Update: Sorry, still working on this book.  Aiming for February 2024 release.

Book Description

You crave or have a dick.  Would you prefer to do the sex with and/or as someone who can suck his own dick, or not?  (I didn’t say “does,” I said “can”).  You want that dick to be healthy and hard, or feeble and flaccid?

Alive Juice Bar’s Guide to Men’s Health: How to Suck Your Own Dick will show you how to keep yourself and/or your man limber, robust, and hard into old age.  This book advises men on nutrition and the mental and physical exercises they need to do to be youthful and in sharp mental and physical shape at any age.  Included are simple recipes and meal prep strategies, suggested weekly exercise routines, and neuroplasticity drills.  There’s also a bonus chapter on Oriental sex tricks that double as penis and fascia workouts so you and/or your man can achieve autofellatio (if you want) and shoot jizz farther than ever.

Working toward sucking your own dick will improve your health, regardless of age, guaranteed.

Introduction

Nostalgia is a sign of bad health.  “I grew up in the 80s, and that was the best decade,” people write in the comments section for a popular 80s music video on YouTube.  Was it really?  Would any of these people trade their smart phone for a rotary phone, Internet access for a CB radio and a Walkman, and a 2020 Hyundai Elantra for a 1985 Cadillac Seville as their commuter car?  Of course not, they wouldn’t be commenting on YouTube if they’d made the trade, one that’s available to Americans who don’t live in poverty, every day.

So why are many people sentimental about their youth?  Was the music really that much better or is it better because of the memories it evokes?  Why are memories of angst filled youth and dumb decisions comforting?  Not saying each decade doesn’t have its own unique high points – people looked better and were healthier before the obesity epidemic, for instance.  But the 80s was also the decade of AIDS epidemic and the highest crime rates ever recorded.  In 1989, there were 1905 people murdered in New York City.  In 2022, there were 433 murders.

This isn’t just about the 80s, it’s about people’s propensity to romanticize their youth, no matter how wretched it was compared to their present.  I remember working on a documentary about the New York City’s Lower East Side, which was a slummy neighborhood until around year 2000.  Everyone who grew up there in the 1950s told me about the “good old times,” like the entire family sleeping on the iconic metal fire escapes during the miserably hot and humid summers.  These same people moved from 600 sf tenements for a family of six to spacious, air-conditioned homes in the suburbs during the 1960s.  If their youth was so wonderful, why would they deprive their own children of the same experience?  How can so many people romanticize what most people today consider poverty?

My theory is that those reminisce about their youth do to avoid the pain of being unhealthy in the present.  The 50-year-old who is in better shape than he was when he was 20 isn’t going to be pining about his 20^th year of life.  Ask former fat-fuck turned Navy Seal and ultra marathoner, David Goggins.  He went from being 6’1” and nearly 300 lbs. of flab (he wasn’t a football lineman) in his early 20s to a 175 lbs. 50-year-old fitness magazine model and motivational speaker today.  You think he’s reminiscing about the days when he couldn’t see his dick from a standing position?  Goggins never speaks wistfully about his youth, watch his interviews on YouTube if you don’t believe me.

If my theory is right, that being healthy – limber, robust, and free of pain – is such a wonderful state of being that it’s better to be so than to have all the trappings of a luxurious life while being feeble, then why do so many in the modern world choose to be frail than fit as they age?  I say “modern” because there’s anthropological evidence that those who live in a pre-modern world – no chairs, elevators, anything that reduces physical labor for survival – don’t suffer from the same physical ailments as many of those who live in industrialized societies.  Like the elderly who don’t suffer from back pain despite working their entire lives to gather food, for instance.  From NPR’s segment on Lost Posture: Why Some Indigenous Cultures May Not Have Back Pain[1]:

Believe it or not, there are a few cultures in the world where back pain hardly exists. One indigenous tribe in central India reported essentially none. And the discs in their backs showed little signs of degeneration as people aged.

Westerners tend to believe that the body necessarily degenerates with age and use.  That’s not true, according to the “posture guru” and acupuncturist Esther Gokhale, interviewed in the above mentioned NPR segment:

“I have a picture in my book of these two women who spend seven to nine hours everyday, bent over, gathering water chestnuts,” Gokhale says. “They’re quite old. But the truth is they don’t have a back pain.”

If routine physical labor and age don’t cause back pain, then what does?  What about other physical and mental ailments, such as erectile dysfunction and Alzheimer’s, are they due to labor and age, or not?

The science regarding the link between age and ailments isn’t conclusive and either way, it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that you have to believe that age isn’t an excuse for having lower back pain or brain fog; or tight hips that restrict your movement; or the beer belly that likely causes lower back pain, bad posture, and makes your cock look small; or your inability to learn a new language.  If you don’t believe that age isn’t an excuse, then this book is of no use to you.

The point of this health book isn’t to teach you how to suck your own dick.  It’s cool if you want to, and I have a feeling that most women and gay men would like to see their man – or any man — pull it off.  (It’s mostly straight men who don’t want to suck their own dick, I suspect).  The purpose of this book is to help men become healthier, and the ability to suck one’s own dick is just a symbolic and probably abstract goal for them in their pursuit of a more vigorous life.  You can succeed in improving your life without sucking your own dick, okay?  But working to suck your own duck will make you healthier, guaranteed.  Like, what does it take to suck one’s own dick?  One has to be:

• Limber
• Slender
• Decently endowed

This book will help you become more limber, slender, and better endowed, and it won’t be as difficult as you think.  It won’t be easy, but you can still eat tasty food, drink alcohol, and not spend more than 10 hours a week on physical exercise.  And it’ll probably save you money, short and long term, because eating well costs less than eating shit that makes you inflamed, bloated, and torpid.  So let’s do it!

To do it, you need to have the Right Mindset, the topic of Part I of this book.  Chapter 1, Age is a Lame Excuse, berates those for blaming age, instead of their chronic bad habits, for their health problems.  It reviews some anthropological and medical literature about health and aging in modern and pre-modern societies to convince you that there shouldn’t be a significant decline in physical and cognitive performance as you age.  Chapter 2 shows you how to Think Like a Three-Year-Old.  You can train yourself to become more curious and regain much of the neuroplasticity that your brain once had.  To do so, you might need to assess your attitude about Mental Health, the title of Chapter 3, because many physical ailments are manifestations of mental ones.  And you need to have the right mindset to work through the Physical Exercises – Part II of this book – to help you suck your own dick.

We kick off Part II with Suck Your Dick Workouts, the title of chapter 4.  Most physical ailments begin with a weak core, your abs and hips.  Here you’ll be shown to how strengthen your core so you can move correctly without fucking up the rest of your body in your own fucked up way.  It’ll hurt, but it won’t be as painful as you think and soon, you’ll be fucking like a porn star on Viagra.  In chapter 5, you’ll be shown exercises – resistance training — to boost testosterone so you can fuck with more frequency and your jizz will shoot farther.  Chapter 6, Exercises for Hair Growth, you’ll be introduced to the head stand.  My hair was thinning and greying until I started to do a head stand every day, and now it’s as thick and dark as ever.  The headstand sounds intimidating to some, but it’s not that hard and private inversion lessons costs a lot less than those stupid creams, hair transplants, and hair pieces.  Inversions are also face lifts so your facial skin looks less droopy.

Part III is a primer on the Diet and Nutrition you need to suck your own dick.  We get to the heart of the matter in Chapter 7, How to Train Your Palate to Eat Less. Most diets don’t work because they’re asking people to eat what they don’t like to eat.  This chapter explains how to get around this dilemma by training your palate to crave less sugar to be satisfied.  Chapter 8, What to Eat, suggests what you should eat to be lean, limber, and free of inflammation.  This chapter will probably save you money, because eating well is cheaper than you think once you stop eating the bullshit health foods you don’t like.  Chapter 9 considers When to Eat.  Should you eat three meals a day?  Should you eat within an hour after waking up?  Can intermittent fasting reverse aging?

Part IV is about some of the Mental Exercises you can practice to improve brain neuroplasticity so you don’t become a dumb fuck as you age.  These exercises work in conjunction with the physical exercises outlined in this book because mental health = physical health.  Chapter 10 – Mental Drills — suggests fun ways to keep your mind sharp, and warns about seemingly harmless activities that’ll make you dull minded.  Chapter 11 shows you how to Learn a New Language to improve brain neuroplasticity so you can think and act like a three-year-old again.  Full circle.

Being able to suck your own dick doesn’t mean you don’t need Medical Care, Part V of this book.  Chapter 12 — What We Can Learn About Vaccines from the Japanese – begins with a history of how medical science works and what we can learn from its of successes and failures.  Pre-Modern Medicine, the title of chapter 13, reviews alternatives to modern medicine to fix your health problems.  It doesn’t discount evidence based medicine, it points out that medicine is an art and a science, and recognizing it as such will help you make better decisions about how to reach your goal of sucking your own dick.  We end with Chapter 14 – Recommended Readings —  reviews of books written by Western trained medical doctors critical of Western medicine who suggest alternative strategies to live a robust life till you die.

This book should be read – in the first reading – in chronological order, from Introduction to the end.  To read otherwise might be confusing.  Send questions and comments to foodyap@gmail.com, put “I want to suck my own dick” in the subject line if you want a reply.  Enjoy, and good health.

[1] June 8, 2015, by Michaeleen Doucleff.  https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/06/08/412314701/lost-posture-why-indigenous-cultures-dont-have-back-pain

Thorstein Veblen publishes Theory of the Leisure Class: an Economic Study of Institutions in 1899. He’s trying to figure out what makes people act like douchebags by studying their consumption habits. Like why Sara buys clothes at this store; Marty drives that car; Vivian drinks obscure coffee. Pre-test:

1. Who owns a Corvette?
a) Vascular Surgeon
b) The commercial plumber
c) The tenured college professor

2. Who owns most amount of clothes?
a) White trash girl living in trailer park
b) Old money girl attending exclusive boarding school
c) Middle-class girl living in middle-class cul-de-sac

3. What does middle-class woman eat on her birthday?
a) Surf and turf
b) Sushi and tempura
c) Raw oysters and beef tongue

4. What is upper-class woman eating Friday evening?
a) Cocktail shrimp and beef tenderloin steak
b) Acai bowl with quinoa, kale chips on side
c) Grilled beef tongue and fried shrimp heads

5. Who is most likely to have read a violent pornographic novel (eg. Georges Bataille, Pauline Reage, Marquis de Sade)
a) Upper-class woman, undergrad from Wellesley and PhD in Comparative Literature
b) Middle-class home economics teacher with enormous porn collection.
c) White trash who beats the shit out of his girlfriend.

Answers:
1. b
2. c
3. a
4. c
5. a

Surprised? Oblique explanations in main text.

Why People Act Like Poseurs and Douchebags

For our purposes here, the only thing we need to take from Theory of Leisure Class is that imitation is the driving force of American capitalist consumerism. In Feudalism, social mobility is limited by birth and the serf works for subsistence, not social mobility. Capitalism, promising unprecedented (upward and downward) social mobility, makes imitation possible, accessible, and encouraged by the logic of economic growth.  “Keeping up,” as Americans put it.  The capitalist “Leisure Class” signifies not only Old and New Money, but anyone with discretionary income, or at least anyone with a credit card.

Whom do people imitate?  Those they *perceive* as just above them.  What do people imitate? The *imagined* sensibilities and habits of those they *perceive* as just above them. Pay attention to the choice of words: “perceive” and “imagined” because people from all social classes tend to have trouble at not only figuring out what those outside their social circles are thinking and doing, but also a person’s social status. That’s why the not-quite-middle-class teen thinks the woman with a deep tan and a tit job is high society. The Old Money woman thinks the young tow truck driver is being ironic when he’s not. The woman who reads The New Yorker has no idea who Jimmie Johnson is. The guy with collection of Jimmie Johnson autographs can’t imagine an Ivy League college professor who listens to Outkast and has tickets to Venus in Furs and The Vagina Monologues, both of which the Time and Oprah magazine reading home economics teacher with tickets to The Nutcracker Suite finds dirty and offensive.  Which is why all this imitation looks more like self-parody than “faking it till you make it.”

History of American Cuisine: Colonial Era

Pick:

6. What’s most likely on the menu at a two year old casual fine dining restaurant in New York City that just won its first Micheline star?
a) Lobster alfredo with chantrelle mushrooms
b) Bone marrow with jerk spiced duck hearts
c) Wagyu tenderloin served with roasted rosemary potatoes

7. Who sucked the most dick by age 18?
a) Working middle-class Tina who attended Catholic school
b) Upper-middle class Siobhan who attended exclusive boarding school
c) Working middle-class Anthony who attended public school

8. Which family is most likely to own Emily Post books on etiquette and send children to etiquette school?
a) Conservative middle-class family, mom is homemaker, dad is bank manager.
b) Old Money family, mom is art curator, dad is opera singer.
c) New Money Google millionaires, Mom and Dad are executives

9. Who sucked the most dick by age 28?
a) Working middle-class Tina who attended Catholic school
b) Upper-middle class Siobhan who attended exclusive boarding school
c) Old Money Sarah who attended public school

10. What vehicle does single Korean man who runs with his parents an established Teriyaki store drive?
a) Toyota Camry
b) Ford Mustang
c) Porsche Cayenne

Answers:
6. b
7. a
8. a
9. b
10. c

Seventeenth century, White Europeans from varied backgrounds started moving to The New World. The English soon became dominant, assimilating the Dutch and the Swedes after kicking their asses, but they couldn’t reach a deal with the French (Acadians in Nova Scotia) so the English told them to fuck off, relocating some of them to Louisiana where they begin Cajun culture. Point is, American cuisine began as variant of British cuisine, and in contrast to the French, who adopted Native American hunting and cooking methods and incorporated indigeneous ingredients into their diet, the Americans used Old World Methods to prepare New World ingredients and tried to grow Old World ingredients in New World climate, with mixed results.  Where reliable trade with British Empire was established, Old World ingredients were imported, making American (New England especially) cuisine intentionally British.

There were lots of regional variations that cut across socio-economic lines — American cuisine has never been monolithic —  with, for instance, upland Southern Rednecks eating possums and squirrels with cabbage and potatoes, and African and Caribbean ingredients and cooking methods influencing the pork based lowland Southern diet.  Pennsylvania Germans brought sausages, sauerkraut, and beer from the Old World. But colonial British mercantilist policies that limited American trade to within the Empire ensured that British traditions would dominate until the Brits began taxing alcohol starting with the Molasses Act of 1733 and the Sugar Act of 1760, and then luxury goods with the Quartering Act of 1763 and tea with the Tea Act of 1773.

The Brits soon learned that when you fuck with people’s alcohol and caffeine supply, there’s going to be a revolution. Americans began boycotting British goods and finally went native out of frustration with British laws. Whiskey had been looked down on by American high society types, who preferred Old World British goods and habits. Now Northern whiskey, made of rye (non-native European ingredient), was becoming fashionable, and Southern whiskey was considered patriotic due to its use of corn, an indigenous ingredient. Rum was out, as it was seen as a symbol of British power.

Another significant change was the shift from tea to coffee.  John Adams wrote to his wife in 1773: “Tea must be universally renounced and I must be weaned, and the sooner the better.” When word got out that a group of housewives in Massachusetts united to serve — as a fuck you to the Brits — only coffee, many were inspired to do the same.

It’s been said that you can tell a lot about a person by what he or she eats.  We can probably tell a lot about a nation by what its people eat.  Shifts in eating habits aren’t accidents and they’re an index of what’s to come politically. You can smell a revolution that’s waiting to happen.

Independence – Immigration Act of 1924

Independence achieved, Americans stopped shitting on French cuisine, which they had disdained during the seemingly never ending conflict between the British and the French. Before the War, cookbook writer Hannah Glasse, wrote in Art of Cookery: “the blind folly of this age that would rather be imposed on by a French booby, than give encouragement to a good English cook!” On French recipes: “an odd jumble of trash.” Those insults disappeared in the first *American* post-war edition of her cookbook, probably because the French had helped with American war effort. The French-American alliance also led to French chefs migrating to the States during the French Revolution, which would’ve been unthinkable under British rule.

Free from the constraints of British mercantilism, American cooks gained wider access to foreign goods.  As an expanding industrializing nation requiring more White people (1790 Act limited citizenship to White people) to populate conquered lands and to work in expanding factories, the US began to accept more and a wider range of White immigrants — now including many from Eastern and Southern Europe — who further diversified American culinary habits. By 1924, Americans are eating all kinds of peasant-redneck-soul food — pig’s ears, raw oysters, raw beef, possums, ram testicles, squirrels, chicken gizzards, cow brains, pig’s feet, and blood pudding.

I use year 1924 as a bookend because it marks the end of liberal immigration policies and the beginning of the modern kitchen.  Growing concern about the “Whiteness” of some European immigrants — Italians, Slavs, and Eastern European Jews — the Immigration Act of 1924 limited the annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the US. It was a way to ensure that the US remain a White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (WASP) nation, not overrun by Irish and Italian Catholics, Jews, Slavs, and other undesirable not-quite-White European “races.”  And by severing the flow of people and cultural habits from undesirable parts of Europe to ethnic US neighborhoods, the not-quite-White people of the US would finally lose their immigrant heritage and assimilate to become fully White and American.

And it was around 1924 that modern refrigeration was becoming common in middle-class America, which led to the rise to mass produced industrialized foods such as frozen meals.  Refrigeration in rail cars meant farms no longer had to be located near population centers and more land could be farmed, resulting in lower prices of prestige items such as beef.

The Federal government and academia were also getting involved in what Americans ate.  Nutritionists and home economics professors introduced a scientific approach to nutrition and eating. They began telling Americans which meals and cooking methods are safe and proper.

Modern American Cuisine

Why did some American ethnic and regional foods become popular nationally, while others remained marginalized or disappeared?

Test break!

11. Who sucked the most dick by age 45?
a) Working middle-class Tina who attended Catholic school
b) Upper-middle class Siobhan who attended exclusive boarding school
c) Old Money Sarah who attended public school

12. It’s 1973, in some middle to upper middle class suburb. What do the Johnson’s have in their kitchen?
a) A dead body, cut up, probably neighbor’s daughter
b) White Wonder bread, margarine, and Tang.
c) Pickled beets, sauerkraut, and offals.

13. Where has Old Money Sarah never eaten?
a) McDonald’s
b) Harold’s Chicken Shack
c) Red Lobster

14. Who lost a toe while on vacation?
a) Upper middle-class Ginger
b) Lower-middle class Tiffany
c) Upper-class Wes

15. Who spends the most on nails and tan?
a) Old Money Sarah
b) Upper middle-class Jimmy
c) Lower-middle class Tiffany

Answers:
11. a
12. b
13. c
14. c
15. c

By 1965, the year immigration was liberalized, the US had finally developed a national cuisine and palate. Coca Cola, orange juice, hamburgers, fortune cookies, peanut butter, apple pie, fried chicken, hot dog, steak, pizza, french fries, spaghetti…these are some regional foods that went national (a few, like Coca Cola, went international).  Why not mutton, smoked salmon, collard greens, pig trotters, fried gizzards, baklava, gyros, Philly Cheesesteaks, and knishes?

Some food became less had because eating them was a sign of low status.  Offals (organs) and possum, for instance.  Perhaps fried chicken made the cut because it was special occasion food for the poor, and fried gizzards didn’t because that’s what the poor ate everyday.  Those who grew up poor traded liver, horse meat, and beef intestines for ground beef when they finally could.

Some food became more popular because they represented modernity and science. The middle-class household in 1970 drank space-age Tang to be modern, used margarine instead of butter to be health conscious, and ate canned soup to be family-on-the-move efficient. Now Tang is one step above kool-aid, margarine is for out-of-touch geriatrics relying on out-of-date info, and canned soup is for the lazy.

Other food and preparation methods became rare because of warnings from government agencies.  “You shouldn’t consume raw seafood or meat of any kind,” warns the FDA. So most stopped doing so, even as steak tartare was served throughout Europe, as it had for centuries, and sashimi throughout Japan, as it had for centuries.  You’re supposed to drink cow milk and eat cereal and bread and cheese…everyday “we’re told by USDA food pyramid. So we did, even though 70 percent of the people in the world are lactose intolerant.  “Cook poultry at 350 degrees,” taught the home economics teacher.  We did and learned to make overcooked and dry meat palatable by adding to it extra extra gravy.  “White meat is healthier than dark meat,” announced the nutritionist.  So we became one of the few nations in the world to prefer white over dark, even though dark is more flavorful and moister.  (And then we make white meat better tasting by frying it or drenching it in gravy, making it even more calorie dense than its dark counterpart). Americans were being taught to distrust their immigrant heritage, to become more modern (American) and less ethnic (backward). American cuisine was narrowing palates and limiting the range of cooking methods. American cuisine was becoming a disaster.

Thesis: government meddling and the loss of immigrant heritage fucked up American cuisine.

Postmodern American Cuisine

If Modernity is about living as one imagines one would in the future, Postmodernity is about living as one imagines someone had in the past.

—————————————————————————–

The Japanese, not Julia Child, saved American cuisine.

It’s the 1980s and the Japanese are on a roll. Americans are starting to think the Japanese are going to take over the world.  They show up in Manhattan to buy all sorts of vanity properties, their cars run better than American ones, and they make Americans feel lazy, and stupid. One could smell the power shift when business between Japanese and Americans was conducted not at Peter Lugar steakhouse, but in a basement level izakaya.

The growing popularity of Japanese cuisine in the US during the 80s and 90s gave Americans an opportunity to reconsider everything they’d been taught about proper cooking and proper meals.  Sure sure, there were American servicemen who loved Japanese cuisine before the preppy douchebags got to try it, but these were working class types everyone ignored, not the preppies middle-class kids emulated during the materialistic Eighties. The preppies made Japanese food cool and eating it became a sign of sophistication and high social status.

Soon Americans are watching Iron Chef Japan. Eating raw fish. Now they’re trying eel and loving it. A few even develop a taste for natto and live sea urchin.  Everything Americans were told not to do they were doing when they were eating Japanese food. For some, it was exhilarating.  Trying “weird” food became a legitimate hobby, and a new brand of foodie emerged.

By the start of the 21st century, Japanese cuisine had gone mainstream and Japanese cooking shows like Iron Chef inspired American versions of them, transforming chefs into rock stars, Ivy League graduates into line cooks working to become chefs, and cooking into a hobby instead of a chore. Sushi was no longer for Wall Street pricks and Californian champagne socialists, you were not middle-class if you didn’t eat and like sushi (even though sushi is a small portion of Japanese cuisine, and not had very often in Japan). Soon we had Japanese food for the masses: conveyer belt sushi, all you can eat sushi, even Chinese people serving (disgusting) sushi.  And as Japanese food ceased to be the new in thing, White Americans, now accustomed to trying “weird shit,” became interested in rediscovering their European roots because being White wasn’t cool anymore.  More restaurants started serving dishes that would’ve been unthinkable in the mainstream 70s, from raw oysters to bone marrow, duck hearts to steak tartare; using cooking methods, such as sous vide, that freaked out health inspectors. Underground dinner parties featured beef tongue and shrimp head. Eating such dishes became a sign of sophistication and American cuisine was becoming not just an archetype of postmodern nostalgia, but also vibrant and challenging. For the first time in a long time, American palates and culinary repertoire were expanding and a new generation of American chefs wanted to show the world that there’s more to American cuisine than McDonald’s.

Why We Eat What We Eat

Some think that the standard middle-class American cuisine is based primarily on proper nutrition (as determined by government agencies) and ethical behavior (as determined by soft science academics).  It is not.  If it were, we’d be eating crickets instead of beef for protein and we wouldn’t let ourselves get suckered by the latest health fad that confers an ingredient undeserved powers and fucks up another nation’s ecology.  Some of us would like to believe our cuisine is *proper* because it justifies our personal preferences (built on habit) and confirms our sense of self as belonging to a righteous nation. Those unhappy with status quo want to make American cuisine *proper* — nutritious and ethical (eg. localvore movement) — so we can feel like we belong to a righteous nation.

If American cuisine is, as argued earlier, built on political intrigue, social maneuvering, and economic brinksmanship, then there’s a good chance that its present is an expression of our competing political beliefs and anxiety about our socio-economic future.  Reading the food we eat as such makes it possible for us to see ourselves as tools when we drink orange juice every morning for its Vitamin C content, douchebags when we order kobe burgers for the prized fat that’s cooked off, cranks when we promote acai berries as ethical superfood, and human when we binge on McDonald’s fries.

Perhaps in the end — weary of reading all those conflicting articles about what’s healthiest and what’s more ethical and what’s better for the economy and environment — eating well has less to do with what we eat than how we explore what’s possible to eat. If only God can determine the righteousness of a nation and its citizens, the best we can do is build a spirited cuisine that challenges and expands, rather than accepts and limits, our palates and imagination.