shelf care #4
Recommendations on reading and consuming, i.e. lots of links
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I’ve been postponing what I actually want to write about for a month now.
The truth is that I’ve been on holiday since the middle of June, a luxury that I never thought I could afford until now. While on holiday, I’ve tried to leave my brain back home (unsuccessfully), with its swirling thoughts on heat and water; collapsing infrastructure around environment and food systems; and cynicism, morality, and authenticity. This is my first real holiday in decades, every other meagre travel undertaking has had another purpose — work, visiting family, studying…
As I’m nearing the end of this holiday, I’ve realised that it truly is difficult to take with me the desire for a feel-good holiday, to become a true tourist who wanders around their surroundings with an uncompromising sincerity for knowing a place with a bohemian spirit. Travel for the sake of travelling and writing about it requires a kind of expertise (and courage) which I lack. I’d much rather have familiar experiences in an unfamiliar destination — and vice versa — even while looking for the contours of home. I’ve written about this previously, which still remains one of my heartfelt pieces to date.
Of course, some thoughts are difficult to escape even while travelling — after all, a lot of travel depends on the climate of a place. The conditions have to be perfect and the terrain has to be unchallenging so our bodies can drop their defences and soak in and ooze pleasure. We work towards tangible landmarks and exciting futures when travel is on the horizon. But both future and travel depend on visibility even if what we we’re after is mostly intangible; both future and travel require us to have faith in something bigger than ourselves, whether that’s climate or all the possibilities that lie before us. I’m trying not to get too corny here (it is unavoidable) but the future is possible by nurturing. Travel, too, is much nicer when we care — about our immediate environments, about the people who were here before us and especially those who will be here after us, about the brutality of convenience and what it actually costs us, and about the colonial project of travelling itself.
Travel is often said to be compatible with places, experiences, and consumption when it is, at its heart, about people — from the restaurants propped up by locals to vacation rentals that displace them due to rising rent prices. “We are, so many of us, caught up in a machine that guides us to a destination that we didn’t necessarily choose. And we still struggle with even describing how the machine works,” wrote restaurant critic Soleil Ho last year, her words reverberating through 2024 and beyond. I don’t have a lot of wise words to add here, but I’ll leave you with something I have been thinking about for a decade: if we’re all clamouring to be first somewhere with a certain set of expectations, who benefits from this and who bears the loss?
Here’s what I’ve been consuming since the previous shelf care newsletter.
Books
I have been travelling with just one book and one notebook because I’m trying to cut down on my stationery packing because previously I have carried a box of pens and pencils and my many notebooks, just in case I catch a writing anxiety. So I’m slowly savouring (new to me because I inhale my words) Kitchen by Banana Yashimoto, which is intriguing to say the least. I might come back home with more books than I started with because my sister and brother-in-law have promised to take me to a nearby second-hand bookstall. Exciting days ahead!
Words wide web
I have been doing plenty of reading on my laptop! A fun fact about me is that I hate reading anything and writing emails on my phone because I’m secretly 80 years old. Nothing wrong with that at all. Thoughts on climate and heat led me to this piece on how restaurant employees are fighting back against heat stress in kitchens. Four pieces on how AI is exhausting power grids and destroying all of our lives in the process. Stripping away the pleasure of television by dumping whole seasons. After 17 years of litigation, banana empire Chiquita held liable for funding paramilitary abuse in Colombia. How condiments such as ketchup, mango pickle, piccalilli, and chile sauce were colonised in Early Modern Britain. Why every website started making content about Game of Thrones. Some of Virginia Woolf’s most savage insults. “Writing is about truth and connections, and restaurants are all about connections.” An absolutely stunning essay about a cousin and his death the author never knew.
Other newsletters
Devin Kate Pope with yet another stunner ‘The Catastrophe Already Happened’. I identified so much with Teresa Finney’s ‘The Kitchen Tasks in Front of Me’. Steph’s ‘Creepy Egg Guy’ essay is a tale of rage. I loved ‘Merenda: On Deserving’ by Margaux Vialleron. As I edit this newsletter. FFJ have come out with a no paywall (for a limited time) so you can listen to their latest essay ‘Meat: The Four Futures’. [Also become their premium subscriber, it’s completely worth it!] Trevor Warmedahl on a Sicilian cheese ‘Ragusano: Ecologies of raw milk cheese (part 1 of 3): The Modicana cow’. TW Lim’s ‘Competing with Denny’s’. Totally Recommend on ‘The Suffocation of Sézane’. Rachel Hendry on champagne being defined by celebration.
Cooking and eating
Eating out at an abnormal rate (for me). Standouts include ceviche, fried fish and rice, many strong coffees, mango cider and rice lager, croissants, dosais, nectarines at 6 am, birthday cake(!!), an excellent chicken and spinach quiche, gelato and sorbet, scrambled eggs, and deep-fried squid among other things. I’ll recount this gluttony in detail for my paid subscribers.
Writing
Nothing of note. I’ll just recap what I’ve published lately:
Watching/Listening to
Listened to Fleetwood Mac’s discography throughout the entirety of my travels. Watching lots of Tamil television with my sister, which we always do when we get together.
Would love to know what you’ve been reading, browsing, thinking, and listening to!