Godforsaken | The Spectator

Dearborn beloved

Americans will drive anywhere, but only immigrants will drive eight hours for groceries. Our community of Syrians and Lebanese trek from western Pennsylvania to Dearborn, Michigan, where a handful of small Levantine groceries sell ingredients too obscure for a Rust Belt supermarket: Cortas rose water, Al Wadi tahini, bags of dried wildflowers for zhourat tea. Eight hours round-trip by the Ohio turnpike, Dearborn is my family’s culinary refuge, and home to America’s largest population of Arab Americans. Henry Ford, also an advocate of driving, was born here on the family farm. The burgeoning auto industry attracted Arabs from the Levant, and Ford gave his employees healthcare, English classes and a trade school.

Christopher Snowdon

Don’t listen to the health fascists — drink up

It was always likely that once the killjoys had done their work on smoking they would turn their attention to alcohol. Sure enough, with the Dietary Guideline Advisory Committee going through its twice-a-decade revision of what, and how much, Americans ought to be eating and drinking in order to look after their health, drinking alcohol is being subjected to the same demonization process that was once applied to smoking tobacco. There is a campaign to lower safe drinking limits in the US, in the same way that they have been lowered in other countries. Worse, there is pressure to eliminate altogether the concept of a ‘safe level’ of alcohol consumption — and make out that every drop brings a drinker a little closer to his or her demise.

Roger Kimball

Ports for any storm

Just as tastes in female beauty have differed widely through the ages — take a comparative glance at the damsels Rubens featured with those of Botticelli (I leave the Venus of Willendorf out of account) — so, too, does the taste in wine vary through the ages. The British critic George Saintsbury was a giant in the field of literary scholarship. He was also an avid apologist for wine, and his Notes on a Cellar-Book (1920) is a classic in the literature of wine writing. A modern reader, however, cannot help but be struck by the prominent place given to wines that have fallen out of favor today, especially such fortified wines as sherry, Madeira and port.

Jane Stannus

In the soup

Ah, autumn, season of mists and mellow soupfulness, as the poet Keats didn’t quite say. In southern England, where Keats was inspired to write his famous ode to summer’s red-and-golden aftermath, fall mists may stick around all day; but in New England, they burn off with the morning sun, giving way late in the day to heady breezes that blow clean through the soul. It was Geoffrey Chaucer who brought the word autumn into the English language. As sure as ‘Aprill with his shoures soote’ leads ‘folk to goon on pilgrimages’, so October cries out for vigorous outdoor activity followed by autumnal soup.

Food & Drink