One of my favorite novels is incidentally about food—specifically, gastronomy (the art of eating). It is The Club of Angels, by Brazilian writer Luís Fernando Veríssimo. It is one of two of his books translated into English. I highly recommend this and the other one, Borges and the Eternal Orangutans.
Here are some the best foodie passages from The Club of Angels:
“[G]astronomy was a cultural pleasure like no other, for no other brought with it the same philosophical challenge by which appreciation demanded the destruction of the thing appreciated and where veneration and consumption were one; no other art could equal eating as an example of the sensory perception of an art, any art, with the one exception, he thought, of actually stroking Michelangelo’s David’s butt.”
“It isn’t everyday that we want to see a syrupy Van Gogh or hear a piquant fugue by Bach, or make love to a succulent woman, but every day we want to eat; hunger is the recurring desire, the only recurring desire, for sight, sound, sex and power all come to an end, but hunger goes on, and while one might weary of Ravel for ever, one could only ever weary of ravioli for, at most, a day.”
“[A]ll gastronomic pleasure was a co-opted form of sexual desire. We interrupt the organic process of a plant or animal in order to eat it and we exhaust our own voluptuousness, our own perverted sexual desire, in the pleasure of eating.”
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