SC - Regarding atypical "meats"

[Heitman]

I haven't had the time to read the list recently due to finals but I came
across these charming quotes in a book called "The City in History" that I
thought many of the people on this list would quite appreciate.

"Color and design were everywhere in the normal accompaniment of the daily
tasks.  The array of goods in the open market added to the general visual
excitement: velvets and brocades, copper and shining steel, tooled leather and
brilliant glass, to say nothing of foods arranged in their panniers under the
open sky.  Wander around the survivals of these medieval markets today! 
Whether they be as drab as the Sunday market in Whitechapel, as spacious as
that on the Plain Palais at Geneva, or as handsomely entrhoned as the Straw
Market in Florence, they still have some of the human delight of their medieval
prototypes.  The plastic coated automation of the American supermarket, with
its ghastly fluorescent lighting, its meretricious packaging, its cunningly
baited booby traps ('impulse buying'), its poisonous forms of preservative
antisepsis, its frozen and flavorless foods in their artfully arrested decay,
presents a contrast that betrays both an esthetic and a physiological as well
as a social loss." (p 298)
The author's condemnation of the modern supermarket particularly reminded me of
Lord Ras's condemnation of modern healthy eating and replacing tasty things
like butter or olive oil with yuckies like margarine . . . 

"Life flourishes in this dilation of the senses.  Without it, the beat of the
pulse is slower, the tone of the muscles is lower, the posture lacks
confidcence, the finer discriminations of the eye and the touch are lacking,
perhaps the will to live itself is defeated.  To starve the eye, the ear, the
skin, the nose is just as much to court death as to withold food from the
stomach." (289-299)

Mumford, Lewis.  "The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and
Its Prospects"  Harcourt Brace 1989   0-15-618035-9

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