Warning: This Post is NOT About Food

Dear Turkey,

If you were me yesterday or the day before, you would appreciate a warning on all of my other posts that said: Warning: This Post IS About Food, since looking at pictures of food was, for once, not my idea of fun.

Now that I'm all better (Dear rest of my family: I am SO sorry. On the bright side, at least we weren't all sick at the same time so I can do your laundry and stuff), I still want to tell you something. And, if you think about it, it is kind of about food, especially if you are me.

So there is this thing called Moby Dick Big Read. It's from a British university. Every day for 136 days, they released audio (along with artwork) of one chapter of Moby Dick (they're all done but the audio/artwork is still available). Some of the readers are famous (like the Prime Minister), and some are not. Their whole argument is that Moby Dick is the greatest American novel, but nobody reads it.

I read Moby Dick before, in college, and I loved it. But, listening to a few chapters a week while I pump breast milk at work, I REALLY love it. And, this is my new favorite part (you'll see why). If you really read it, I think it will surprise you, because Melville is so awesome, and he has surprised me tons of times:


But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s bow. The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from foreign parts.

Listen to the whole chapter here.

Image Courtesy of Moby Dick Big Read: Scrimshaw 2012 by Jonny Hannah

And, really it is all about food in the end, even for Melville:

When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter’s lance, the mother’s pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolor the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries.

I guess someone who wrote her MA thesis about Childbirth Motifs: Sacred and Profane would be into that.

I moss you,
Tofu