Food

by Gertrude Stein

Sadder than salad.

From apples to artichokes, these glittering, fragmented, painterly portraits of food by the avant-garde pioneer Gertrude Stein are redolent of sex, laughter and the joy of everyday life.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Nonfiction, Modern Classics, 20th Century, Essays, Food

55 pages, Paperback

Published February 22, 2018

About the author

Gertrude Stein was an American writer who spent most of her life in France, and who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. Her life was marked by two primary relationships, the first with her brother Leo Stein, from 1874-1914, and the second with Alice B. Toklas, from 1907 until Stein's death in 1946. Stein shared her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, first with Leo and then with Alice. Throughout her lifetime, Stein cultivated significant tertiary relationships with well-known members of the avant garde artistic and literary world of her time.

Reviews

[Eloise Mcallister · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book sounded nice read aloud because it has rhythm, but it genuinely feels as though a random word generator used an algorithm to make something that sounds like the good shit, but actually its kind of just shit?

[Lisa (NY) · Rating 2 out of 5]

[2+] Although incoherent, these poems are almost appealing. They make no sense - but then I read them in the morning with a cup of coffee. They should be read while very, very high - preferably aloud with a group of artists in a Paris salon circa 1915. I imagine them giggling with delight at the way words shimmer and glow even when randomly strung together. "Cold coffee with a corn a corn yellow and green mass is a gem."

Penguin Modern Classics
#1 - Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr.
#2 - Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber by Allen Ginsberg
#3 - The Breakthrough by Daphne Du Maurier
#4 - The Custard Heart by Dorothy Parker
#5 - Three Japanese Short Stories (3 authors)
#6 - The Veiled Woman by Anais Nin
#7 - Notes on Nationalism by George Orwell
#8 - Food by Gertrude Stein

[Marjolein (UrlPhantomhive) · Rating 1 out of 5]

I mistook the table of content for a poem and the sad thing is, it would have been the best poem by far.

[Liam O'Leary · Rating 1 out of 5]

THE LOWEST RATED BOOK ON GOODREADS!
Here's why!
—
(Original Review)
In attempting to write about Food, Gertrude Stein expresses its derivative.

There are lower ratings, but not for serious books by acclaimed authors. This book need not exist. I doubt there is a single soul on earth who would hold this to their heart and say 'this is my favourite book'.

I have no idea how I will make a video review on something this unremarkably incoherent but I've made my proposition already for to make reviews for all 50 Penguin Moderns. Video review coming soon.

[Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gertrude Stein was the world's most experimental rapper

[xKarenina · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can barely put into words my feelings towards this book / collection of short essays / poetry? / disturbance. Maybe I am too dumb to get it (which is truly possible and in that case please forgive me). I could not even finish this. It reads like a mentally ill person was asked to just write it off. Yes, this might be a genius way of not writing proper sentences. I cannot digest it. At all.

[ink · Rating 1 out of 5]

Do not pick up this book or waste your time; this review will give you more reasons why than the low rating.

This book is fucking weird. I read it in about 15 minutes because I was really curious why it had such a low rating. Leaving it DNFed was a large possibility. I think the author really just wrote an eligible paragraph then replaced the words with food/other nouns. The whole book looks something like this:

Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot. This makes it art and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet.

Right before I reached the ending... I stumbled upon this big fat cowshit...

It was a time when in the acres in late there was a wheel that shot a burst of land and needless are ni**ers and a sample...

now, I'm the one who censored the word... perhaps this book was written in a century where it was okay for people to say this word openly and slavery was the new cool trend in the European trending list of white-nonesense.com. Or the author is just racist? I mean, there's no other "way" of saying this word. It was racist back then, and it's racist now, and it's racist tomorrow and all the days after.

I'm done.

[Andy Hickman · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Food” by Gertrude Stein
Brilliant manual on SEX cleverly disguised as essays on food.
The back cover describes this book as ‘redolent of sex’ .. seriously? Yeah, right! What a bunch of baloney. You have to be looking really really hard with that particular lens to find anything like that.
It also describes it is ‘fragmented’, well even scrambled eggs have distinct ingredients and discernible flavours.
This book is dry toast, or to imitate Stein’s style: ‘dry toast in the toast dull dry and so and dry toast in the chew choke and spew.’
The title needs a more honest subtle adjustment: “FOOL” because that’s the only person who’ll get anything out of this.
I give this book a single star rating. Penguin would be better off collecting all these Goodreads reviews into a booklet, that’d sell much better.
Why did I click on 5 red stars?
They’re my five sequential red “STOP” signs warning the reader to brake or detour before driving into Dullsville and getting car-jacked by a corncob to the brain

[Joe Maggs · Rating 2 out of 5]

My first foray into reading anything avant-garde and maybe this a bad example, maybe it’s just not my style, maybe the second half of Ryanair flight FR2799 from Riga to Bristol is not the place this should be experienced, but I genuinely couldn’t make any sense of this, and I’ve read some seriously inaccessible stuff. The blurb promises portraits of food invoking sex, laughter and the joy of everyday life, but the content failed to deliver for me. Plus 1 star for it being at least in part flowing to read.

[Peter · Rating 1 out of 5]

A cacophony of words best describes this aimless drivel, a miasma of incoherent word noise with no structure. There is no skill in this writing at all.

Why did someone feel this writer needs publishing.

[Saru · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe the beauty of this book lies in its nonsense. It seems just the flow of thoughts related to food, hard to understand but we cannot understand each book we read, let alone know what each writer wants to convey.

[marcel✧.* · Rating 1 out of 5]

like i have so many questions

[Caz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wonderfully incomprehensible. Food walked so that why's it called an oven when you of in the cold food of out hot eat the food could also walk

[Nicole · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ik snap wel waarom dit boek de slechtste rating op goodreads heeft

[Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't know what the hell this was. Given the subject matter, it would be appropriate to call it word salad in about as literal a sense as possible (without it being actual salad, of course) – as if someone grabbed a series of vaguely food-related words and plopped them onto a plate and called it poetry.

Except, in my experience, poetry is actually trying to say something, and this is saying nothing. It's stream of consciousness gibberish, a waste of the time it takes to read and the energy it takes process.

[C.W. Bryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is incredibly fun to read : ) it would be a foolish endeavor to even begin to understand these poems from a syntactical perspective but god damn do the modernists know how to have fun

[Kirsty · Rating 1 out of 5]

Food by Gertrude Stein is the eighth book in the Penguin Moderns series. 'From apples to artichokes, these glittering, fragmented, painterly portraits of food by the avant-garde pioneer Gertrude Stein are redolent of sex, laughter and the joy of everyday life', proclaims the book's blurb.

I shall begin this rather negative review by pointing out that I have not read much Stein before, save for a few fragmented pieces. Despite loving modernism as a genre, I have found those extracts of Stein's which I have come across quite hard work to read, and a couple of them have been almost impenetrable. Food was therefore one of the books which I was looking forward to least in the Penguin Moderns collection, despite loving food and food writing.

Food was first published in Tender Buttons in 1914 and, I imagine, was just as unintelligible then as it proves to be now. Clearly Stein was pioneering in her use of language, but I do not enjoy repetitive sentences like those which fill this book, some of which appear say nothing whatsoever, and others which go on and on far longer than is necessary. From the essay on 'Roast Beef', for instance, Stein writes: 'There is no use there is no use at all in smell, in taste, in teeth, in toast, in anything, there is no use at all and the respect is mutual'.

Collected here are a series of highly meandering essays, some of which are more like lists, and others which seem to evade their titular subject entirely. If this book had not been so short, I definitely would have stopped reading it quite early on, and it was definitely a source of irritation to me as it reached its end; it has been the first Penguin Modern which I have not enjoyed in the slightest. Food has, however, done one very positive thing; it has confirmed entirely that Stein is not for me.

[Fiona · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars??? - I really do not (for the life of me) know how to rate this read.

An extremely experimental writing style that breaks the boundaries of traditional writing. As the title suggests, the theme is centered around food, though it definitely reaches further and touches upon life, etc. as well.

WHAT I LOVED:
More than anything, I loved the way the words flowed when I read them. How they sounded. How they almost had a melody, a certain rhythm even, the way they were paired together. This would be an excellent book for reading out loud because it all sounds so beautiful in your ears.

WHAT I DISLIKED:
Sometimes I would read a whole page and be like.. "what did I just read? What is this even supposed to mean?". A lot of times, it seemed like Stein was simply choosing random words that sounded good together and merely stacking them onto each other.

[Nayantara · Rating 3 out of 5]

As they say, expectations will only let you down.
I was expecting Gertrude Stein's "Food" to be full of descriptions of food- beautiful, evocative passages on food. But I didn't get what I wanted. Instead, she painted abstract portraits of food. The feeling of food, or the image we conjure up in our heads when we think about food. Associations, memories and hints.
This was not an easy read at all. It was the sort of poetry that forces you to reflect. There are instances where Stein just seems to write gibberish. Personally, gibberish isn't gibberish to me. I felt there is meaning behind all that. I might dare to drag automatism into this. Quite a relevant read, this.

[Beatrizmallow · Rating 1 out of 5]

This feels like a collection of randomly chosen words, that do sound well together but if they have any meaning whatsoever it went completely over my head.

[Mell · Rating 1 out of 5]

I closed the book and immediately forgot about everything I just read and I praise the lord for that

[ines · Rating 1 out of 5]

i can’t believe i actually read the entire thing cause what the fuck was that

[erik · Rating 2 out of 5]

it was like she continuously pressed auto correct

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I guess this all comes down to a matter of taste -- zing! I personally could not put this book down and found it incredibly charming.

[Debo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nope. Absolutely not.
I really, really tried, y'all. But to get through this was SUCH a chore... Maybe it's me, maybe I'm too unintelligent to grasp this, but to me it reads as a chain of words, lacking connection. Especially connection to the topic of food. I dunno, y'all, this just wasn't it and made zero sense to me.

A sample:
RHUBARB
Rhubarb is susan not susan not seat in bunch toys not wild and laughable not in little places not in neglect and vegetable not in fold cold age not please.

WHAT ARE YOU SAYING, GERTRUDE?!?! KJWBSADCSJCUHWÖA

[Elena Alexa Theres · Rating 1 out of 5]

wtf

[Pascal Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

To me this is classic Stein. Nonsense nonsense. Im always liking a thing that will deconstruct all the other things around it. I think food is a really wonderful topic for Stein. I feel like it fits with her unconstruction of language. Food is such a constant in our lives and more than often a passive component of our lives. Like language. both are passive except when we decide for them to be active. I think thats is very fun and interesting that words and food can be nothing and disgusting and boring and that woods and food can be brilliant and magic and life changing. I think thats what this book is about, just thinking about that. at least thats what its about to me, I dont know if thats what she wanted.

I have just read a lot of the negative reviews on this book, which was very surprising to me, I had imagined that this was the kind of thing you'd expect to read picking up a Gertrude Stein. I feel like I must saw a few more things.
The words in this book are difficult a lot. they keep you thinking and building things up and breaking them back down. It's almost a game trying to figure out whether or not the words have meaning at all or are just pretty next to each other or rhythmic when spoken aloud or random or stream of consciousness or anything else or none of those things.

to me the words are pretty and silly and funny and sweet and sincere and never too serious but very very cared for and caring. i think so anyway

somebody said that thought the glossary was a poem and that it was they're favourite one. It had to have been intentionally made that way. i love it aswell

[Kathryn · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was self-pleasuring, inedible babble from cover to cover. Impossible to pick out a single quote that’s halfway coherent, much less one that resonated with me, so I’ll just open the book at random and choose a poem to share.

“Milk”

A white egg and a colored pan and a cabbage showing settlement, a constant increase.

A cold in a nose, a single cold nose makes an excuse. Two are more necessary.

All the goods are stolen, all the blisters are in the cup.

Cooking, cooking is the recognition between sudden and nearly sudden very little and all large holes.

A real pint, one that is open and closed and in the middle is so bad.

Tender colds, seen eye holders, all work, the best of change, the meaning, the dark red, all this and bitten, really bitten.

Guessing again and golfing again, and the best men, the very best men.

---

So, anyway, I have this terrible weakness where I require my poetry to make at least a lick of sense. So sue me. At least I can say I’ve read Gertrude Stein (first and last time) if I’m ever asked (I’ll never be asked).

[Nawara H. · Rating 2 out of 5]

ตื่นตาตื่นใจตรงที่เรารับสารอะไรไม่ค่อยได้เลย 555 แต่มันเป็น prose กึ่งบทกวี พอลองอ่านออกเสียงแล้วรู้สึกว่าคุณสไตน์เขียนได้จังหวะสนุกจัง เป็นการอ่านที่เหมือนนั่งมองภาพวาดพอร์เทรตอาหาร แล้วค่อยๆ ไล่สายตาไปตามแต่ละรายละเอียดที่คนเขียนจะชักจูงไป หรือไม่อาหารที่เราคุ้นเคยกลับถูกปั่นออกมาเป็นอนุภาคใหม่ๆ หรือไม่ก็เป็นบรรยากาศบนโต๊ะอาหารที่แตกต่างจากการเล่าถึงแต่ละมื้อในแบบฉบับอื่นๆ อันที่เราชอบก็เช่น;

“...the sooner there is sadder than salad, the sooner there is none do her”
“Only the moon to soup her”
“Custard is this. It has aches, aches when. Not to be. Not to be narrowly. This makes a whole little hill... It is better than a little thing that has mellow real mellow. It is better than lakes whole lakes, it is better than seeding”

[Dane Cobain · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stein’s work was always experimental and this is no different. What I like about this is that it’s about food and that at the same time, it’s not. It’s about life and how our food relates back to the lives that we live.