Sometimes a hot dog is a cheesy metaphor
January 30th, 2008 by Cliff Bostock in Food media
The Utne Reader is featuring an interview with Darra Goldstein, the editor of my favorite food magazine, Gastronomica. Goldstein is also a professor of Russian studies at Williams College and has authored four cookbooks. A sample of the interview:
…There is a place for a deeper and darker exploration of issues surrounding food. With the trade magazines people want to be entertained and enter a fantasy world. It’s a larger problem with American culture—the happy face, as though we should always be smiling. Smiling is good, but we also need to explore things critically and analytically. When you talk about food, the pleasure component is important, but there are also problems of hunger, food security, the environment, the food chain and the toxins that are introduced into it. These issues need to be explored.
Find the entire interview here. And check out Gastronomica’s own website here. The current issue features a portrait of Freud holding a very phallic hot dog instead of his omnipresent cigar.
Gastronomica won the 2007 Utne Independent Press Award for social/cultural coverage.
Leave a Reply