Alfred Hitchcock once told François Truffaut he wanted to make a film that would examine a city entirely through food and, unusually, waste. He would show the arrival of meat and produce into a metropolis, “its distribution, the selling, how it’s fixed up and absorbed. “Dish and pot, dish and pot, these are the poles,” his narrator says in “Malone Dies.” The dish, we discuss freely: Food, in literature and elsewhere, is part of what we talk about when we talk about culture. They are life, as much as sex is life — maybe more so, because people’s sex lives dwindle but this need does not. There is no defecatory equivalent of the inoffensive, neutral ‘sex.’” But we will do our best.

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Persons: Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, ” Samuel Beckett, “ Malone, Milan Kundera, Rose George, ’ Locations: Milan