What’s in My Bag

A note up top: I wrote about homemade dog food—a pet (pun intended) obsession of mine now—for Wired. I spoke to a veterinary nutritionist, Marion Nestle, and homemade dog food recipe developers for the piece, and found a whole lineage of food writers who have written about feeding companion animals. I will go more in depth in the newsletter soon on precisely how I make Benny’s food and why I came to these conclusions; every dog is different. If you’d like to talk more about reported essays—how to pitch and how to approach the research, whether short or long—the workshop is tomorrow!

Dante keeps coming up in my life: I watched the horrible In the Hand of Dante, of course (I’m a Schnabel film fan, ok); a personal essay workshop student likened the structure of one of our readings to Inferno (about which I took an entire semester-long class in college and want to revisit); and in the forthcoming To Taste: On Cooking and the Good Life, author (and philosopher) Scott Samuelson writes that “our most powerful businesses embody Dante’s image of Satan.” I can’t quote more than that from a galley, but it’s been an interesting moment to think about overconsumption as a spiraling hell from which there’s no escape as heat waves rage and kill.

Leave it to me to talk about hell while trying to write about what’s in my bag!

I sometimes feel like I’m wildly bougie, but I also don’t consume enough to make any algorithm happy. There are people who will tell you all that they’ve tried on a weekly basis; they will create roundups of the “July favorites” and “new empties.” These types of things overwhelm me on a nervous system level. They overwhelm me conceptually. They are, to further beat the oddly chosen thematic anchor of this blog, a personal hell.

All my skincare and beauty products have been the same for years. I even use the same pens and notebooks all the time, with some light variation here and there. I read, perhaps excessively and certainly enthusiastically, but I recoil at the idea of turning that into some sort of quantified endeavor. I shiver at the idea of performing a front-facing camera review.

Wine, I guess. Wine is what I consume enough of, but I just try to give a recommendation once per month.

Summer Essay Workshops in July and August: personal, reported (TOMORROW!), and cultural criticism. These will be presentations followed by discussions, and the different months have different reading lists. Each has three essays to read—no food included, a mix of old and new. Choose day or evening sessions. We’re really having fun in these talking about our questions, concerns, and processes for approaching essay.

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The Food Essay returns in the fall. You can also book a private consultation or get my workshop downloads.

Anyway, none of this is that new. If you don’t constantly buy or try new things or go to grand places, you realize quickly that you’re going to be left behind by the content-churning machine. As Benny is still in treatment and I’m working in the background on quite a few long-term projects—as well as a new issue of Tomato Tomato!—I hope you’ll indulge me in some Light Summer Blogging.

In the name of Light Summer Blogging, I will tell you about all the things I carry around when I leave the house. These do not change based on anything. They are my seven evergreen needs and wants, based on decades of trial and error (i.e., being alive)—the things I require for a heavenly existence. Members, let’s discuss yours in today’s Weekly Salon in the Tomato Tomato Discord at 3 p.m. EST.

1.

Pens. I overconsume pens. I admit this in On Eating, probably very clearly out of agitation because I once got an email from a reader about my wasteful habit. To which I say: I’m a vegetarian apartment dweller who doesn’t own a car; let me have my pens.

Our local Marshalls had a short run last year during which they kept getting in packs of Le Pen in various shades, and—like when I bought three Mauviel 1830 pots there for very much under market value—I felt that it was my duty as a pen connoisseur to give them the best possible home. This was also the case when the same store had Leuchtturm1917 notebooks, though I’m a Baron Fig cahier loyalist, and when they’ve had candles by Diptyque and Maison Margiela: Clearly, these things were on the shelves for me personally.

Where once I only used black felt tip pens, I have taken to underlining books and writing lists and taking notes in a whole variety of colors. Anyway, there are many memes about the role of Marshalls in Puerto Rico and I could write a book-length essay on the subject.