This is one of the rare times where I’m returning to a subject. I first wrote about food (and drink) on /Tuesday Ten /124, way back in March 2011, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that most of the songs that I’d used at the time were barely about food, instead euphemisms that used food to talk about something else entirely.

So I decided to return to the subject, ask for suggestions anew, but with the specific request that the songs had to actually be about food. This still got an awful lot of suggestions (nearly 200), most of which actually fit the brief, and a couple of the songs here are also about wider social issues/events related to food, but food is still a critical part of it.

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Bob Vylan
/Health Is Wealth
/Bob Vylan Presents the Price of Life

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Bob Vylan made some important points on their excellent album from a couple of years back: particularly on Health Is Wealth, where they point out the obvious point that the poor eat less well: for various reasons, convenience food and poor-quality ingredients are chosen purely on cost, or cheap takeaways, and that begins a vicious cycle that only makes the poor less healthy, and less able to improve their financial position as that then impacts work, and so on. Bob Vylan himself is vegan, and uses this song to explain that a vegan-based diet could actually be cheaper and healthier, and is quoted elsewhere as saying “I feel healthier in my body and mind. If we’re going to use our existence to rally against injustice, we probably need to be quite healthy to do that.”

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/Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft
/Kebap träume
/Für immer

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I got to see – finally – the excellent Electronic Body Movie recently, and one of the groups (rightly) prominently featured was DAF, including interviews recorded with the late Gabi Delgado-López before he died (and showed that he was just as intense in interviews as he was onstage). One of the slower, more measured songs from DAF’s greatest period is Kebap träume (translated as “Kebab Dreams”), which appears to be observing the change in Berlin food and culture as more immigrants moved into the divided city. This was at least partly a product of that partition of Germany and Berlin, but also the gastarbeiter scheme that saw much-needed workers coming from Southern Europe and later Turkey to fill roles as the German economy boomed. As immigration and nationality rules changed, many of those gastarbeiter stayed, and opened their own businesses, and the German Kebab – a variation of the classic Turkish Kebab that sees use of specific bread (mostly a pitta) with more sauce and often then lightly toasted – became a staple of the local cuisine. They are often rather more portable for the late-night eater, and have now spread widely, not least thanks to the fast expansion of the originally Berlin-based GDK chain.

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/Streetband
/Toast
/London

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Blue-eyed soul singer Paul Young perhaps owes his career to Kenny Everett and a baker’s strike. Throwaway B-side Toast got played to death by then-Capital Radio DJ Kenny Everett, swiftly becoming the A-side and a chart hit, while a baker’s strike as part of the winter of discontent saw this song used in news stories as people queued for restricted availability of bread.

I’m not as much of a fan of toast for breakfast as my wife is – and she puts Marmite on hers, which I can’t abide – but cheese on toast? As long as I can put a few splashes of Hendos on it, now we’re talking.

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/Clutch
/Hot Bottom Feeder
/Book of Bad Decisions

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I guess this week’s post was always going to include at least one recipe: that said, I’ve already used 1. David Jay 2. Peter Murphy 3. Kevin Haskins 4. Daniel Ash on /Tuesday Ten /396 and Die Eier von Satan on /Tuesday Ten /124, so I was looking for another, and happily, one of the hardest working rock bands of our time have obliged.

Amid a mighty fucking groove – this is Clutch, I’d expect nothing less – Neil Fallon takes us back to his Maryland home, to make Maryland Crab Cakes (a specific, Chesapeake Bay area speciality, using local Blue Crab). The video is basically a “how-to” set to music, even with the recipe at the end so you can pause and follow the instructions (which one metal blogger did with great results). They look delicious, too.

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/ZZ Top
/TV Dinners
/Eliminator

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Eliminator was the point where the ZZ Top best-known in popular culture emerged. Prior to that, they’d been a boogie-blues-rock band without much to distinguish them – except, of course, the sunglasses and mighty beards of Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill (introduced in 1979). But Eliminator used synths, drum machines and had a much sleeker, tighter sound – plus it had a stack of singles with unforgettable, stylish videos (most of which featured their legendary modified 1933 Ford Coupe Hot Rod) and thanks to heavy rotation on MTV, they sold millions.

One of the singles from the album, though, went down a more mundane route: celebrating the frozen ready meal (or TV Dinner in US parlance), the quick, go-to for the single man who is lazy and can’t or won’t cook, at least as the cliché goes, and ZZ Top helped perpetuate.

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/MF Doom
/Fillet-O-Rapper
/MM..FOOD

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The late MF DOOM wrote an entire album where food features as prominently as the samples of TV and comic characters that pepper the album. Many of them do, to be fair, use food as euphemisms, particularly in battle raps (which sadly precluded the amazing Beef Rapp), but the relatively short Fillet-O-Rapper is absolutely about food. Here, DOOM is expecting rare company, and wants to impress with his soul food menu – lots of greens, black-eyed-peas, cornbread and more – interestingly it is mostly vegetarian, too. There’s also the kiss-off that some might not like this healthy food, but DOOM couldn’t care less what you think.

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/The B-52s
/Butterbean
/Whammy!

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Another American band from the East Coast regions celebrating local food are The B-52s. On their 1983 album Whammy! – one of the last albums with founding member Ricky Wilson (he died from AIDS-related complications in 1985) – is something of a throwaway New Wave track that celebrates a staple of Deep South cuisine – the butter bean or lima bean, reminding that back home in Georgia, everyone loves eating them. A recipe for southern butter beans does look pretty good, too.

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/The New Royal Family
/Anyone Fancy A Chocolate Digestive?
/Filthy Little Angels Singles Club

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One of the most popular biscuits in the UK, the Chocolate Digestive biscuit, was introduced in 1925, so celebrates 100 years this year. I always thought that plain Digestive biscuits were the disappointing ones in the biscuit tin (although I’d take one of those over a Rich Tea every day), so we should thank McVities for thinking along the same lines and making the chocolate variant. Amazingly, too, there’s a song about them, thanks to indie band The New Royal Family.

Apparently, according to McVities themselves, we’ve been eating them wrong, as we should be eating them chocolate-side down to “fire up the tastebuds”. I’ve normally eaten them before I even think about which way up they should go into my mouth.

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/Shonen Knife
/SUSHI BAR SONG
/HAPPY HOUR

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The legendary Japanese punk band Shonen Knife have an awful lot of songs about food – at least twelve were suggested for this week – and I decided to go for a song about sushi, and celebrating the Sushi Bar. Something we like a lot – indeed we were regulars at Moshi Moshi at Liverpool Street when we lived and worked in London (as I recall it was the first conveyor-belt sushi restaurant in the UK, and retains their commitment to sustainable fish and seafood to this day), before that Saskushi in Sheffield, and also that one of the greatest and most memorable meals of our life was at Tanoshii (Sushi Mike’s) in Chicago the first time we went out there in 2014.

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/Levi Stubbs & Rick Moranis
/Feed Me (Git It)
/Little Shop of Horrors OST

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It is, when you think about it, a most unlikely pairing: the powerhouse baritone voice best-known as the lead vocalist of R&B legends The Four Tops, up against a scrawny Canadian comedian. But in the 1986 adaptation of the musical Little Shop of Horrors, they are both perfectly cast as the evil alien plant (Audrey II) set on world domination, and the meek hero that rises to the challenge. Indeed, it is such a joyously brilliant film that both my wife and I love so much that we went to New York City in summer 2024 to see the musical off-Broadway (and it was worth every penny, too).

And as we close this week’s /Tuesday Ten, I never said what the food was to be. In Little Shop of Horrors, and particularly from the point of view of Audrey II, it’s the humans that are on the menu…