The way to a man’s tummy is through his heart, i.e. through his sense of yummy.
Eating–along with dancing, making love, listening to music, drinking, the ingesting of power plants, watching spectacles and the like–is an archaic technique of ecstasy (merci, Mircea).
Writing about food as if he were stranger, an alien, to eating, as if he has never salivated or smacked his lips or hissed through his teeth or cursed the waiter for taking so long, makes the writer essentially a Nmiaci (an acronym that I will explain later).
Otherwise, the great ones from Homer to Tolstoy to Melville to James Joyce and Henry Miller and Jorge Luis Borges write about eating with the same hearty appetite they exude when they write about the beauty and wonder and horniness of sex .
Almost. The latter is really holy ground you are stepping on when you take it into your head to write hornography.
One superb artist who appears to know this is the young American actor Edward Norton, if one may draw a spontaneous conclusion from his sex scene in the movie Fight Club.
When Sir James Frazer wrote that the primal people regarded the food they ate, say rice, as a god, he was saying that for the primitive eating was a mindblowing experience.
The first time Westerners saw our archipelago, their eyes went wide as the Pacific. Why, what did those men see?
First of all, what was essentially those men’s condition?
They were starved! In more ways than one.
They had not seen a woman for what seemed–what was–an eternity. The Pacific Ocean was eternity.
And they had not eaten properly for about as long. They had gone catching rats. Shaved the ship’s masts and boiled the shavings and drank the brew of misery.
Then behold, the bright islands.
Behold the tropic eats. Rice, fish, fowl, fruits, coconut water. And the brown women. The Chocolate Hills of Bohol, except it was Leyte!
If histories are suspicious, maybe it’s because historians hardly tell us what the eats of the greats were.
The same indifference that we find in the anthropologists. We know that Julius Caesar had epilepsy but we are forever ignorant of what his favorite bites were, excepting Cleopatra’s chikinini.
Same with Alexander, Napoleon Bonaparte, Columbus, Copernicus, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth, Sappho, Shakespeare, Bismarck, Karl Marx, Bach, Beethoven, Rembrandt, El Greco, Freud, Einstein. If the historians ever mention food, it is never on account of who it was that particularly loved eating it but always for a historical significance.
For instance, if noodles are mentioned alongside the name Marco Polo, it’s not because Marco Polo loved noodles–we don’t know that! — but because it was he who brought noodles to the West from the East upon his return the outcome of which was the birth in the West of spaghetti.
Why would the late 19th-century Spanish authorities in Negros Oriental forbid people to talk about the legendary Buhawi, real name Ponciano Elopre, after the incendiary’s death?
The answer is: precisely because he was legendary! Buhawi had entered legend and poetry.
Thus, what the authorities were doing was demythologization. The tales of power were called leyenda negra–which was to not only discredit but, as the word implies, denigrate Buhawi.
Leyenda negra sounds like something nice to eat, like leche flan and pudding and fruit cake and gulaman and, of course–how could one not think of it right away–maja blanca.
Perhaps someone should invent this dessert, if only to let historians eat their words literally.
(Nmiaci: No man is a coney island.)