Food as Influencer: Today’s Special

The angel was a monster, the ghost its

costume: that’s why / we ate pork. Why we
ate songs and maybe too / why our nails
hurt when we fucked. Because of the posture of the cavity.
LUNA MIGUEL

The Cordovan Restoration. It rains, I’m bored: I turn on the TV. A public
network is filling up the dead hours of the afternoon with folksy street interviews.
Before I can switch to a different channel, possibly to the juicier tabloid shows on
the private networks, a restorator from Córdoba is asked about his philosophy. I
am not looking at the screen. I multitask, searching for entertainment on the TV
while ordering takeout on my phone. Prompted by the question, I assume that by
restorator they mean a white-coated professional who tactfully and lovingly restores
paintings for a museum. They are asking him about his philosophy, about his
aesthetic theory and practice, the principles he abides by when it comes to
restoring said paintings. I finally order a chicken burger and I look up, expecting to
be smacked in the face with an answer concerning pigmentation, humidity, and
craquelure. Instead, I see a sweaty cook, a face like a blistering pepper.
“My philosophy can be summarized in three words,” he says while
squeezing a singularly dirty rag. “Jamón, Jamón, Jamón.”
“Come again?” asks the interviewer with an anxiolytic smile.
“Very simple,” he explains, “jamón as a starter, jamón as main course, and
jamón as dessert.”
I raise a toast to the wit of the Cordoban restaurateur. Come to think of it,
cooks are the real restorators of national culture. Food restores the body and soul
much more than peeling off the coats of misapplied repaint from our national
pinacotheques. If Marcel Duchamp suggested we use a Rembrandt as an ironing
board, I suggest we use it as a dining table and serve up the very beef Rembrandt
painted. In Córdoba, it looks like—literally: the camera follows the restorator in his
titanic task of spreading slices of ham for each and every serving—there is a great
penchant for pork. Far from us to pass inquisitorial judgment here: this zeal for
ham has nothing to do with the hunger of the converso. That Córdoba was the
centuries-old capital of the Caliphate bears no relation with the porkphilia of
Spanish gastronomy. Nobody has read Marvin Harris here. Or if we have, it was by
accident and diagonally, and by now we have opportunely forgotten the bit where
the Hindus did not sacralize the cow until the Islamic invasion of India in order to
establish a cultural barrier and limit access to sources of proteins. Had I studied
anthropology, I would know that convivium (eating together) is a key factor in social
integration, which facilitates both commercium (the exchange of goods and services)
as connubium (intermarriage): the three pillars upon which all societies stand.
Because I haven’t studied anything, I am content to admire the work of the
Cordovan restaurateur, dishing out slices of jamón serrano, while a delivery guy
cycles through the rain with my chicken hamburger and my thick-cut french fries,
the kind which has tiny bits of fried potato skin on the edges. The app gave me the
option of rounding up the order, donating a pair of philanthropic cents to
humanitarian causes in Ukraine, and, of course, I tapped yes: да, да.

In vinacro veritas. One day, three wise men gathered around a pot of vinegar.
Seeing that neither of the two were making any movement, the first wise
man took initiative. He dipped one finger in the pot and tasted it. His face twisted
in pain. “This wine has gone sour,” he said. “We must reform customs and bring
back the correct ritual for grape fermentation so as to restrain this chaos.” His
name was Confucius.
Some minutes passed before the second wise man, too, took his turn and
tasted the wine for himself. Finally, he dipped his finger in the pot and tasted it. “It
is certainly bitter,” he said. “But wishing to correct and sweeten its flavor will
embitter us even more. The best course would be to completely eliminate the
desire to taste it.” His name was Buddha.
Moments later, the third and last wise man followed in the path of his
predecessors. He dipped his finger in the pot, and he, too, tasted it, but his face did
not twist in pain, lighting up instead. “In itself it is sweet,” he said, addressing the
other two wise men. “You are the ones who are embittered in your attempt to
judge it.” His name was Laozi.
This tale, summarizing the main differences between the three great schools
of Chinese philosophy, has been interpreted in multiple ways. There are
commentaries for all types, but to my mind none is as brilliant as Soledad
Ojizarca’s. The Uruguayan poet has called attention to the seemingly trivial that
these three wise men do not resort to using cutlery of any kind to taste the vinegar.
No ladles, no spoons, no bowls. They dip their fingers in the pot and stick it into
their mouths without ceremony. On this point, Ojizarca calls to mind the
etymology of imbecile: imbaculum, staffless. Lacking implements to eat and drink,
Ojizarca rightly asks whether these three men are helpless imbeciles or whether, on
the contrary, they stand above any trace of human imbecility. Ultimately, lacking
culinary tools could either indicate an extreme culinary primitivism or a subtlety
that defies our ordinary comprehension. Not in vain, the most refined cuisine in
the world is the Chinese, from which forks and knives, those sharp and pointed
white-weapon projectiles, were banished centuries ago. Depending on how you
slice it, chopsticks are either a form of regression or of progression toward those
primeval fingers that the three Chinese wise men dip (like imbeciles, who is to
say?) in the pot of vinegar.
What Ojizarca fails to comment on is the possibility, geographically absurd
but intellectually fruitful, that this pot, emptied by the labor of the three wisemen’s
fingers, was the same where Diogenes of Sinope lived caninely, masturbating in
public, retorting to those who looked down upon this practice that there was
nothing indecorous about it, and that it was a great misfortune that hunger
couldn’t be assuaged by rubbing one’s belly.

Surfaim fatale. The Life of Hunger is not only the best novel ever written about
anorexia, it is also not even about anorexia, and it isn’t a novel. Amélie Nothomb
patented a new literary genre. We’ll skip the part about blurring the boundaries
between fiction and non-fiction, since these boundaries exist exclusively in the
corrupt minds of journalists and literature professors—the two are increasingly
indistinguishable in my mind—and what sets Nothomb apart is not blending real
and imaginary, anybody can do that, but that she does it quick. Nothomb is really
fast, you don’t have time to get bored with her two-to-five page chapters, and her
two-hundred page books. In the miniaturization of contemporary literature, in the
drastic reduction of the average size of novels today, there’s not only the influence
of authors’ widespread precariousness, without time to write, and the laziness of
the public, without the concentration to read, but also unquestionable models like
that of Nothomb, who churn out tiny 50.000 word books every year.
Three decades have passed, more than thirty titles since her debut, and
Nothomb’s stomach is still rumbling. The Life of Hunger is about the desire to eat
the world whole, drink it up and swallow it down. With a first-person narrative
which we shouldn’t automatically slap on to the life of Nothomb, the narrator tells
us about her childhood, the hunger of the 1970s. In Japan and in China, in the
United States and in Bangladesh, the seventies starved the lips of a kid. The world
is famished for freedom and justice, but also for meat, sweets and drink. Raised on
alcohol from the age of 5, the narrator doesn’t shy away from water, through her
mouth and up to her neck, until a bunch of Bangladeshis taste her body by force
on a beach. Previously, her Japanese classmates had peeled and stripped her down
during recess to establish whether she was white inside. She was, and in New York,
the girls from her class would fight to clasp and sweat on her hand, on their way to
the park. The narrator was the brightest because she was always hungry and thirsty,
and “necessity is the mother of invention,” but after the rape on the beach she
loses her appetite, gets bad grades, stops reading and writing, and becomes
anorexic.
As an entrée, whetting the appetite and only dulling it once the hallucinatory
reading is complete, The Life of Hunger speaks in its first pages about an archipelago
in the Pacific where the feeling of hunger is unknown. Flora and fauna are so
generous that their inhabitants have had no need to develop any technological
ingenuity whatsoever. Despite the abundance of natural resources, foreign powers
have not bothered to exploit them. That which is not defended is not attacked
either, and the attitude of the natives toward the grudgingly potential colonizers
has always been: “Yes, please, come help us terminate this horrible cornucopia.”
There’s a cute geopolitical metaphor here for anorexia: the equivocal art of not
eating against an international backdrop where some are served too much food,
and some too little. Against Nietzsche’s overman, half machine, half animal,
Nothomb advocates for a fatal overhunger: a voracious mode of being in the
world, for which there’s always another bite, another word, another kiss, another
sip.

Two culinary dreams. I am late for my doctor’s appointment, or maybe I don’t

have an appointment, but I have to go to the doctor, because my back hurts and I
need a massage. He’s a private general practitioner, the kind who bills for signing
prescriptions for old ladies without even establishing their pathology. I have been
to his clinic a couple times, I could find it in my neighborhood with my eyes
closed. For some reason, in this dream, he also gives massages. Because I know
that he’s a highly sought-after doctor and that you have to sit down in the waiting
room for quite some time, I have brought a bunch of mandarins in my backpack
to eat in the interim. As soon as I step outside I realize that I’m not dressed for the
cold. At the clinic, all the patients crowd around the only heater that warms the
waiting room. All my neighbors are here, the people who have historically
refrained from saying hi, who look in the other direction when they cross my path
on the street, who go up and down the stairs when I occupy the elevator, who
whisper behind my back. Hesitantly, I take the last empty seat next to the heater
and begin to peel my mandarins without taking them out of my bag. taking them
out of my bag. I am not sharing with these assholes. All too late, when I have
already eaten three or four mandarins, I realize that the waiting room has no trash
can. I can’t leave the peels in my bag, their juices will distill, sticking to the sides of
the bag, only to ferment and rot inside. Seeing that none of my neighbors are
looking at me, I drop the contents of my bag inside the heater. It takes me a couple
minutes to realize my mistake. The room is steaming with a spicy and citrusy mist,
the heater exudes an orange liquid and the line of waiting patients doesn’t move,
not a single patient has gone in to see the doctor since I sat down. I must
intervene: the lid of the heater collapses and reveals a molting pulp that goes plop,
plop. I try to shut the lid, which is curiously not hot but room temperature, but the
heater contains more food waste than I was expecting. Next to my peels there is a
loaf of bread and two fried eggs. Embarrassed before my neighbors, powerless
before somebody else’s food, pushing the lid of the heater with all my might, I
force myself to snap out of my dream and I wake up rested, with my legs stiffened
by cramps, in my bed.
It seems I am not going to fall back asleep. It’s 6:30 am and in half an hour I
have to wake up to write my text about “food as influencer.” Thankfully, I soon
find myself in a touristic city, with cobbled bridges over a wide-flowing river. I am
ordering takeout at a restaurant that looks like a chain. As I am leaving, food in
hand, I notice that there is no bench that isn’t taken by a street CD vendor. I
return to the chain, not any less crowded than the street. All tables are taken, but in
all of them there are at least two empty seats. Before I sit down, for politeness’s
sake, I ask if they are vacant and they say no, that their occupants have gone to the
counter to order for the whole group. Nobody in the establishment has food, only
me, the rest are waiting for those in line, the absent customers, to bring it to them.
Impatient, I notice that my order is getting cold inside the paper bag when I see a
table occupied by a girl, alone, with about ten or twelve empty chairs around her.
Wordlessly I sit down in one of them and wolf down my order. The girl calls me
out, accuses me of harassment and rape, threatens to call the police, and squeezes
bottles of ketchup, mayo and mustard in my direction. I continue swallowing. I
don’t care if spurts of sauce are hitting me in the face and dripping down to my
plate. The table ends up completely smeared with red, white, and yellow squirts. At
that moment, the absent customers, the ones standing in line, show up and
immediately recognize me. “How can Ernesto Castro be sexist when he presented
Paul B. Preciado’s book?” is their only argument against the tricolored sauce girl.
The alarm goes off. I wake up and write these lines.

AI digs in. Ernesto Castro: Write a 300 words essay on the topic of “Food as
Influencer”.
ChatGPT: Food has always played a significant role in shaping cultures and
societies. It not only provides us with essential nutrients but also serves as a social
and cultural marker. From family gatherings to national celebrations, food is an
integral part of our lives. It influences our thoughts, behaviors, and even our
health.
Food has a unique way of bringing people together. Different cuisines offer an
insight into the culture and traditions of a particular community. For instance,
Indian cuisine is known for its aromatic spices and flavorful dishes. Each region of
India has its unique style of cooking, which reflects the local ingredients, climate,
and culture. Similarly, Japanese cuisine is known for its minimalism and use of
fresh ingredients, which is a reflection of the country's Zen philosophy.
Food also influences our health and well-being. Our dietary choices affect our
physical and mental health, and lifestyle diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and
obesity are linked to unhealthy eating habits. The rise of fast food culture has
resulted in a significant increase in obesity rates worldwide. However, on the flip
side, there is growing awareness about the importance of a balanced diet and the
benefits of incorporating local and seasonal ingredients into our meals.
Food also has a significant impact on the environment. The production,
transportation, and consumption of food contribute to greenhouse gas emissions,
deforestation, and water scarcity. The food industry's unsustainable practices have
led to a call for more sustainable food systems that prioritize local, organic, and
plant-based foods.
In conclusion, food is a powerful influencer that affects our lives in many ways. It
is a marker of cultural identity, a tool for social interaction, and a determinant of
our health and well-being. Therefore, we must be mindful of the food we consume
and the impact it has on our society and the environment. By making conscious
choices, we can harness the power of food for positive change.

Dine & Dash & Cash. Ulysses is best read wearing a bib. Otherwise, you
run the risk of drooling on your chest, or spatter your frock with the jettisons from
this agape. Already in the paragraph that introduces the protagonist,

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He
liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried
with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton
kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
 We’ve caught Mr. Bloom in the kitchen. Househusband, delighted to get his
hands dirty, Bloom is straightening his breakfast and straightening the missus’
breakfast too. And that of the meowing cat, to whom he serves a couple inches of
warm milk. From this point on we are awake to Bloom and Joyce’s antispeciesism
—the kind which leaves us no option but to become vegan, since it doesn’t regard
the end of animal suffering as plausible, least of all through ascetic market
mechanisms such as eliminating the consumption of this or that product, practices
only feasible to the extremely poor or the moderately wealthy. Bloomian and
Joycean antispeciesism is erected upon a familiarity with animals akin to that of the
shepherd who is up with the sun and shares the same penuries as the sheeps and
lambs that he will shear or slaughter in the immediate future. This long-suffering
shepherd, who witnesses the helpless fall of his dogs down the same black and
craggy chasm where he has slipped times out of mind; that old and wise shepherd,
aged by his wisdom, understands Darwin without the need of ever having heard
his name. If we are all animals, there’s much in the way of cannibalism in our diet.
Bloom works in publicity; he foists an advertisement with two keys to a “tea,
wine and spirit merchant” by the name of Keyes. He is himself a spirit merchant, a
shopkeeper of the spirit, well-versed in the consumption of souls and bodies. Souls
and bodies are consumed all throughout Ulysses, from the breakfast of the opening
chapters to the mental orgies of the last ones, going through the intervening
funeral and amuse-bouches, just as his Homeric ancestor. In a paper published by
the National Library of Ireland, the professor Kimberly J. Devlin sets “Homer’s
lack of taste” against Joyce’s hypersensible taste buds. In the Odyssey there’s enough
food to feed a village. Penelope’s suitors eat. Odysseus’s sailors eat. The slakeless
witches of the Mediterranean eat the sailors, after they metamorphose into swine.
According to Devlin, Homer has dictated “an epic with an oral fixation,” but he
never dwells on the taste of the “uberous flesh” of his animals, fruits, and humans.
The Odyssey narrates what’s seen and heard, rarely what’s touched, licked or
smelled. Joyce, on the contrary, incorporates the lesser noble senses to his tale. Just
as his wife fantasizes about hugging a priest just to get a whiff of their stench of
incense, Bloom equates adultery with polishing the dregs off somebody else’s plate.
For him, after the premature death of his only son, fucking for pleasure’s sake
seems as impracticable as shoving a cork back into a bottle of flat champagne.
Instead, he delights in what Devlin calls “tactile fetishism”: judging at a glance the
ruggedness and sinuosity of the women he comes across in the street. Bloom sits,
all expenses paid, at the feast for the senses that is Ulysses.
I purchased Doctor Devlin’s pamphlet at a steal in the James Joyce Centre
in Dublin, on an evening of leaves rustled by the wind, on my way to have dinner
at David Byrne’s. That’s where Bloom ends up having lunch, disgusted by the
smell, noise and sight of the mass of men salivating and chewing bovinely their
meat offerings. With sound commercial acumen, confident that most of the
novel’s fanboys have never actually held it in their hands, let alone read it, every
single establishment desecrated by Joyce currently sports a small plaque as place
where Ulysses took place. The only corner without commemorative signposting is
number seven Eccles Street, the address of the Blooms, unless we wish to find
commemoration in the maternity ward that cranes and mud-spattered bulldozers
were building on that street when I visited Dublin last year. Here, where the novel
ends, countless Dubliners will start up their existence. Since there is no corner that
goes unmentioned in his work, the city has become a bookworm’s theme park,
Disneyjoyce Dublin, a place nobody would visit were it not for its authors, most of
them voluntarily and permanently exiled. A European capital with half a dozen
museums dedicated to literature and not a single bookshop where the storefront
doesn’t make you cringe. Another proof that artists define themselves in
opposition to their surroundings, and that a country of amiable illiterates is more
stylistically stimulating than any coterie of opinionated liberal arts graduates.
But let us go back to Davy Byrne’s. Joyce describes it as a “moral pub”
where the client is not buffeted with idle talk. Yet, Bloom hears insidious enquiries
about his wife, followed by a yarn the length of his arm about that day’s horse race,
for which he has given, against his will, a bad tip. Not a wit the wiser, this tip will
result in a fight, later that night. For the time being he ponders whether to order
the potted meats on display. The curve in the wood of the bar he is resting on
reminds him of the first time with his wife, under wild ferns, on top of his coat, in
a field of blooming heather. “Joy: I ate it: joy,” he thinks. Though he perceives
dairy fermentation as corpses that rot, crumble, pale and wean the worms, he ends
up ordering a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy. While he relishes in
the wine, he fantasizes about eating or serving at a fine dining establishment on
Bleibtreustrasse, that is: the Street of Remaining Faithful. And then:

Yes but what about oysters? Unsightly like a clot of phlegm. Filthy shells.
Devil to open them too. Who found them out? Garbage, sewage they feed
on. Fizz and Red bank oysters. Effect on the sexual. Aphrodis. He was in
the Red bank this morning. Was he oyster old fish at table. Perhaps he
young flesh in bed. No. June has no ar no oysters. But there are people like
tainted game.
 Do we need to insist on the erotic insinuations of this passage? When I was
at Davy Byrne’s with my partner, it was no longer a “moral pub,” but a restaurant
with delusions of grandeur. It no longer offered canned food, but a black-carpeted
terrace, covered by foldable awning in red and black stripes, neatly shouldered by
potted shrubs which, if they were not made of plastic, looked like it. A warm red
light, wicker chairs outside, uncomfortable stools inside, painted ceilings, floral
motifs, pseudo-Greek figurines without any evident relation to Homer, a frieze of
numerical relief, sixes and nines arranged in sexual patterns, and Joyce’s books in a
display cabinet completed the establishment’s portrait. Royally ignoring the
tourists’-only gorgonzola sandwich and glass of burgundy, my partner and I made
a move for the tray of shellfish for two: trout, salmon—it now hits me that that
both trout and salmon count as shellfish here—, prawns, crab, lobster and oysters,
of course, which didn’t quite knock our socks off, barely managed to warm us up,
and did awfully little in the way of being an aphrodisiac, in marked contrast to the
three types of mayos on offer, each one a shade redder than the one before, and
the whole-grain bread by Guinness with butter, which we stuffed our faces with.
All teed up by the white wine, we thought of pulling a dine & dash, leaving without
paying our bill, without swiping our Red Bank card (Santander, in our case). But
we looked homeless, we had sweated through our tracksuits, we smelled foul after
a long day’s stroll, the bartenders had sat us at the back, far from the door, and
they kept their eyes on us. We ordered another basket of bread and kept on using
the crabs’ claws as provisional forks, milking what remained of butter and mayo.
We had long become aware that the whole of Dublin is buttered in grease or in
Guinness. The evening before we had stood in awe before the great factory of dark
beers, right by the city center, reflecting on the oily waters of the Liffey, across the
towering monument to Wellington. Which one of the two was more cyclopean,
whether the rockhard penis erected in honor of the generalissimo of our war of
independence, or those metallic dinguses, those silos like towers frothing their
alcoholic haze over the city—we couldn’t tell. I looked at my partner, I raised my
eyes from the shellfish, and I wish I had been able to remember that line, “We
learned to love in a bad restaurant,” which she wrote when I was still a vegan.

My Tripadvisor score: 7.5/10