I can't help myself but I am completely obsessed with Jim Harrison. There's a non-fiction piece of his called Wild Creatures: A Correspondence with Gerard Oberle that consists of letters between Jim and Gerard - Gerard is a french chef and great friends with Jim and Jim is of course the amazing writer. They have a lovely dynamic which is mostly just bragging to eachother about who hunts and eats where and what.. Here's a part that I loved from one of Jim's letters:
"I think I told you that I finished my novella The Beast God Forgot to
Invent. Anyway, I've begun another that deals with the captious and
banal aspects of success called I Forgot to go to Spain. In there my
hero questions if food and cooking are not one of the last vestiges of
true freedom for modern man? A la Foucault, nearly all of us eat zoo
food in the zoo we are confined in by society and culture. In modern
America we are pigs eating a confined diet determined by the economic
powers of our society. True varieties of food become more limited
because they are not as profitable for the grocery industry, what you
yourself refer to as "industrial" food, whereas the true food is what
we bought at the market in Moulin. Fast food is zoo food."
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Jim Harrison is such a treasure. While visiting my family in Michigan, I recently revisited "The Theory and Practice of Rivers", a book of his poetry that was published about 20 years age. Definitely worth checking out. He's really an overlooked poet, novelist and foodie (plus, he reminds me of my father in MI).
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