden administration came to power and trying to figure out his next move.
So naturally he's decided to launch a podcast. Because we really need yet another unemployed man in a transitional period of his life to spout off more opinions on bipartisanship in DC or whatever boring ass topic on which he thinks he's an authority. Oh and even better news -- his podcast will be hosted by the Young America's Foundation, a "conservative youth organization" whose alumni include Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller. I don't know who needs to hear this but if your youth organization had members like the architect of some of the most nativist and racist immigration policies in the world, you're more in line with being described as the reincarnation of Hitler Youth than you are merely "conservative." But I guess I'm not the target audience of this f*cking podcast anyway so who cares about what I think, right?
Anyway, I guess this makes sense. Pence's career as a public servant is effectively over and the man is too toxic to immediately integrate into consulting for "conservative" foundations and think tanks without significant blowback. So throwing a bunch of money his way so that he can continue to "spread the good news of conservatism" seems like the most logical and viable next step. I'm just mostly bitter that no one seems to think my podcast idea of a hybrid cooking-and-gossip show is worth funding but this guy is?! All my eyerolls and groans to this endeavor. I hope he'll at least get a free Casper mattress out of this gig so he won't need to sleep on couches anymore.