
My post-cultural-studies mind can't even handle what I got in the mail from Sarah. Plush Wiener Schnitzel and french fries of felt. Simulacrum of food have fascinated me for a while, from the immediate post-undergrad days when I bought Julie a fake doughnut "sculpture" that she kept on her desk and which confounded her co-workers for months at a time. But this confounds me. What should I do with it? Leave it on the dining room table for a while? As a non-meat-eater, it has a particularly strong
something for me. One would never confuse this with real food, but somehow it feels like it's veering into the territory of the
Unheimlich, in being a useless, permanent representation of something fundamentally useful and impermanent. And I do love french fries. *L
p.s. It was made in Germany, not America, so take that, Eco & Baudrillard.