Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals. A book review by Steven G. Kellman

               
In Everything Is Illuminated (2002), a character named Jonathan Safran Foer flabbergasts his Ukrainian guide, Alex Perchov. "I'm a vegetarian," the visiting American declares. "I do not understand," Alex replies. A dialogue of mutual incomprehension ensues: "'I don't eat meat.' 'Why not?' 'I just don't.' 'How can you not eat meat?' . . . 'I just don't. No meat.' 'Pork?' 'No.' 'Meat?' 'No meat.' 'Steak?' 'Nope.' 'Chickens?' 'No.' 'Do you eat veal?' 'Oh, God. Absolutely no veal.' 'What about sausage?' 'No sausage either.'" The starving traveler is forced to feast on two potatoes.


               Eating Animals, Foer's first book of nonfiction, answers Perchov's "Why not?" with a more cogent explanation. An apologia pro diaeta sua, it begins in fond remembrance of his grandmother's chicken and carrots. Foer passed through vegetarian interludes throughout adolescence and consumed animal protein only occasionally after he married. When his son was born three years ago, he renounced meat entirely and began this book. Discomforting thoughts of a child gorging on flesh may have inspired Foer to make the nine-year-old narrator of his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), a vegan. Like Leo Tolstoy, J. M. Coetzee, Franz Kafka, and Margaret Atwood, Foer extends his empathy to nonhuman beings. "For the animals," wrote Isaac Bashevis Singer, another literary vegetarian, "it is an eternal Treblinka."

              Appalled that "upwards of 99 percent of all meat eaten in this country comes from 'factory farms,'" Foer sets out to comprehend what eating animals entails in the stages leading up to consumption. He participates in a clandestine nighttime raid on an industrial turkey operation. The supervisor of a facility where fifty thousand birds share a single shed tells him: "High-yield farming has allowed everyone to eat." Foer examines the price we pay—in environmental devastation, zoonotic pathogens, food-borne toxins, and complicity in atrocity—for cheap meat. Genetically engineered for maximum yield of flesh and profit, billions of pigs, chickens, and cows annually endure torture before their wretched lives are terminated, often painfully. "The factory farm," he concludes, "has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat." Eating is applied ethics, and Foer contends that we can act on our values every day by refusing meat.

He visits some remaining family farms, where animals are not debeaked, tail docked, castrated, branded, drugged, or otherwise treated as machines incapable of experiencing agony. He deplores the market forces eliminating both these farms and the few abattoirs where gratuitous cruelty is rare. In its astonishing conclusion, Eating Animals breaks with the growing chorus of philosophers, farm advocates, environmentalists, and nutritionists who advocate for a plant-based diet. Though still a devout vegan, Foer recognizes that most other Americans will continue to eat meat. So out of "the very same impulse that makes [him] personally committed to eschewing meats, eggs, and dairy," he has, through an organization he founded called Farm Forward, begun building humane slaughterhouses. The oxymoronicity would be clearer if, instead of chickens and turkeys, the objects of slaughter were dogs, chimpanzees, or humans, beings we feel more squeamish about killing. "A straightforward case for vegetarianism is worth writing," writes Foer, "but it's not what I've written here." Yet he has, though the implications of what eating animals really entails will be hard for most readers to swallow.

From: Bookforum Dec/Jan 2010

Food Conference Keynote Speaker

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures

Department of History

College of Liberal and Fine Arts

The University of Texas at San Antonio

announce the

6th INTERDISCIPLINARY AND MULTICULTURAL CONFERENCE ON

FOOD REPRESENTATION IN THE HUMANITIES, FILM AND THE ARTS

Keynote Speaker
Professor Steven G. Kellman
"The Only Fit Food for a Man is Half a Lemon": Kafka's Plea and Other Culinary Aberrations

Friday, February 26

6:30 pm Aula Canaria

University of Texas at San Antonio

Downtown Campus

With the support of an HEB grant

A professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he has taught since 1976, Steven G. Kellman was UTSA’s first Ashbel Smith Professor (1995-2000). He has also taught at the University of California campuses of Berkeley and Irvine and at Bemidji State Minnesota and Tel-Aviv University. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley and his B.A. in English and General Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton. He has held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Sofia and a Fulbright Senior Lectureship at Tbilisi State University and twice served as Partners of the Americas lecturer in Peru. He was twice awarded the UTSA President’s Distinguished Achievement Award in Recognition of Research Excellence (1990-91, 2005-2006) and once received the campus-wide teaching award (1985-86). Kellman has served as John E. Sawyer fellow at Harvard University’s Longfellow Institute and has held an NEH research grant, an NEH grant to South Africa, and a Fulbright-Hays grant to China. He was honored with the 2005 Arts and Letters Award of the San Antonio Public Library Foundation and with the 2008 Gemini Ink Literary Excellence Award.


Kellman is the author of Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (W. W. Norton, 2005), which was honored with the 2005 New York Society Library Award for Biography and was praised in the San Francisco Chronicle as "not only a necessary addition to the annals of American literature, but also a trenchant exploration of the relationship between the horrors of life and the saving power of art." Kellman's other books include The Translingual Imagination (2000), The Plague: Fiction and Resistance (1993), Loving Reading: Erotics of the Text (1985), and The Self Begetting Novel (1980). He is editor or co editor of M. E. Ravage’s An American in the Making (2009), Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft (2003), UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo's Underworld (2002), Torpid Smoke: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (2000), Leslie Fiedler and American Culture (1999), Into The Tunnel: Readings in Gass's Novel (1998), and Perspectives on Raging Bull (1994). Since 2001, he has co edited Magill's Literary Annual.

A contributing writer for The Texas Observer and the San Antonio Current, Kellman received the 1986 H. L. Mencken Award for his column in the San Antonio Light. He was awarded first place in arts criticism by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in 2006 and received the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Nonfiction for an essay in the Southwest Review during 2008. He is currently serving his third term as a director of the National Book Critics Circle and was recipient of the NBCC's 2007 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. His essays and reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Bookforum, Chronicle of Higher Education, Huffingtonpost.com, Forward, Michigan Quarterly Review, New York Times Book Review, Georgia Review, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among many other publications. Kellman was founding president of the literary center Gemini Ink and was elected into the Texas Institute of Letters.

This exhibit at the San Antonio Museum of Art is an excellent example of what art can do with foood as its subject.

Revised Final Conference Program

6th INTERDISCIPLINARY AND MULTICULTURAL CONFERENCE ON
FOOD REPRESENTATION IN LITERATURE, FILM AND THE OTHER ARTS
February 25-27, 2010
PROGRAM
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
College of Fine and Liberal Arts
The University of Texas at San Antonio
With the Support of the
Department of History
College of Fine and Liberal Arts
and
HEB

Thursday, February 25
5:00 pm-8:00 pm ::: Registration

6:30 pm. Aula Canaria :::

Marita Nummikoski, Chair, Dept. of Modern Languages & Literatures
Opening Remarks
Dean Dan Gelo, College of Liberal and Fine Arts
Welcome
Professor Christopher Wickham.
An Introduction to Talking about Food


7:00 pm. Aula Canaria :::

Steenson, Keeley -- The University of Texas at Austin
Two Short Films
Patrick Santé – Chef
Dinning as art - "The three stars"

8:00 pm. Reception (Cash Bar)

Friday, February 26th, 2010
I Session 8:30 am - 9:45 am

Panel 1. Food and Nation
Tebben, Maryann -- Bard College at Simon's Rock
The Concentrated Essence of Culture: Sauces as Metaphor in French Literature
Moran, Theresa -- Ohio University
Bayard Taylor, "The Great American Traveler," Afield with the Cup and the Pipe
Scholl, Jan -- Penn State University
Film Comedy Educated the Public about Food, 1911-1931

Panel 2. Film I
Matz, María R -- University of Massachusetts Lowell
El papel de la comida en la filmografía almodovariana
Chien-Cheng, Wu (James) -- Durham University of UK
Nostalgic Foodscape of Modern Taipei
Lirot, Julie -- Dartmouth College
Food as Cultural Identity in Exile

Panel 3. Food Pleasures I
Bobroff, Maria --
Gluttonous Pleasures: Arlequin, Sentimentality and Eighteenth-Century French Theater
Rich, Lauren G. -- University of Notre Dame
Conspicuous Consumption: Food & Dining in Eighteenth-Century Fantastic Literature


Friday, February 26th, 2010
II Session 10:00 am - 11:15 am

Panel 4. Film II
Israel, Deborah --
Whisk, Whisk! Chop, Chop!: The Kinesthetics of Cooking in Nor Ephron's Julie and Julia
Kumar, Nirmal -- Sri Vankateswara College
Food and Construction of motherhood in Hindi Films
Rundell, Richard -- New Mexico State University
Through His Stomach, North and South: Babette's Feast (1987), Like Water for Chocolate (1992), and Mostly Martha (2002)
Chalaire, Mary Anne -- University of Texas Pan American
The Americanization of Mostly Martha

Panel 5. Imagining Nations
Guy, Kolleen M. -- The University of Texas at San Antonio
History, the Culinary Turn, and Cultures of Abundance
Goldstein, Lauren --
Currying F(l)avour: Cultural Hybridization, India, and the British Empire
Timko, Merrianne -- Independent Researcher
Flaubert, Dumas, and Frith in the Land of the Pharaohs … In "The Land of Pilau"

Panel 6. Pedagogical Foods
Crosetto, Alice -- The University of Toledo
The Use of Food in Children's Literature: An Exploration
Oxford, Raquel -- University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Joaquín Sorolla: Food Representation in Celebrations and Work
González, Ana María – Texas Lutheran University
Naranja dulce, limón partido: el dulce, el chile y la manteca de la lírica tradicional latinoamericana

Friday, February 26th, 2010
III Session 11:30 am-12:45 pm

Panel 7. Comfort Food in Eco-Tourism
Cohen Miller, Anna --- Palo Alto College
Discussant: Discussion and Food Tasting of Indigenous South American Comfort Foods as Represented in Student Projects.

Panel 8. Literary Food
Bueno, Lourdes -- Austin College
Comida y comensales: “Delicias gastronómicas” en los clásicos españoles
Alpañés Pastor, María Amparo -- Washington and Jefferson College
Memoria, estatus e ingenio: el papel de la comida en Hoy caviar, mañana sardinas de Carmen y Gervasio Posadas
Agnew, Jennifer -- Harris-Stowe State University
Preparing 'Good Things to Eat': Creating Identity of Autonomy in Early African-American Food Writing

Panel 9. Fat Food
Garner, Kirsten E – UTSA
Nutritional Science
Candau, Antonio -- Case Western Reserve University
"No me come nada": A New -- Fat Free -- Spanish Author
Julier, Alice P -- Chatham University
Fat and Fighting Words: Obesity Discourses, Sustainability, and the Rhetoric of Resistance


Lunch Break


Friday, February 26th, 2010
IV Session 2:00 pm-3:15 pm

Panel 10. People’s Identity
Wallach, Jennifer Jensen --
Taking Back the Chicken Shack: African-American Challenges to White Food Stereotypes during the Civil Rights Era
Laemmerhirt, Iris-Aya -- University of Heilderberg and TU Dormund University
The Raw and the Cooked: National Identities, Othering and Resistance in Linda Furiya's Bento Box in the Hearland and Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meat
Caddell, Preston --
A study of Kimchi and its Cultural and Economical Effects in South Korean Society

Panel 11 Food Pleasures II
Gimbernat González, Ester -- University of Northern Colorado
Sazón inesperada en poemas en prosa de escritoras argentinas
Morris, Matt --
After the Party: Artistic Hindsight as Crowns Were Passed at the Fench Revolution and the Localvore Revolution
Van Zwoll, Lisa -- United Staes Air Force Academy
Madame at the Butter Churn: the Marquise de La Tour du Pin Cooks up Identity on the Farm

Panel 12. Literatura Cubana
Cornide, Ana -- Earlham College
Préstamos culturales y venenos: la nutrición del vacío en la cuentística de Virgilio Piñera
Vico Corvalán, Graciela N. -- Webster University
Cuerpo, carne, hambre, locura y autodestrucción en la obra de Virgilio Piñera
Torres Caballero, Benjamín -- Western Michigan University
La función de la comida en la literatura cubana contemporánea

Friday, February 26th, 2010
V Session 3:30 pm-4:45 pm

Panel 13. The Aesthetics and Politics of Scarcity
del Aguila, Rocío -- The University of Texas at Austin
The Real Eclectic Kitchen: Impoverished Indians and Wealthy Criollos Seated at the Same Table
Navarro, José Enrique -- The University of Texas at Austin
Hell's Kitchen: Images of Immigrant Labor in Parisian Restaurants in George Orwell and Santiago Gamboa
Tamayo, Cristine -- The University of Texas at Austin
The Liminal Kitchen: Textual Representations of Wartime Scarcity and the Male Provider in Civil War Spain

Panel 14. Food for the Soul
Chansky, Dorothy -- Texas Tech University
No Picnic: Food and Dystopia in the Plays of William Inge
McLeod, Stephen G. -- Jackson State University
Food for the Soul: The Power of Allusion in Chuck Sullivan's "Grace after Meals: Thanksgiving 1958"
O'Connor, Amber -- The University of Texas at Austin
Contemporary Religious Conversion in Quintana Roo: Changes in Religion, Communalism, Economy and Nutrition in a Maya Village

Panel 15. Pot-Pourri
Heise, Henriette --
Food and the Disgust of Existence: Sartre's narrative Nourritures
Duhaime, Douglas -- University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Mushrooms and the Margins of Agency: The Limitations of Cage's Chance Operations
Nieto, Nicole K. --
St Joseph's Day Altars: Collective Identity and Narrative in Post-Katrina New Orleans


Friday, February 26th, 2010


6:30 pm Aula Canaria

Steven G. Kellman
"The Only Fit Food for a Man is Half a Lemon":
Kafka's Plea and Other Culinary Aberrations



Saturday, February 27th, 2010
VI Session 8:30 am-9:45 am

Panel 16. Food and Leisure
Russek, Audrey -- The University of Texas at Austin
What's for Dinner?: The Absence of Food in American Restaurant Promotional Literature, 1920-1960
Janosik, Jeffrey -- Univeristy of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
More Cumin than Cumin: Imaginary Foodscapes and Representational Otherness in the US Mexican Restaurant
Warren, Dinah J. -- Dartmouth College
The Pursuit of Authenticity: The Impact of Tourism on Traditional Culinary Practices in Bahia

Panel 17. Mythologies
Aranda Silva, Alfredo -- University of Wisconsin La Crosse
Cosmogonía literaria del Café: De la semilla del cafeto a la mitología de los espacios enmarcados en sus correlatos artísticos
Namaste, Nina B --
Killing Him Softly: Identity Control in Myrna Santos Febres' 'Marina y su olor'
Morán, Elizabeth – Christopher Newport University
Feast for the Gods: Eating, Ritual, and Sacrifice in Aztec Art

Panel 18. The Labyrinth
Martínez-Ortiz, María Teresa -- Kansas State University
Violence, Hunger and the Politics of Social Control in Pan's Labyrinth: Analysis of Guillermo del Toro's Symbolic Imagery
Kordas, Ann -- Johnson & Wales Univeristy
Mother's Milk and Father's Bread: The Power of the Feminine in Pan's Labyrinth


Saturday, February 27th, 2010
VII Session 10:00 am-11:15 am

Panel 19. TV Shows
Goetzel, Johanna -- Wesleyan University
What is Not Said: The Food Network's Silenced Voices
McCullough, Cali --
Yum-O! From Julia Child to Rachel Ray: Defining the Success of the Celebrity Chef
Fong-Morgan, Bridget M-- Indiana University South Bend
We're Mixing Up a Murder: Television Cooking Shows and the Culinary Mystery

Panel 20. European Literature
Komara, Kirsten -- Schreiner University
Culture, Class, and Character: Representations of Food in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley
Kimball, Susanne --- UTSA
Cullinary Allusions, Decline and Spiritual Refinement in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks
Ware, Barbara Blithe --- Keene State College
The Creation of a National Culinary Canon: Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Gendered Authority

Panel 21. US Latino
Fernández, Ana -- Stony Brook University
Comida, memoria y creación de identidades en Caramelo de Sandra Cisneros y Monkey Hunting de Cristina García
Pignataro, Margarita E. -- Syracuse University
Bicultural Nutrition in Cuban-American Literature: Food Representation in Cuisine, Cosmetics and Religion
Knepp, M. Dustin -- University at Albany, State University of New York
The Role and Representation of Mexican Food in Life and Literature: an Ethnographic Comparison
Cárdenas, Norma – Oregon State University
Food, Place, Identity, and Memory in Woman Hollering Creek

Saturday, February 27th, 2010
VIII Session 11:30 am-12:45 pm

Panel 22. Hunger and Food
Rostankowski, Cynthia -- San Jose State University
The Other Mother's Roast Chicken: Authentic Food and Comfort in Neil Gaiman's Coraline
Heydl-Cortínez, Cecilia -- Penn State University
Hombres de maíz and Women Too: Corn is Food for the Soul from the Popol Vuh to Asturias and Chicana Writers
Moreno, María Paz -- University of Cincinnati
Eggless Omelets, Fried Sunflowers and Lots of Sardines: Cookbooks from the Spanish Civil War

Panel 23 Food in Language and Literature
Oxford, Jeffrey -- University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Food and Food Gathering as Status Symbols in the Valencian Cycle and Beyond
Niño, Miguel A. -- Saint Edward's University
La comida: un elemento íntegro de la corrupción mexicana en Arráncame la vida
Stanford, Lois -- New Mexico State University
Como los frijoles del payaso…: Food Dichos in Mexico

Panel 24. Male and Food
McLean, Alice --
From Domestic Cookbooks to Gastronomic Literature: Gender and Genre in Nineteenth-Century Food Writing
Vester, Katharina -- American University
"Wolves in Chef's Clothing": Recipes for Masculinity in Hemingway, Hammett and Early Men's Cookbooks
Kolberg, Stephanie -- The University of Texas at Austin
Food in Porn: The Classing of Disgust and Desire in Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler
Rao, Suweta -- University of Illinois Urbana Champain
The Men in Kitchen: Bawarchi and Cheeni Kum

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

Buffet Lunch 1:00 pm


Stefani Bardin -- University of Buffalo
Food Issues, a Video Project. Continuous showing on Friday and Saturday

Food Sites

We have just added to our blog a new link to a site that offers a lot of information on food and a list of links to other sites: http://www.onthetable.us/

Intellectual Nourishment

The latest issue of Ovations, a publication of the College of Liberal and Fine Arts, The University of Texas at San Antonio has an article, "Intellectual Nourishment", commenting the Conference on Food Representation in Literature, Film and the Other Arts, held every two years at the The University of Texas San Anton io Downtown Campus. You can see the article following the link,
http://colfa.utsa.edu/colfa/Ovations/food.html , or read it here:

As a boy in Chile, Santiago Daydi-Tolson often passed time on the coast searching for clams in the sandy shore. Or he was inside, enjoying conversation and coffee at the dining table. While these may seem like disparate activities, there is one common denominator: food.
The use of food in that childhood memory gives the story more detail and poignancy, Daydi-Tolson says. “What seems everyday and kind of mundane can and does have a lot more meaning.”
Daydi-Tolson, a professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature, has researched and written about the prevalence and meaning of food in art and literature for more than 10 years. The representation of food in the art world is fundamentally the celebration of people and their place in the world, he says. “It just shows how art is involved in so many subtle ways with human nature. It is something that weighs strongly in the way people live, think, feel and react.”
To more deeply explore the function of food in art, Daydi-Tolson has organized five food conferences since 2000, composed of people who, like him, believe that it reveals an abundance of information about the way people live.
Called the Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Conference on Food Representation in Literature, Film and the Other Arts, the event draws scholars who specialize in food studies and other fields from as far away as the University of Tokyo and as nearby as Texas Lutheran University in Seguin, Texas. The conference expands the study of human thought in references to food in written, spoken and visual communication. They explore the philosophical, psychological, political and religious messages imbedded in each work. Even the field of marketing in popular culture is on the menu: think of the apple in Macintosh computer promotions.
After the first conference eight years ago, participants requested Daydi-Tolson and his colleagues repeat the gathering every two years. The most recent conference—funded in part through a gift from H-E-B—was in February. The next one is scheduled for 2010.
Participants also have created an electronic journal, Convivium Artium, which means “Banquet of the Arts” in Latin, to further explore the subject. In the magazine, participants can electronically publish studies on food and the humanities.
Daydi-Tolson says people don’t have to be food connoisseurs or scholars to understand the interest. Even a cursory look shows how artists apply food to convey religious, ideological, cultural, political and economic perspectives.
Consider Vincent Van Gogh’s dark depiction of the poor eating a scant meal of potatoes during a time of famine in “The Potato Eaters.” Subtle details in the painting, such as an oil lamp as the sole lighting source, the thin and rough hands of those that are gathered around the table and the use of potatoes as the lone food in the meal, are used to illustrate the depth of the people’s poverty. Leonardo da Vinci’s use of leavened bread in his depiction of the momentous “Last Supper” has been used by researchers to determine whether the historic event took place during Passover.
Daydi-Tolson stresses that food is not used by artists as an afterthought; it is a deliberate theme. “It is there for some particular reason,” he says. In essence, he says, food becomes another character in their works.
Daydi-Tolson has focused on famous writers. For example, he noted that the classic novel, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, “talks about food and eating in practically every chapter.” Charles Dickens took a similar tack, particularly in A Christmas Carol. Then there is Ernest Hemingway, who often used food in his writings. He is credited with using big-game hunts in life and literature as a way to establish a masculine identity for both his characters and himself.
Have an appetite for more information about Daydi-Tolson’s work? E-mail Santiago.dayditolson@utsa.edu.

A Philosophical Buffet
As in recipes, opening remarks are required for a conference about the depiction of food in literature and the arts.
When Christopher Wickham, associate dean of UTSA’s College of Liberal and Fine Arts, began thinking about the topic, he decided to use equal parts humor and humanity.
“Perhaps it was someone calling me sweetie pie or cutie pie; pie is generally held to [mean] ‘nice’ in English: nice as pie is a favored expression,” Wickham told the audience. “Someone might be considered to be the crème de la crème, which is really only the gourmet way of saying cream of the crop,” he said. “People might be full of the milk of human kindness, as Shakespeare had it.”
Look at your companion, Wickham advised, as they might have an attractive peach-like complexion or less so—pasty-faced or whey-faced.
More mature people might have salt-and-pepper hair, and kindred spirits might be as alike as two peas in a pod with wit as keen as mustard or more salt of the earth, he said.
Even people’s emotional states are prone to food analogies, typically fruits and vegetables, he said. People “go bananas from time to time, just as we all know someone who is nutty, nuts or even nutty as a fruit cake.” The proverbial couch potato simply requires a sofa to veg out.
The working world has its own food ties, such as a plum job paying big dough or the antithesis: getting paid peanuts when bean counters have their way. At the end of the day, it’s important to bring home the bacon while not working so hard that you have too much on your plate.
The human body is rife with edible similes, or as Wickham described them, “the alimentation of anatomy.” A head is sometimes called a noodle, and cauliflower ear might merit a visit to a plastic surgeon.
Wickham adopted the cadence of the late comedian George Carlin for the remainder of his food-based philosophical observations:
If life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. If you are in the soup, you try not to get in a stew. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs. It might not be your cup of tea, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Sometimes you have to wake up and smell the coffee, but if you don’t bite off more than you can chew, it’s not such a tough nut to crack. As long as you don’t end up hitting the sauce, life is a piece of cake. And don’t let anyone tell you it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. That’s baloney. We may try not to compare apples and oranges, but sometimes you can’t have your cake and eat it.
I’ll stop and let you get to the meat of this conference. Suffice it to say that food is a two-way street, it crosses our tongues in both directions: inbound, we ingest the signified, the food, to stay alive and, outbound, we express the signifier, the words as communication and literature, to make life worth living.

WEB EXTRA: Listen to the NPR podcast of “The Splendid Table,” featuring the UTSA food conference, at www.utsa.edu/today/2008/02/SplendidTable2-23-08.mp3.

CALL FOR PAPERS

6th INTERDISCIPLINARY AND MULTICULTURAL CONFERENCE ON
FOOD REPRESENTATION IN LITERATURE, FILM
AND THE OTHER ARTS

San Antonio, Texas
February 25-27, 2010

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
College of Liberal and Fine Arts
The University of Texas at San Antonio


The objective of this interdisciplinary, multicultural conference is to examine, celebrate, and enjoy the variety of ways in which food has been represented in literature and the other arts throughout time and throughout the planet.


Two hundred-word summaries of papers on any aspect of the general theme and written in any of the several languages taught at The University of Texas at San Antonio (English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Italian, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic) will be considered. Proposals for special panels will also be accepted.

Proposals for individual papers or sessions should be postmarked or e-mailed (as a Word document attachment) no later than September 25, 2009 and should be addressed to:

Professor Santiago Daydí-Tolson
Department of Modern Languages & Literatures
The University of Texas at San Antonio
One UTSA Circle
San Antonio, Texas 78249-0644
e-mail: santiago.dayditolson@utsa.edu


For more detailed and updated information, including previous Conference Programs, and Convivium Artium, the electronic journal on food representation in literature and the arts visit the Conference Web Page: http://flan.utsa.edu/foodconf or http://foodinlitart.blogspot.com