A fat one of Riesling, tostados, a tin of Spanish mussels. I’m a vegan in a bar, unthinking sessile bivalves & making list of anorexia metaphors (their figuration: gossamer thin, what if they were to disappear? become invisible?) Towards an ethical literature of anorexia, I engage in small acts of self-redaction. 

My therapist wants me to explain my boots. (They are actually woven from the tar of oil sands by Portuguese craftsmen who, decades ago, worked leather. I imagine fathers teaching them to grapple skin. I smell their father’s chests. I could live on the fumes of a Portuguese tannery, c1976. Now I’ve reduced them to this. Now Portugal will probably leave the EU, emasculated.) They eat terribly in the Algarve. As Simone Weil said: capitalism is an ethical famine.

Except she didn’t. I just feel the need to quote Weil, a referential hunger. Alice Gregory argues writing about this is hard because it is, fundamentally, boring. She’s right. But it’s not hard hard like making pangratatto by running a toothbrush over cold toast. Chefs now say they have a philosophy of food, which I guess makes me an epistemologist. What is it like? They ask. Just imagine a pitcher of oil pools o’er every plate. It’s forked logic.