Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 52: Food: The Vital Stuff
Winter 1995
Food as indulgence, certainly, but also food as a taboo, a cruelty, a desperate need, a failed sex aid, and a means of making a living. Including Graham Swift on the life and death of a butcher, J. M. Coetzee’s attempt at vegetarianism in Texas, Giles Foden at Idi Amin’s dinner table, and Sean French on the delights of Icelandic cuisine (including roast puffin and whale sushi). Plus: Georges Perec, Romesh Gunesekera, John Lanchester, Jane Rogers, Margaret Visser and Joan Smith.
From this Issue
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The Butcher of Bermondsey
Graham Swift
‘Then he led me out into the noise and the glare and the stink.’
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People Eaters
Joan Smith
‘In 1777, a butcher's assistant from Cheshire, Samuel Thorley, was tried for murder at Chester Assizes.’
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Grateful
Jane Rogers
‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly grateful.’
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Aphrodisiacs I Have Known
Norman Lewis
‘In the winter of 1957, I went to Liberia for the New Yorker.’
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The Sins of the Flesh
Margaret Visser
‘The message that vegetarianism imparts to the rest of us is ascetic and exclusive.’
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A Mystery
Charles Jones
‘Charles Jones took beautiful photographs of vegetables, fruit and flowers.’
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Do Women Like to Cook?
Laura Shapiro
‘Until recently, the question 'Do women like to cook?' wouldn't have been asked and couldn't have been answered.’
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What Bengali Widows Cannot Eat
Chitrita Banerji
‘Spring in Bengal is teasing and elusive, secret yet palpable, waiting to be discovered.’
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Frozen Fish
William Leith
‘I remembered the freezer from when we were kids. It had been important to us then, the site of many shameful boyish deeds.’
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Toffee
Agnes Owens
‘"Bloody well wake up!" Maureen's mother called to her -daughter, who slept in the kitchen bed recess.’
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Stringhoppers
Romesh Gunesekera
‘In 1956, my father was thirty-nine years old. He didn't even know how to boil an egg.’
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First Catch Your Puffin
Sean French
‘A man is rescued after years stranded on a desert island with two companions, one of whom died.’
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Men as Chickens
Geoffrey Beattie
‘She had offered four men £2,500 each to live like battery hens for a week.’
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Nobody Need Starve
Amartya Sen
‘Famines can occur with or without substantial declines in food output.’
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How It Ends
Andrew O’Hagan
‘Seagulls murmur overhead, and nip at the banks. You can hear almost nothing.’
