On Seattle, hungry musicians, and the culinary arts.

Coffee, salmon, berries, kale, fennel, lavender, rosemary, hops, beer, wheat, wine, oysters, clams and Dungeness crab. These are foods and flavors of the Pacific Northwest. But in addition to things indigenous to this region, Seattle is also on the Pacific Rim, making it a great hub for Asian food. The Blue Scholars, Seattle’s precursor to Macklemore, played on Friday night at the Showbox, singing about phở:

Top 5 Food References In Pop/Rock Music

Iced coffee, the egg, and the banh mi
We eating hella good in the city by the sea
Pho Bac, Pho viet, Pho Cyclo
Thanh Thao, maybe Than Bros, or Thanh Vi
Laughing cow smiling at me.

 

“Pho is absolutely a part of Seattle culture,” said Sabzi, “all of South Seattle is secretly run by Vietnamese people. There’s pho places, all kinds of banh mi, Viet bakeries, billiard halls. There are different sides to Seattle, but I’ve spent the last 10 years in South Seattle, so I eat a lot of pho.” –Macklemore Loves Pho

and this, from the New Yorker:

“Why,” asks Sandra Gilbert in “The Culinary Imagination,” a new history of “eating words” in a cultural context, “do we so massively—and often so hungrily—meditate on food, its history, its preparation, its stories, its vices and virtues?”

Along with sex and death, food is one of the three great universals, and it can be discussed in a far wider range of registers than those other two.

An obvious response is: Why wouldn’t we? Along with sex and death, food is one of the three great universals, and it can be discussed in a far wider range of registers than those other two. When breaking the ice with someone you’ve just met, you might hesitate to bring up sex (creepy!) or death (morbid!). Food, on the other hand, provides an instant topic of conversation that anyone can join, inoffensive without being boring. – The Allure of the Imagined Meal