I have a new review essay in the Spring issue of Virginia Quarterly Review. The whole issue is about food, and my piece, “Forced Feeding,” is about the role of Ensure nutrition shakes in torture. 

Here’s a snippet:

I can’t tell how appropriate it is that a few weeks spent reading about torture calls to mind the way my stepfather died and how we fed him in the end. But the effect of the memory is sympathy. And thinking back to a death you know strikes me as a natural response to reading the details of torture, if only because torture exposes the likeness, the porousness, between death and life.