Food and sex are our most intrinsic desires, and yet we are a species governed by extrinsic constructions. Sex and sustenance guarantee the survival and the perpetuation of the species and are the motivators of our most urgent and primal desires. It is no wonder that there should thusly be a limitless array of interesting cultural phenomena surrounding both of these mandatory components of life. (I could also talk about defecation and the weird shit - hehehe...shit - that we do with that, but I probably won't. Shit's complicated).
I could start with food advertising, and how tactics of the porn and sex industry are used for food. In an image-dependent consumer culture, this is totally understandable.
Food, like sex, is messy. It doesn't always cooperate. That supposedly beautiful avocado turkey burger from Carls Jr might topple over while being photographed, the fries may become flaccid, the bun might not be as taut and tan and shiny as it needs to be able to make you abandon all other thoughts, and to suddenly feel like, I need that fucking burger, now. Forget my husband. Forget my kids. BURGER.
Things may not drip when they need to be dripping, and things may be dripping when they shouldn't. Food photography and porn (the really shiny kind) have a lot in common.
What happens is that we abandon reality in favor of idealistic images of our most necessary and innate urges. I feel like we likely do this to make these potent urges more manageable in a society whose functionality would be disrupted by these images. In doing so we create taboos that allow us to endlessly dance around the fact that SEX is SEX and FOOD is FOOD.
Suddenly biting down on a messy burger becomes a transgression, and becomes thusly exciting. I've often wondered if some vegetarians are unconsciously vegetarian because they need to create their own food taboos so that the potential for violating said taboos provides an erotic realm of possibility that would not have existed were they not vegetarian. This is something that I thought about a lot while reading Erotism, by Georges Bataille.
The idea is that we are very much still animals, and always will be. Rather than feeling like calling myself an animal is a degradation, I feel like it is an honor. Non-human animals have a lot of their shit way more together than we do. But anyhow, there are so many of us, and we are all so individually urgent beings, as well as self-absorbed and paradoxical. We are physically weak, and have been creating similar system upon similar system to remain governed, alive, fed, and fucked over millennia since as individuals, we may not be able to fend for ourselves without external means.
Shit. This is so much more complicated than I wanted it to be. Back to the weirdness happening in Food. An easy place to look at this is our recent preoccupation with BACON.
This is an image (I don't mean body image, I mean image-image) and diet-obsessed culture where food is often no longer just food, used as sustenance, as life, but is rather used as a dieting tool, a dieting enemy, an acceptable means of pornographic and transgressive enjoyment (see foodgawkers.com or food porn sites), a drug, or even a purse or pillow or wallet.
Bacon, then is an ultimate transgression in a variety of ways. It represents slaughter, filth, fat, grease, and even old-school values in a nation preoccupied with progress. Its plentiful leavings of fat can be used for a variety of almost-equally taboo creations, it sizzles, it drips, it's hard, it's soft, and most of all, it misbehaves. It makes its way to sexy burger billboards, and atop maple bars in Portland. Bacon is on the rise.
Bacon is the anecdote to a society simultaneously obsessed with dieting and foodie-culture, and yet plagued by obesity and an untrustworthy FDA.
Although this may all sound disparaging, I am not really mourning any of this. Yeah, the diet-obsessed culture, the obesity, etc...those are downers (I sound like a real tool glossing over this, but my main point is the formulation of taboos and how they function). Without these created taboos, the pleasures surrounding both food and sex would be limited. I likely would not get the deep, physical and psychological almost painful satisfaction that I do from masticating a rare steak were it not for the current taboos and paradoxes set in place around food. And around sex. My Catholic childhood and largely vegetarian and vegan adolescence set me up with some pretty sweet restrictions to violate.
Taboos keep it hot. And delicious. So much Bataille in my thoughts. I've definitely mentioned him in an earlier entry as well, but I feel like his writings surrounding human transgressions are so perpetually relevant, and keep getting manifested in numerous fascinating ways. I hope he wouldn't mind this blog.
I leave you now with Paula Deen riding things.
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