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"Justin Case" is the pseudonym of my paranoid research assistant who lives thousands of miles away but is still freaked out by this blog. Anyway, Justin is hopping mad about what he considers my sloppy reporting of "the Leon Kass ice cream quote." He thinks the quote needs expansion. Great! More musings about ice cream from the guy who wants to stop cloning. How do I get talked into this stuff anyway?
As I said earlier, it's a real drag when I make a mistake and to have to go through this kind of crap again, but here is the original ice cream quote, which I found on the Internet, and used in what I thought was its entirety:
Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior."
Nothing wrong there; it's just that there's much more in between the little dot dot dots. Here's the whole quote:
Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone --a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many reader, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America's rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing traditions -- their reasons long before forgotten -- that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners. To cite one small example: yawning with uncovered mouth. Not just the uneducated rustic but children of the cultural elite are now regularly seen yawning openly in public (not so much brazenly or forgetfully as indifferently and "naturally"), unaware that it is an embarrassment to human self-command to be caught in the grip of involuntary bodily movements (like sneezing, belching, and hiccuping and even the involuntary bodily display of embarrassment itself, blushing). But eating on the street -- even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat -- displays in fact precisely such lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one's food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty. This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior."
Are you hungry? Is your stomach growling? I am running late and I have to leave right now!!
Just about ready to start a big road trip.
I'm hungry too!
Forgive me! I have a lot to be ashamed about, and I have barely started. (The irony here is that I am a polite person, and I really don't think I needed Dr. Kass's lecture, which in my view fully justifies Howard Stern antics.)
Posted by Eric at July 28, 2003 04:55 AM