In fashionable-dining news: 

Wooden “plates” used by restaurants pose a food poisoning risk to people eating from them, a council has warned as it issued a £50,000 fine to a steakhouse where 14 people fell ill… Birmingham City Council brought the case against Ibrahim’s Grill and Steak House because it kept using the boards to serve food. A number of issues of concern were found, including a high level reliance on the use of disposable gloves, rather than staff washing hands. In addition, wooden plates which were incapable of being cleaned were being used to serve the food, the city’s magistrates’ court heard.

Setting aside the hygiene issues of abandoning ceramics in favour of grooved wooden chopping boards, there’s also the matter of presentational flair, which, as we’ve seen, ranges from the merely bizarre to the nakedly perverse. At a recent family lunch at an upscale village pub, the food and service were excellent but the dining was somewhat complicated by modish presentation. Specifically, a 30cm wide ‘plate’ that was about 70% rim, with a deep indentation in the centre, roughly the size of a coffee mug, into which the entire meal had been stacked, vertically. Imagine a layer cake of pork, potatoes and spinach. All tasty, certainly, but just a tad inaccessible.

モッツァレラ の 歌  Via Elephants Gerald.

Law professor Adam MacLeod on undoing the ‘progressive’ miseducation of his students: 

Slapping a label on the box without first opening the box and examining its contents is a form of cheating. Worse, it prevents you from discovering the treasures hidden inside the box. For example, when we discussed the Code of Hammurabi, some of you wanted to slap labels on what you read [“classist,” “racist,”] which enabled you to convince yourself that you had nothing to learn from ancient Babylonians. But when we peeled off the labels and looked carefully inside the box, we discovered several surprising truths.

Related: “Who is this Mozart?”  

Michael Walsh on the real-world destination of “social justice” activism: 

In the aftermath of the Ferguson riots in Missouri and the Freddie Gray fiasco in Baltimore, the decriminalisation of crime in the name of “social justice” – long a goal of the cultural-Marxist Left – got fully underway. The result was exactly what anyone not fully invested in Critical Theory would have expected… Baltimore is a prime example of what happens when citizens are categorised by skin colour or cultural background, and then have differing standards of behaviour applied to them by what should be an impartial justice system. Instead of “social justice,” the outcome is social disruption, mistrust, resentment and lawlessness.

If violent and predatory behaviour has consequences only for the victim, then the situation is unlikely to improve. 

And David Cole on gentrification, its opponents, and the kind of nakedly racial animus that’s apparently okay: 

Activists [in Pilsen, Chicago] protested the opening of a new restaurant in the neighbourhood. The owners of the eatery, named S.K.Y., are accused of “gentrifying” the neighbourhood with their presence. So of course the activists responded by defacing the building, threatening the staff, and blocking people from entering… But the chef-owner of S.K.Y., Stephen Gillanders, is baffled. His meals start at $7, hardly the stuff of billionaire foodies. So why the resistance from the locals? Well, it turns out that Gillanders is Filipino and his wife is Korean.

Media reports that have mentioned Gillanders’ race have suggested that it’s somehow odd that the activists are attacking a fellow minority… [But] the activists speak again and again of keeping Pilsen “Mexican.” Not “diverse,” not “rainbow,” but Mexican. In fact, CBS Chicago reported that it isn’t just Gillanders’ business that’s being targeted. The protesters are “demanding that non-Mexican owners here [at S.K.Y.] and across the street get out of Pilsen.” Viva la Raza! There’s your identity politics, leftists. This is the logical conclusion of the race-centred worldview that the left encourages non-whites to embrace.

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Princeton University is offering a course this fall that will “examine the changing history, aesthetics, politics, and meanings of fatness” through dance and performance art.

Yes, fat feminist dance therapy is a thing that exists. Needless to say, “intersectional dimensions of the fat body” will be thoroughly explored.

The German shepherd was calm and responded to police commands. On the way to an animal sanctuary, the dog vomited some of its owner’s tissue, including skin with still-recognisable beard hair.

Here’s a thing to ponder as you pet your fluffy companion: If you died, would your dog eat you? 

In 24 percent of the cases in the 2015 review, which all involved dogs, less than a day had passed before the partially eaten body was found. What’s more, some of the dogs had access to normal food they hadn’t eaten.

And before owners of other pets start feeling terribly smug:

Cats tend to go for the face, especially soft parts such as the nose and lips, says forensic anthropologist Carolyn Rando of University College London… Even hamsters and birds have been known to scavenge on occasion.

Sleep well.