Black Lamb

November 2010 in Black Lamb

Volume 8, Number 11 — November 2010

November 1st, 2010

The All Food Issue

In the cover article of our All Food Issue, Are you gonna eat that?, Ed Goldberg reviews a life spent loving food and pitying those who merely eat to live. In Getting the hang of it, from our Black Lamb Archives, we reprint Cate Garrison’s classic tale of of an Englishwoman struggling to prepare a Thanksgiving meal. Elizabeth Fournier confesses her love of bacon in Can’t get enough.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: All Food Issue, Month summaries | Link to this Entry

Getting the hang of it

Thanksgiving — one of those damned colonial mysteries

November 1st, 2010

BY CATE GARRISON

No matter how long you live there, a foreign country remains mysterious. Even when the language purports to be the same as your mother tongue, some little turn of phrase or cultural reference, or just the accenting of an unexpected syllable, can send you rushing to the reference library in your effort to acculturate.

The basic, innocent pleasures of everyday American life hold terrors for the immigrant. The indecipherable dishes listed at drive-through (“thru”?) restaurants, plain sailing for the native, can scare the living daylights out of the newly landed stranger as disembodied voices call for split-second choices among incomprehensible offerings. “Er, um, a twenty-piece bucket, please!” once yelled my uprooted eight-year-old in a panic to conform. How could I know he was about to receive a score of chicken legs in a plastic container? At least he fared better than his five-year-old brother, whose fearful, dry-mouthed response on the same occasion was a frantically whispered “Hello, wall!”

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: All Food Issue, Garrison | Link to this Entry