Food Lover's Must Read: Lapham's Quarterly Food Issue

Why must you read the Lapham's Quarterly food issue? Because it rules.

Lapham's Quarterly threw all of its weight behind the topic of food, and created one hell of a charming magazine issue.

Lapham's Quarterly is a quarterly magazine that devotes each issue to a single topic. This past summer's issue was "Food." Lewis Lapham is the man behind the magazine. Former editor of Harper's Magazine, he is now the editor and eponym of the magazine. Lapham and his team assembled the issue by scouring thousands of pieces from the literary and art world, and piled them into a not-too-cohesive collection with food as their theme.

From food-related scenes lifted from Shakespeare and Dickens to snippets by Anthony Bourdain and Patton Oswalt, Lapham's Food issue tackles the topic of food with silliness and serious contemplation via excerpts, poems, trivia, artwork, essays, charts, and jokes. View the contents of the food issue here.

From Lapham's blog:

"In the issue, Charles Dickens asks for just a little more, Annie Dillard participates in the food chain, William Carlos Williams raids the refrigerator, Roland Barthes fiddles with chopsticks, H.L. Mencken worships the hot dog, and Erasmus teaches us how to have good table manners.

The issue also includes charts and graphs of history's top chefs, a sampling of dos and don't for table manners all over the world, the calorie counts of military rations, and major historical party fouls. Our essays include Daniel Mason on earth-eating, science writer Deborah Blum on food poisoning, and Brent Cunningham on the bourgeois desire to return to the farm."

I only wish they could have included my favorite scene from Uncle Buck (surely they would have if they could have):



[where: Minnesota, Food, Minneapolis, Twin Cities, 55418]