When I was an undergraduate, our university operated on a semester basis, and required all lower-classmen to take a course during the Interim month of January. As the courses offered during that period were designed in part as a testing ground for future standard semester courses (‘experimental’), in part as cram-courses for catching up a missed class in compressed time or as courses that otherwise didn’t fit into the typical academic demands of a semester or involved travel, they tended to be highly desirable classes anyway, and I opted to continue my Interim studies during all four years of my undergrad education. It came in very handy in my senior year after I’d taken a whole semester of the previous year to travel in Europe (non-academically, but spending my school funds all the same) and really needed to finish school in 3-1/2 years rather than the full four to compensate.

But the real benefit of the system was that I got to take a delightful course somewhat off the beaten path of my degree each January. One year, it was ‘Chinese Conversation, Culture and Cuisine‘–a supremely entertaining class team-taught by two brilliant New York Jews and their Chinese grad student (the team in itself a refreshment in the midst of a perfectly fine ‘white-bread’ west coast Lutheran uni education). Two days a week, one or the other of our professors would lecture on Chinese history and culture, slipping in lots of anecdotal hijinks from their respective times studying in China; one day was a practicum devoted to classic Chinese cookery, and was needless to say the day of perpetual perfect attendance for and by all in that class, given how hungry undergraduates always are for good food; and one day was spent focusing on the development of Chinese written and spoken languages, with some rudimentary training in making Mandarin-like sounds and practicing the beautiful strokes of character calligraphy to accompany what the sounds should, at least, have meant, though I’ve no doubt that what we actually said translated as something much more in the comical-infant-to-international-crisis-causing range. One of the few things that’s stuck with me for all of the intervening years was learning that the proper greeting was not Howdy or Hey, Baby, but Have you eaten rice today? And of course, that is heart and soul of compassion and hospitality in any culture or language. Would that we all might operate more fully on the basis of that concern.All of this wisdom aside, I guess it’s hardly rare for anyone as food-obsessed as I am to generally forget to eat once in a while. Here it is already 18.00 hours and I haven’t eaten more than a handful of pistachios. And those, not recently. Tasty though they were, I imagine I might not be just dreaming that I could enjoy a slightly more substantial repast before long. But sometimes I think a little semi-fasting is not a bad thing, because it may, for example, begin to ameliorate any damage done to my innards, and any, erm, expansive qualities reflecting that internal damage in my out-ards, over certain recent holidays by a slightly over-enthusiastic or exaggerated sense of my capacious personage’s actual dietary needs. Also because, being frank here (though I generally prefer the name Frances/is, should anyone ask), a short period of partial abstemiousness only serves to enhance the pleasures of the simplest foods.

And that’s what I’ll have today: the simplest. A little fridge-cleaning bite while paused from a somewhat overweening stack-up of household chores left too long undone, messes unattended. But I can’t say that I’ve any objections at all to a little truly simple food goodness, so I shall indulge in that momentarily. I’ll leave you with some verses to chew upon until my return on the morrow. Bon appetit! Or as we say in my family, Vær så god. That’s far more appetizing, I’m sure, than what I would have said in Chinese, no matter how good my intentions.