Alison Knowles has always shared authorship of The Identical Lunch with the composer Philip Corner. As she writes in the introduction to this book, “Philip midwifed if not actually preconceived The Identical Lunch. . . .He caught me eating the same lunch at the same time at the same place each day. From that day on, the experience was elevated into a formal score.” Inspired by Knowles’s formalization, performance, and documentation of eating the lunch, Corner, in turn, undertook a parallel project at Riss Foods. He decided to realize Knowles’s score by ordering everything on the menu, “starting from ‘tunafish,’ which is the third down on the board, mov[ing] down the left, then up the right side of that board, and then on to the other boards which offer, for example, hot plates, salads, etc.” Many complications ensue and ethical decisions have to be made as the diner menu is rewritten and inconsistencies appear. Corner records his thinking about all that in this book, which sometimes addresses Knowles directly, thereby staging a conversation of sorts between his book—presented here in its entirety—and Knowles’s Journal of the Identical Lunch.
Image RISS Restaurant © 1970 by Jan Herman. © Alison Knowles. Published by Nova Broadcast Press 1973.
