An oldie but goodie today on the occasion of a new edition of 
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin‘s The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, translated by M.F. K. Fisher and with a new introduction by Bill Buford, from Everyman’s Library. This book has never been out of print since it was first published in 1825, and it’s not hard to see why. What follows is one of Brillat-Savarin’s “Aphorisms of the Professor: To Serve as A Preamble to His Work and as A Lasting Foundation for the Science of Gastronomy.” Let it suffice to say that it took me far longer to choose which one of the twenty to pick for this post than it took me to type it out. And yet it is brilliant. Run out and buy this book immediately (and I never say that).
VII: The pleasures of the table are for every man, of every land, and no matter what place in history or society; they can be a part of all his other pleasures, and they last the longest, to console him when he has outlived the rest.
I love Savarin’s invention of the “10th muse.”
there’s a new book out about how cooking is what really sets humankind apart from other species and how the fact that we spend less energy digesting helps us to use more to think. I heard a bit on NPR but missed the title…