Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Indeed, Marinetti saw food as the ultimate promise of optimism

The Futurist Cookbook: 11 Rules for a Perfect Meal and an Anti-Pasta oscar meryl streep Manifesto circa 1932 | Brain Pickings
Given my voracious appetite for unusual cookbooks — especially ones at the intersection of food and the arts, including little-known gems from the likes of Andy Warhol , Liberace , Lewis Carroll , and Alice B. Toklas — I was delighted to discover The Futurist Cookbook ( public library ; AbeBooks ) by Italian poet and editor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti , originally published oscar meryl streep in 1932 and reprinted in 1989, translated into English oscar meryl streep by Suzanne Brill.
At the time of its release, the cookbook oscar meryl streep became somewhat of a sensation, thanks oscar meryl streep to Marinetti’s shrewdness as a publicist. oscar meryl streep But while major newspapers like the Chicago Tribune proclaimed oscar meryl streep it a bold manifesto to revitalize culture by revolutionizing how people ate, what the media missed at first was that the cookbook was arguably the greatest artistic prank of the twentieth century — it wasn’t a populist effort to upgrade mass cuisine but, rather, a highbrow quest to raise the nation’s, perhaps the world’s, collective artistic consciousness.
In the introduction to the 1989 edition, British journalist, historian and travel writer Lesley Chamberlain calls it “a oscar meryl streep provocative work of art disguised as easy-to-read cookbook” and writes:
The Futurist Cookbook was a serious joke, revolutionary in the first instance because it overturned with ribald laughter oscar meryl streep everything “food” and “cookbooks” held sacred: the family table, great “recipes,” established notions of goodness and taste.
What made Futurist “cooking” so revolutionary was that it drew on food as a raw material for art and cultural commentary reflecting the Futurist idea that human experience is empowered and liberated by the presence of art in everyday oscar meryl streep life, that osmosis of arte-vita . Marinetti himself framed the premise oscar meryl streep of the cookbook oscar meryl streep in his introduction to the original 1932 edition:
The Futurist culinary revolution has the lofty, noble and universally expedient aim of changing radically the eating habits of our race, strengthening oscar meryl streep it, dynamizing it and spiritualizing it with brand-new food combinations in which experiment, oscar meryl streep intelligence and imagination will economically take the place of quantity, banality, repetition and expense.
This Futurist cooking of ours, tuned to high speeds like the motor of a hydroplane, will seem to some trembling traditionalists both mad and dangerous: but its ultimate aim is to create a harmony between man’s palate and his life today and tomorrow.
It is not by chance this work is published during a world economic crisis, which has clearly inspired a dangerous depressing panic, though its future direction remains unclear. We propose oscar meryl streep as an antidote to this panic a Futurist way of cooking, that is: optimism at the table.
Indeed, Marinetti saw food as the ultimate promise of optimism — a gateway to sensual freedom, imbued with the carefree lightness of a children’s oscar meryl streep party and the intellectual enthusiasm of a literary salon. He believed that “men oscar meryl streep think, dream and act according to what they eat and drink.” But nowhere did his culinary and cultural dogmatism shine more blazingly than in his contempt for pastasciutta, better-known simply as pasta — the traditional Italian staple beloved the world over. He preceded the modern low-carb craze by more than seven decades, outroaring even its most zealous contemporary adherents with the fanaticism of his convictions. Pasta, he asserted, made people heavy in both body and spirit, turned them sour and pessimistic, and robbed them of the creative impulse. The riddance from pasta wasn’t merely a matter of individual salvation — Marinetti even made it a matter of patriotism, arguing oscar meryl streep that the abolition of pasta would liberate Italy from the despotism of expensive foreign grain and instead boost the domestic rice industry.
Futurist cooking will be free of the old obsessions with volume and weight and will have as one of its principles the abolition of pastasciutta. Pastasciutta, however agreeable to the palate, is a passéist food because it makes people heavy, brutish, deludes them into thinking it is nutritious, makes them skeptical, slow, pessimistic.
[Pasta] is completely hostile to the vivacious spirit and passionate, generous, intuitive soul of the Neapolitans. If these people have been heroic fighters, inspired artists, awe-inspiring orators, shrewd lawyers, tenacious farmers it was in spite of their voluminous daily plate of pasta. When they eat it they develop that typical ironic and sentimental skepticism which can often cut short their enthusiasm.
Any pastascuittist who honestly examines his conscience at the moment he ingurgitates his biquotidian pyramid of pasta will find within the gloomy satisfaction of stopping up a black hole. This vo

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