There's a lot of surprising things I have heard of about the academia, but I would like to know how food exactly fits in the all-encompassing theories in a study?
Not a food historian. Nor do I spend time of the history of cuisine. But some books on the practicality of food technology, like how meals could be cheaply produced, prepared, and organized for soldiers after the Industrial Revolution, clearly had an impact on the formation of professionally mobilized and regimented armies.
Since the topic of English(speaking) literati has come up, could I ask an offtopic question (if not, just ignore this post)? What is your opinion on Henry Mencken?
That depends on the two faces of Mencken we're talking about and how he relates to me. Mencken was a genuine conservative in America - I use that term in its proper philosophical and political philosophical context, unlike most "conservatives" today. To that end, and as a critic of the New Deal and the mechanical world of hedonistic economics that it would usher in, I find him on point. But in comparison to figures like Swift and Huxley, Mencken is rather flat.
His satire, comparatively speaking, is somewhat crude and nothing particularly insightful that older generation of literary critics hadn't already said. In lampooning the materialistic, hedonistic, and mathematical-scientistic philosophy of his era in the Laputans, Swift was far and away more insightful about the damages of embracing that kind of worldview would do to us as humans. The Laputans can't see straight (get it?
), they can't do routine tasks anymore and so have servants to do the tasks that humans had long done on their own, and the Laputans are nothing more than sex craved hedonists - especially the Laputan women. And to deal with their problems, floating overhead, they just hurl rocks down upon the naughties! Man, kind of like what modern Western countries do a lot today if you understand the connection I'm making here!
Huxley, of course, builds from Swift in his criticism of this mechanical and sterile way of life in Brave New World which is equally profound and brilliant, seeing the sterile artificiality and mass hedonism and nihilism as the end state of the revolution of Francis Bacon. So Mencken's opposition to materialistic economism and its parasitic like lifestyle that it would produce is already said by a contemporary of his in a book that will live through the ages and by another literati more than 200 years earlier.
Thus, comparatively, Mencken isn't particularly deep in my mind. Professionally, I'll reference, directly or indirectly, Swift, Huxley, Orwell, Steinbeck, and others. I won't reference Mencken. Mencken sits in a personal library.
As a master of modern English prose, however, Mencken is quite superb. And he was king of the one-liners. But as a writer and thinker of the human condition I think Mencken was seriously lacking. Which is why he is not in the same pantheon as other English literati. A timely critic and master of early 20th century American English he was. But that's about it. And certainly we don't need to go down the road any further here about my interdisciplinary work with literati and literature; whether English, German, or Russian.
Great to see you around GM! Always good to see a familiar name drop in from time to time!
By all means drop me a PM in due course, would love to meet up if the stars align.
You can count it.