Because this is the way it is, I am reading the Tin House summer reading issue [Vol. 7, No. 4] now. This is Lydia Davis from Eating Fish Alone:
I love fish, but many fish should not be eaten anymore, and it has become difficult to know which fish I can eat. I carry with me in my wallet a little folding list put out by the National Audubon Society that advises which fish to avoid, which fish to eat with caution, and which fish to eat freely. When I eat with other people I do not take this list out of my wallet, because it is not much fun to have dinner with someone who takes a list like this out of her wallet before she orders. I simply manage without it, though usually I can remember only that I should not eat farmed salmon, or wild salmon, except for wild Alaskan salmon, which is never on the menu.
But when I am alone, I take out my list. No one will imagine, from a nearby table, that this list is what I am looking at. The trouble is, most kinds of fish on restaurant menus are not fish one can eat freely. Some fish one cannot eat at all, ever, and other fish one many eat only if they come from the right place or are caught in the right way. I don’t try to ask the waitress how the fish is caught, but I often ask where the fish is from. She usually does not know. This means that no one else has asked her that evening — either no one else is interested, or some are not interested and others know the answer already. If the waitress does not know the answer, she goes away to ask the chef, and then comes back with an answer, though it is usually not the one that I was hoping to hear.
Something else — and the whole thing! — from Lydia Davis about food and eating is still online courtesy of Fence Magazine. Lydia Davis’s re-imagination of Franz Kafka’s preparations for a romantic dinner: Kafka Cooks Dinner.