A picture game

I went to Terra Futura in Firenze last weekend. It was a conference on "sustainability" from all different perspectives. I learned about electric cars; indulged a vegan by letting her evangelize me for a while . . . and then had a little fun asking questions she couldn't quite answer; tried almond milk; saw an awesome concert in Piazza della Signoria; and saw a great film called "Merica". There's so much I "want to tell", but I'm disciplining myself until I finish all these research projects!

So, I leave you with these pictures. First, anyone who can tell me why I took these two shots wins a prize:



And second, I think I've told you about the Italian obsession with enormous fashion handbags. This isn't the most gigantic or the most fashionable bag I've seen, but I think the carrier-plus-fashion composite score rates rather highly:

A few of my favorite things

Possibly my favorite thing about living in Italy is the market. I love going to the market! In Bologna, the "Mercato delle Erbe" is a ten-minute walk from my house, it's open every day but Sunday, and they sell everything I need. The central area is filled with "beautiful" (and mostly expensive) fruit, and the side wings offer in-season produce, often local, at good prices. I'm a side-wing shopper, myself. My bread man Pietro and my vegetable man Luca take care of me.

Every day I have a delicious salad of spinach (I like the stems the best), fennel, tomatoes, and now I'm adding cucumbers. Luca tells me that the spinach season is finishing up, though, so I'm going to have to move on to another green. He's suggested chard.

Oranges are about a dollar a kilo, and I have one or two every day. The south of Italy is filled with oranges, so they're always available and always delicious. My favorites are the Sicilian tarocchi; they're red inside, and I think we call them blood oranges.

Here's another photo related to the market. It's Pietro, the Bread Man, who also plays in an African drum band. He told me about the Festival of Soup a few weeks back. I went, bringing with me, as instructed, a spoon and a cup, and I must have tasted a few dozen different soups! My favorites was a peanut soup from Bolivia.

The Movie Series Begins. I hope.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating: The Bologna Cineteca is awesome. It’s basically a movie theater that screens films in a “meaningful” way. Lots of the films are themselves “meaningful” – in the sense that they’re not Die Hard 37 – but the Cineteca also makes them more meaningful by making them into series (“Focus on Argentina”), staging lectures related to the films, and inviting the directors to present the films and field questions. Best of all, they host film festivals, and the most recent was Slow Food on Film.

One of my classmates hooked us all up with “credentials,” which let us see as many films as we wanted for free. It also gave us a lanyard with a nametag, which is almost like a membership card, and you all know by now how important membership cards are. So the credentials were great on both counts. I saw a few awesome feature-length films and a bunch of documentaries and shorts. (I’m a short fanatic, if you didn’t know.) I learned a ton – you could become a semi-expert in food just by going to the festival – and I have to say that the quality of the filmmaking really impressed me. Definitely the best film fest I’ve been to. In any case, I saw a few films that are definitely worth seeking out, and – if I can manage to follow through on the idea – I thought I’d introduce you to a few of them in the next few blog posts.

The first one is King Corn. Two guys graduate from college, discover in a hair test that they’re basically “made of corn,” and move to Iowa to farm an acre of “King Corn”. In the process, they discover all kinds of absurdities and abuses that pervade the American food system (and – really – American food). Definitely worth a look, and I’ll bet you can even find it at the library.

In other news, I made octopus for the first time tonight. I’m crazy for it, I told you, but this is the first time I’ve actually made. It comes frozen, and I bet you can find it at Wegmans if you want. If you buy it frozen, it already comes de-eyed, so you just have to plop it in a pot with a little garlic, white wine, lemon juice, and just a touch of water, and it’ll take care of itself.

So, my recommendation for tonight: A trip to Wegmans, a trip to Blockbuster, octopus, and King Corn.

Chestnuts and Cannibals, oh my!

I apologize for the lag in entries. I’m up to my eyeballs in schoolwork. It’s awesome, though. I just love what I’m working on. I have five final papers due by the end of the month. I think I’ve just about finished three of them and have two more to go. Want to hear what I’ve been studying?

The first project I finished was on the chestnut. I’ve been working on that one for a while. Go ahead, try me, ask me anything about the chestnut! I now know for sure that the horse chestnut (which I tried to roast and eat the last time I came back from Europe) is definitely NOT related to the chestnut and it is definitely NOT edible! All of the real American chestnut trees got wiped out by a fungus in the first half of the last century, and – this is incredible, to me – its pathogenic spores are still floating around out there and the American chestnut still cannot grow successfully in North America. There is, thank heavens, The American Chestnut Foundation, which is doing its darnedest to bring ol’ Chester back to life. Seriously, they call the Castanea dentata “Chester” on their website.

Then I finished up a research into cannibalism. One interesting finding I had was that, in Medieval Europe, even though there weren’t practicing cannibals, per se, there were a few interesting cannibalistic “trends”. Yeah, how do you like that? Today it’s tight black pants and tomorrow it’s cannibalism. Go figure. Anyway, there were a handful of popular uprisings – the price of bread was too high, or they imposed a new tax, or whatever filled the Text-Message-to-the-Editor column in the Ye Old Town Crier of 1385 – in which the townspeople took to capturing the scapegoat politician, whacking him, sticking his head on a pole, and then eating his intestines. And then, there were some edgy docs who started prescribing human blood as a curative for all kinds of health problems. Most of the time they got the human blood from criminals who had been hanged or decapitated, and a whole chain of “mummy shops” opened up in the big cities to meet the growing demand. (I’ll bet there was a pyramid scheme/scam and everything.)

Then I had to analyze a piece of art. Most people stick with sensible genres like Last Suppers and Madonnas eating pears and things like that. Horrified by the prospect of seeming normal, I stuck with my cannibal theme and instead analyzed this picture:

Next up, I have a bibliography project I’m doing on sustainable agriculture, and – this is what I’m really excited about – my paper for “Anthropology and Food.” I talked with my prof, and he supported my idea: I’m basically going to do a “field study” regarding the differences I pick up between the food cultures of the United States and Italy. Now that gets me going!

Did I tell you that I'm taking a painting class? I figured that, since I'm in Italy, I should stage my own Renaissance. I finally finished my first painting, a copy of Caravaggio's San Giovanni Battista. (Some people have argued that, because of its strong sensuality, it's not actually St. John the Baptist, but rather Isaac or even Bacchus.) Although I expect it will demand great concentration and discernment, try to tell which is the original :)