You can tell a book from its cover..

I’ve recently come to the opinion that we’re much more successful at preserving vegetables than we are at preserving youthful looks. In that half land of waking, this morning, the imagined strains of a childhood song, “With a face like a squashed potato….” sung to the tune of “Figgy Pudding”, served as illusory background music to images remembered from a programme on the very wealthy who live in ultra luxurious hotels. The rooms in these hotels and the faces of their inhabitants were similar in their overblown artificiality. Such was the shallowness of the concept of beauty or style, in both face and space, that the surgeon responsible for the facio maxillary work and the interior designer may well have been the same man. It’s bewildering to see such tightly stretched, unresponsive material both living and inanimate.

The preserved lemons, that I used in a version of tonno fagioli for supper yesterday, are not as they were when on the tree. That part is over – the fruit falls or is picked. What they have gained from preservation is an intense and singular taste, that only comes with age and the skill of the preserver: which qualities are missing from the preserved and the preserver in the human version. We make the mistake of trying to put the fruit back on the tree.

The tonno fagioli was the same simple Italian dish, enlivened with capers, anchovies, preserved lemon and flat parsley.

Oh, and this is quite interesting as well – http://petapixel.com/2013/04/25/portraits-of-miss-korea-2013-contestants-spark-discussion-on-plastic-surgery/?utm_source=feedly