begins with images of a bright, bulging American supermarket, and then moves to the jammed chicken houses, grim meat-cutting rooms and chemical-laced cornfields where much of the American diet comes from.
But then you run into clunkers like the desiccated veal Milanese, a grim piece of meat pounded out to the size of a Ping-Pong paddle, or the appetizer of thin-sliced salmon, swordfish and white anchovies, so harshly marinated that the swordfish takes on the texture of shirt cardboard.
As well as the performance of a song, a part or a poem, rendering has grim associations: rendered meats and fats; the rendering of suspects for covert interrogation; the rendering of a human being into an avatar.
The grim contention comprised the meat of the defense on day two of the Akai Gurley trial, in which Officer Peter Liang is being tried for the accidental but fatal shooting of Gurley, a 28-year-old unarmed black man, in the decrepit stairwell of a project in East New York, Brooklyn.
The bodies of his victims were burned in pyres of wood and car tyres while the assassins stood around drinking and cooking meat in a grim parody of South Africa's famed braai, or barbecue.
Precisely how we regressed from the delights so well described by writers like Gustave Flaubert a century and a half ago — times when, dare one say it, true love did occasionally blossom among the bougainvillea and the date palms — to the grim realities of today's meat markets in Thailand and the Philippines is the main thrust of Mr. Bernstein's properly high-minded book.
Indeed, food plays a key role; medium shots of Jeanne making breaded veal cutlets and preparing a meat loaf play like grim refractions of Julia Child's "The French Chef".
At the end of each darkening hall was a grim buffet, with lunch ladies pushing meat and potatoes—"More?
A derelict mass of rusty iron and reinforced concrete; a vestige of a bygone era that tore through the West Side of Manhattan; a grim and gritty canopy, sheltering blood-soaked meat packers and transgender prostitutes.
Mooby's grim, multicoloured restaurants feature playground equipment shaped like a meat grinder.
