Loren Goodman, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature, Underwood International College Among several words and taste buds one of the things on the tip of my tongue as I fly back from Seoul to New York is food. I bring oranges, soy beans, and carrots to balance out the greasy plastic airline meals served in plastic with plastic utensils. Sitting next to me is an older Czech gentleman. He orders Ginger Ale with every meal. I have one too, then water. I love Korean food, but I've got two things on my mind: poetry and American food (pizza, tacos, steak) and I'm looking forward to an American-style feast. I arrive in Brooklyn at 1 am and eat my first meal in America: beef ribs from the Italian restaurant next door. Dark and stewed, two bricks of meat. "Same as Korean food, eh?" my host jokes. It's fantastic. I don't know why, but this tastes better than anything I've eaten in a long time. Though I'm not hungry it makes me want to eat more. All week we chow down: waffles, pancakes, submarine sandwiches, salmon steaks, pizza, burgers, Mexican corn, burritos. Good stuff everything I've been dreaming of. My last night, I suggest going back for those Italian ribs again. I can't get them out of my mind. Unfortunately, my host's girlfriend has other ideas. "I thought you might want to try something else," she says, "so I made reservations for us at Raw." Next stop: Raw, for my first raw vegan meal. There are many choices on the menu. Everyone eating there looks like a model or an actor. "Look at their eyes," says my host's girlfriend, "they're so vibrant that comes from eating raw foods." On the menu I see "Good for Liquidarians." "Liquidarians?" I ask. "It refers to people who consume no solids, only juices." My host's girlfriend says she's been juicing a lot lately. "Don't say that at the all-natural body building championships." "Juicing is good for rapid absorption in the blood stream." "Then why have teeth?" I order soup and a "hamburger."What arrives may be said to resemble or signify a hamburger, though the "meat" is the size of a pocket watch. The bun, you ask? Buckwheat slabs that look and taste like drywall. The theory at work: don't kill the food; don't break the bonds that hold it together at the microscopic level. Hence, no heat. Preserve the life force of the food. Anyone considering cryogenic preservation will understand this. Maintain the life force of the food: if it's cooked, eat it hot from the oven; if it's meat, eat it fresh from the kill. This makes sense. Conversely, when you eat food from a can sitting on a shelf, you're eating that dark, inert energy. Everyone who has been served a cold or microwaved meal should hold Descartes personally responsible. The raw vegan hamburger is crazy with flavor. It tastes extremely salty/sour. I keep saying, "This is weird! This is weird!"After the meal my mouth remains activated. According to my host's girlfriend, we eat unhealthy food not because we like the way it tastes, but because we've become habituated. We don't really enjoy the food — we enjoy the memories associated with eating that food in the past. I have no memories of eating raw vegan food, so my body doesn't know how to process it. It's a bit unsettling and stimulating. On the way back, we talk. "According to Ayurvedic medicine, all flavors should be present in every dish." I say I encountered a similar idea in Japan that every meal should contain 31 different types of food (or was that Baskin Robbins?). "It is best to eat with the hands," she goes on, "as some of the food is absorbed through your fingers." Maybe that's why I've always liked eating with my hands. It just feels better. She continues: "Food produced with love and care tastes better and is better for you. Why is cow's milk so good for you? Because it is produced lovingly with inspiration within the body of the mother cow to nurture her calf. When the cow is penned in, shot up with hormones, and without child, the resulting milk is quite different." Later that night, I sneak back to the Italian restaurant and order the ribs again. I order the exact same rib dish, and it's completely different: one rib (not two), undercooked, little or no flavor. The first time I had the ribs, they were provided by my local host, when the restaurant was about to close, out of communal sympathy for a tired traveler. The second time, I bought them after eating, a gluttonous stranger.