I’m not saying I don’t appreciate a nice meal. I’m saying that the human equipment—and the delightful, unusual people who study it—are at least as interesting as the photogenic arrangements we push through it. Yes, men and women eat meals. But they also ingest nutrients. They grind and sculpt them into a moistened bolus that is delivered, via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into a tubular leach field, where it is converted into the most powerful taboo in human history. Lunch is an opening act.
