Kylie OP on Food/eating!

I’ve been thinking a lot about how when I was twelve and I thought tomatoes were just the

ugliest things. Simply did not understand them on an ontological level. And onions – I thought

onions were hateful little creatures that grew underground specifically to spite me. I remember

watching my dad make a tomato and onion sandwich in the kitchen when the counter hit just at

my forehead and wondering, literally what is going on in that man’s brain. But with the normal

molting processes of growing older and wiser and learning how to do the things you think just

come naturally to adults, I learned that I, rather ironically, really, really love red onions and

tomatoes. There’s a scene in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance where Geum-ja, when presented a

cake made out of tofu (symbolizing a clean slate/forgiveness), shoves her face into it and eats it

and weeps, her daughter hugging her from behind. It’s the moment she accepts that she has done

enough not to be forgiven for her “big” and “little” sins, but enough to move on from them and

live a better life with her family. Every time I dice my red onions with terrible abandon and think

wistfully of the tomatoes I bought and devoured from small vendors in Italy, I think about that

scene. And I think about that moment I watched my dad slicing tomatoes on the counter, eating

the onions I used to think were so hellacious.

Barry Jenkins said that cooking for someone “is a deliberate act of nurturing. This very

simple thing is the currency of genuine intimacy.” And I think that’s fairly obvious for most

people. We recognize the effort that goes into kneading and rolling out dough and peeling it off

the dining room table, the care in overseeing the baking of a moist cake, the precise alchemy of

combining flavors. But I think there’s more to our relationship with food and its relationship to

our relationships with others– we sit down at meals together and laugh over the day’s

misfortunes, or we sit in silence at a dinner table and poke at the lukewarm tilapia lying nakedly
on a plate. We cut up salad leaves to make our bites more palatable to the person across from us,

and we sit and rest for a time after dinner to let the unsavory bits digest. Bakhtin describes the

grotesque body as a thing so enmeshed with the fecund, generative world that it outgrows itself,

“transgressing its own limits” – seen most especially in things that open out into the world, like

the mouth. A boy once loved a drawing Maurice Sendak wrote him so much that he ate it. These

are the creative, destructive, digestive processes we experience with food and the preparation or

consumption of it. Obviously, I don’t always think about Bakhtin when I bake butter tarts and

spanakopita with my mother on Thanksgiving or when I bake my fourth batch of beer bread for

my roommates, but I think all of that is involved with food just the same. It’s something about

desire – what Anne Carson described as the thing that “confounded…boundaries of body,

categories of thought...All our desires are contradictory, like the desire for food.” Have you ever

loved something so much you just wanted to eat it up, like old ladies used to say in cartoons? I

think our relationship to food and its relationship with us is like that – expressed in a fairly

straightforward way with the things we can eat, and complicated by the one’s we’re not meant to.