Food For (Dirty) Thoughts
Oct. 19th, 2005 10:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_siobhanI made it to the food box and back in one piece, although I did run over my own foot a couple of times with the bundle buggy. And the feet of a couple of teenagers. (Not on purpose, but they were taking up the whole sidewalk.) And tripped up a woman who for some inexplicable reason was walking backwards down the sidewalk and only gave me a dirty look when I said, "Watch where you're going." So no skin off my ass.
I even managed to do a couple of useful things when I got home, like clean all the crap out of the mailbox. I get almost as much paper spam as I do the electronic variety. The number of ads I get in my mailbox for weight loss aids and gyms has finally surpassed the number I get for fast-food joints. ThIs is the final proof I needed that my neighbourhood has finally slid over the dividing line from ghetto to yuppie in the two years I've lived here.
Did you know that back in the '60s there used to be an meal-replacement bar called AIDS? I'm not kidding. I have an old box.
I actually cooked a turkey a few nights ago. My first ever. It turned out awesome. Turns out that a meal that you put in the oven and wander away from for five hours was exactly the right choice for No Attention Span Woman. This resulted in one of my absolute FAVOURITEST things ever, and in my opinion, the only reason to have turkey dinners in the first place - cold turkey leftovers.
I ripped the carcass apart yesterday and made stock out of the bones. Turkey legs are such bloody big things, they always symbolize abundance for me. Whenever I am brandishing one I always think of a) bopping somebody over the head with it and b) a film I saw years and years ago called The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones. It was a typical 70's treatment of a Henry Fielding novel in the classic "Round the Bend" style that everybody thought was funny thirty years ago, before The Onion and All Your Base.
The reason it always pops into my head is because of a scene where the lead character stops at a roadside inn for the night. There is one other person in the dining room, a woman traveling on her own. The two of them start flirting by eating at each other - licking the juice of fruit off their fingers, taking huge bites of meat, tearing into hunks of bread, the whole time staring at each other and making each move very deliberate. It's all unabashedly physical, and at the end the two of them scurry off together to the bedroom.
The rest of the movie is long gone, but that one scene has stayed with me ever since.
The connection the film makes between food and sex isn't original, in fact it's pretty damn obvious. For centuries people have been drawing comparisons between the sexual "appetites" and the culinary ones. I think Shakespeare even did a couple of riffs on the theme. But something that has been really fascinating me lately is the similarity I can see in moral attitudes towards the two.
The news of the American culture wars leak over the border and I read more and more talk about abstinence-only education. People vote against the rights of gays to get married. Womens' rights to their bodies are whittled away. God sneaks back into the classroom.
Commercials talk about how their products are "sinful", or "tempting". I've seen guys in red suits with horns shilling fattening food and women in wings and halos extolling the "heavenly" virtues of their "light" counterparts. Food has become good or bad. People who eat the food describe themselves as good or bad.
And women on television get smaller.
Being fat has become a moral issue. Fat people are denied health care or given substandard healthcare. People actually debate whether the public should fund health-care for those who are obese, because "it's a lifestyle choice". As is catching AIDS. Or having a child out of wedlock.
I get shit on a regular basis at work because people regularly see me eating a big bowl of fruit on my breaks. For "being so damn good all the time". Not because, you know, I might happen to really like fruit.
And women on television keep getting smaller. And eating disorders explode.
Could you make a film like that now? Could you show a lascivious buxom woman bursting out over her corset and tearing into a (phallic) loaf of bread with her teeth, biting down into a turkey leg the size of her head? Keeping pace with the man every step of the way, and thoroughly enjoying herself while she does it.
Try to picture Jennifer Aniston or Kirsten Dunst doing that now.
That's the kind of thing I think about when I'm eating turkey.
I even managed to do a couple of useful things when I got home, like clean all the crap out of the mailbox. I get almost as much paper spam as I do the electronic variety. The number of ads I get in my mailbox for weight loss aids and gyms has finally surpassed the number I get for fast-food joints. ThIs is the final proof I needed that my neighbourhood has finally slid over the dividing line from ghetto to yuppie in the two years I've lived here.
Did you know that back in the '60s there used to be an meal-replacement bar called AIDS? I'm not kidding. I have an old box.
I actually cooked a turkey a few nights ago. My first ever. It turned out awesome. Turns out that a meal that you put in the oven and wander away from for five hours was exactly the right choice for No Attention Span Woman. This resulted in one of my absolute FAVOURITEST things ever, and in my opinion, the only reason to have turkey dinners in the first place - cold turkey leftovers.
I ripped the carcass apart yesterday and made stock out of the bones. Turkey legs are such bloody big things, they always symbolize abundance for me. Whenever I am brandishing one I always think of a) bopping somebody over the head with it and b) a film I saw years and years ago called The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones. It was a typical 70's treatment of a Henry Fielding novel in the classic "Round the Bend" style that everybody thought was funny thirty years ago, before The Onion and All Your Base.
The reason it always pops into my head is because of a scene where the lead character stops at a roadside inn for the night. There is one other person in the dining room, a woman traveling on her own. The two of them start flirting by eating at each other - licking the juice of fruit off their fingers, taking huge bites of meat, tearing into hunks of bread, the whole time staring at each other and making each move very deliberate. It's all unabashedly physical, and at the end the two of them scurry off together to the bedroom.
The rest of the movie is long gone, but that one scene has stayed with me ever since.
The connection the film makes between food and sex isn't original, in fact it's pretty damn obvious. For centuries people have been drawing comparisons between the sexual "appetites" and the culinary ones. I think Shakespeare even did a couple of riffs on the theme. But something that has been really fascinating me lately is the similarity I can see in moral attitudes towards the two.
The news of the American culture wars leak over the border and I read more and more talk about abstinence-only education. People vote against the rights of gays to get married. Womens' rights to their bodies are whittled away. God sneaks back into the classroom.
Commercials talk about how their products are "sinful", or "tempting". I've seen guys in red suits with horns shilling fattening food and women in wings and halos extolling the "heavenly" virtues of their "light" counterparts. Food has become good or bad. People who eat the food describe themselves as good or bad.
And women on television get smaller.
Being fat has become a moral issue. Fat people are denied health care or given substandard healthcare. People actually debate whether the public should fund health-care for those who are obese, because "it's a lifestyle choice". As is catching AIDS. Or having a child out of wedlock.
I get shit on a regular basis at work because people regularly see me eating a big bowl of fruit on my breaks. For "being so damn good all the time". Not because, you know, I might happen to really like fruit.
And women on television keep getting smaller. And eating disorders explode.
Could you make a film like that now? Could you show a lascivious buxom woman bursting out over her corset and tearing into a (phallic) loaf of bread with her teeth, biting down into a turkey leg the size of her head? Keeping pace with the man every step of the way, and thoroughly enjoying herself while she does it.
Try to picture Jennifer Aniston or Kirsten Dunst doing that now.
That's the kind of thing I think about when I'm eating turkey.