It involves doing a face plant in clouds of takeout wrapping paper. Anyone watching you eat like this has no idea what you’re working on — we can’t  see through all the paper and foil. Usually it involves a burrito, but not always. All your audience knows is that you’re going in, coming up to chew, then going back in, and that you’re  breathing heavily through your nose while your cheeks gather skid marks of sauce and vegetable detritus. I give it zero out of five stars for style.

The first time I witnessed it I couldn’t help thinking, ‘You’re ramming that food down one hole until it comes out another.’ It’s that crass to watch.

Has anyone else noticed that people have stopped directly touching their food? Fear of germs and the rise of hand sanitizing gels have probably contributed to this. So did the necessary changes to environmental packaging standards, from Styrofoam boxes back to waxed paper. Remember this olde delivery systeme that gave you no choice but to directly pick up the contents?

McDonald’s Styrofoam Big Mac container, circa 1990

Back in the day when I ordered a McDonald’s cheeseburger (sans box, but with paper), I’d completely remove the damp sandwich from its yellow wrapper and chomp my way through, occasionally losing a plop or three of ketchup. Most times, though, it was too dry and too old to drip. Still, mess is the biggest reason why folks today don’t remove the wrapping on big production numbers like burritos. It would be like slicing open an intestine.

The Breakfast Burrito. There’s that cloud of paper!

Alien anyone?

But the trend is spreading. I’ve seen people refuse to touch “clean food” like granola bars (the dry ones, not the sticky honey or chocolate-coated ones). They eat them like toothpaste, by pushing the product up from the bottom of the wrapper until it’s safely in their mouth. And when it comes to burgers, they’re only half-unwrapping them, even at the table. They slowly push or peel the paper back until they’ve consumed the whole thing. Not once do they pick it up, feel the weight of it, engage with it. NEWSFLASH: ten minutes after posting this, I got a message from my friend, Carolyn. She had a Whopper at Burger King last night and said it’s now being served in a half wrapper inside the box. “I only touched the burger when it became absolutely necessary,” she said.

This is not a diss against junk food. It’s just that I’m all in favour of getting intimate with every hamburger I encounter. I like rolling up my sleeves in advance of the condiment stream down my arm.

Our relationship to food is sacred, or it should be. I’d just like to see us honouring this special occasion where our senses converge.

The naked hamburger

Being female never gets old.

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

Hat tip to DB Scott for posting this on his blog.

Photo: “Smoking Frieze” taken by my pal Keith Mulvihill, West 19th Street, NYC, January 3, 2012

Why should we use all of our creative power? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulations of [too many] objects and [too much] money.

Brenda Ueland

Window shopping this weekend I noticed a trend in wall hangings: large, white cardboard cutouts of the Canadian provinces, especially the trio of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

It got me thinking: if you only bought Saskatchewan, no one would know what the rectangle on your wall signified.

Cartography is a human invention, an act of civilization. That got me thinking even more.

Weather shapes human behaviour and self-expression. We often  talk of southern cultures and northern, and expressly seek out the sun and warm breezes of southern climes to loosen up and relax.

But I often wonder how cartography shapes us. In other words, does how we chop up what nature has served up (mountains, lakes and plains) affect how we model our own realities?

Did the grid pattern of ancient land surveyors, for example, forever stamp the imagination of its settlers?

The midwest in Canada and the US is often criticized for being so straight-laced and fixed in its thinking, especially during political campaigns. Distance from port cities where there’s an easy exchange of ideas and goods can explain the midwest mindset, in part …

But does your overall shape affect your self-image too?

Imagine hailing from a box!

Nineteenth-century surveyors could have arbitrarily drawn a kink or two in Saskatchewan’s or Wyoming’s borders. But no. Straight arrows all. When there’s nothing in the landscape to go around, does that still the mind or numb the imagination?

And what of the countries or states that defy or were denied division by grid? Like Norway or the Netherlands.

Do craggy coastlines and cockeyed counties make for more squirrely inhabitants?

Today: Ahhhh.

©AGJ on Sketches and Picnik. Thanks, MGM, for the shot of Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain.

I haven’t met Bacon, yet, but I have stood close enough to Robert Kennedy Jr. to study the parrots on his tie and ask him questions about growing up Kennedy. He said when he was a kid his mom would send him outside when he complained of feeling sick. “She thought the sun cured everything.”

I noticed he wore the parrot tie again in a photo shoot for New York Magazine:

(Photo: Jason Schmidt)

I’ve also sat beside the late great Dame Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop. She smelled like vanilla. I asked her tons of questions about her human rights activism as she squeezed my arm red to emphasize the changes that were needed in the world. I liked her immediately and I miss her influence.

Later, stuffed in a back room with Paris Hilton, the heiress stretched her arms up over her head half way through our interview and squealed out a yawn before telling me, “I have to pee.” Was it something I said?

When I met the lithe Liz Hurley, she scanned me from top to bottom and remarked in a plummy accent, “Good God, you’re tall. Are you Dutch?” I’m not, and we sat down for a nice lunch and a chat about Hugh Grant. He lives down the street from her in London, and is god father to her son. Frankly, I think they’ve been married in spirit since they first laid eyes on each other.

When I met my writing hero Gay Talese, he had me at hello.

(Photo: Joyce Tenneson)

Gay smiled at me, just like he’s doing in the picture above, then asked me my name. “Alison,” I replied, with a grin so wide you would have thought two coat hangers were pulling back the corners of my mouth.”And your last name?” he asked. “Wait! Don’t tell me,” he interjected. “You”ll probably change it!” — like I was about to get married, or something. I ended up talking with New York’s biggest flirt about the challenges of the writing life, being an editor at Elle and what it was like to be so tall.

Back when I was an art historian, I shared a desk at the Smithsonian with Alex Nemerov, the nephew of legendary photographer,  Diane Arbus (Nicole Kidman played her in a 2006 film). Alex kept nudging me, saying I was space hog with my books and papers and once left me a sweet note with a volume on “Manifest Destiny” to make his point. Today he’s an art history professor at Yale.

Diane Arbus, “Identical Twins,” Roselle, New Jersey, 1967

Years later, I spent an afternoon with actor Peter Keleghan that was just plain silly. I loved every minute of the interview and photo shoot with the star of The Newsroom, Made in Canada and most recently 18-to-Life. No one, except maybe Alec Baldwin, is as good as Keleghan at playing vain and fatuous characters. He even played one on Seinfeld.

“Wait, I gotta get the lint off.” (Photo: Evan Dion)

Three weeks ago, when I was in New York, I had dinner with a friend who had lunch the week before with Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, and his wife Anne Wojcicki. My friend is a neuroscientist specializing in Parkinson’s research and Wojcicki is the founder of 23andMe, a genetic testing company funded in part by Google. Brin is looking to genomics for a cure for Parkinson’s. His mother has the disease and so may he one day.

Unlike my friend, I haven’t met Brin. Yet. But maybe, just maybe, I can write my way towards him.

That’s the beauty of journalism.

Maybe a fancy border will help

Nope

That’s kinda nice …

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