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Stanislaw Lem wrote a weird little book called "The Perfect Vacuum"--a collection of book reviews of non-existent books, the sort of offering that might be found on a shelf of a Borges library. Anyway, one of the "books"--"Sexplosion"-- describes a world where, due to some vaguely-referenced chemical accident, sex ceases to be pleasurable. Legislations are passed to ensure reproduction, blah blah blah, but the "book" and the review mainly focus on the void that is left and how that void is filled by food--the food pornography that emerges, the taboos around food that arise, the debate over teaching the gastrological processes to schoolchildren. It's kind of like "Do You Want My Opinion?" by M.E. Carr, but with food in place of individuality. Trimalchio--one, Ayn Rand--zero.
Anyway, I was thinking of that Lem story, as I realized that I am in full throes of yet another zeitgeist-bound syndrome: USAnorexia.
People, I am scared of food. When I try to grocery-shop, it's like I am channeling some Victorian child, who is compelled to masturbate, but the compulsion is accompanied by a terror of the "this will make me go blind!" variety. Except in my case, with buying food, it's probably true. About the going blind. Or maybe not blind, but surely between the
a) genetically-modified soy that I envision, in my nightmares, assaulting my hormone production centers, alternately as malicious green vines engaged in some kind of GM plant tentacle rape of my pituitary gland, or deploying Commander Tofu and his squadron through my veins to destroy with prejudice
b) mad cow disease, which leads to my boyfriend frequently complaining that I am "paranoid and controlling" because I will not procure or cook anything involving beef for him
c) G.W. Bush's complete destruction of the FDA, when combined with the fact that Bill Clinton bestowed the MFN title on a country that laces food with melamine, like the asshole drug dealer that for a while supplied my erswhile college campus with cocaine cut with Elmer's glue, soaks cuttlefish in calligraphy ink, makes soy sauce from human hair, and feeds eels birth control pills
d) pesticides, BGH, and god knows what else (but do read a brilliant book called "My Year of Meats" for some eye-opening possibilities)
if I don't go blind...I will...I don't know what, exactly, all I know, is I am having a horrible fear of contamination vis-a-vis food, which for all intents and purposes functionally reduces me to a kindred spirit of that girl from all those anorexic-ballerinas YA books, who, like, cuts a green apple into four pieces and eats them AND NOTHING ELSE over the course of the day.
I suspect the larger problem is, I feel alienated from my food. As much as I think many trends in food consumption are fads, desperate compensatory mechanisms arising from the fact that "Real Food" has become a retronym, and responding to the general anxiety about the industrial-scale commodification of food and the ensuing contamination phobia with highly specialized menus that focus around exclusion and control, working on the same principle as anorexia, I GET the whole "buy local" thing. It's like, generally, I am alienated from my food along two vectors: mode of production and geographical distance; the "buy local" thing somewhat mediates the latter. But in terms of the former...man, for Lukacs sex was really all about capitalism, and for me, taking a subconscious page from Lem's phantasmagoria, I suppose, food is all about capitalism. I feel that this system is insane and inhuman, and I somatize and embody that in my food consumption. Hence my USAnorexia. Here is proof:
1. Any time I am shopping in Whole Foods, I think about The Apocalypse. The friendlier the service is, the more moms-with-babies-in-hemp-slings I see, the more lovingly the nutritional virtues of the samples are extolled, the more I envision how all these people will kill each other over shreds of garbage in a "Blindness"-type scenario. NB: this does not happen in Stop-n-Shop. I am just afraid of the food there more, but minus the abjection. Somehow my food phobia is compartmentalized from the class issues at play in my grand syndrom of USAnorexia.
1a. In similar vein, whenever I see that commercial for Olive Garden on TV, where a woman comes in and says she is looking for her date, and ha-ha-ha, it's funny, because she means her little toddler son, I keep thinking that the light outside the restaurant is the light that I imagine would accompany The Apocalypse.
2. I recently had a dream where all food became this one substance that was sold either in, like, bullion cubes or in cans, it was called NATURELLE and had an ambiguously ethnic woman with charcoal eyebrows an assault rifle on the label, and ALL food was that, it was like the food equivalent of that scene in "Being John Malkovich" where John Malkovich goes through his own portal. So supposedly all food was the same, but there were special stores where you could buy NATURELLE made from a mixture of fish kelp and crumbled brick, which were the two certified "natural" substances. The stores were you could buy this mixture were called BRICK AND MARTYR.
3. I have a strong paranoia that ever since Walmart started selling Organic, that label became meaningless, thus I am scared of ALL meat now, not just non-organic meat. I am also scared of everything that could possibly contain wheat gluten and thus melamine. I am scared of fruit with pesticies, and I am scared that fruit without pesticides is, in fact, secretly sprayed with pesticides.
4. I went to Whole Foods the other day and I bought ingredients that even Iron Chef couldn't make one full meal involving all major food groups from. I was buying ingredients that fell into the category of "these don't scare me," which is an ever-shrinking category.
5. I want to build a homunculus goat and keep it in my study and drink its milk, but I am not sure a homunculus would be considered organic.
6. I want out of this country before I malnourish myself.
7. Do you have another globe?
Anyway, I was thinking of that Lem story, as I realized that I am in full throes of yet another zeitgeist-bound syndrome: USAnorexia.
People, I am scared of food. When I try to grocery-shop, it's like I am channeling some Victorian child, who is compelled to masturbate, but the compulsion is accompanied by a terror of the "this will make me go blind!" variety. Except in my case, with buying food, it's probably true. About the going blind. Or maybe not blind, but surely between the
a) genetically-modified soy that I envision, in my nightmares, assaulting my hormone production centers, alternately as malicious green vines engaged in some kind of GM plant tentacle rape of my pituitary gland, or deploying Commander Tofu and his squadron through my veins to destroy with prejudice
b) mad cow disease, which leads to my boyfriend frequently complaining that I am "paranoid and controlling" because I will not procure or cook anything involving beef for him
c) G.W. Bush's complete destruction of the FDA, when combined with the fact that Bill Clinton bestowed the MFN title on a country that laces food with melamine, like the asshole drug dealer that for a while supplied my erswhile college campus with cocaine cut with Elmer's glue, soaks cuttlefish in calligraphy ink, makes soy sauce from human hair, and feeds eels birth control pills
d) pesticides, BGH, and god knows what else (but do read a brilliant book called "My Year of Meats" for some eye-opening possibilities)
if I don't go blind...I will...I don't know what, exactly, all I know, is I am having a horrible fear of contamination vis-a-vis food, which for all intents and purposes functionally reduces me to a kindred spirit of that girl from all those anorexic-ballerinas YA books, who, like, cuts a green apple into four pieces and eats them AND NOTHING ELSE over the course of the day.
I suspect the larger problem is, I feel alienated from my food. As much as I think many trends in food consumption are fads, desperate compensatory mechanisms arising from the fact that "Real Food" has become a retronym, and responding to the general anxiety about the industrial-scale commodification of food and the ensuing contamination phobia with highly specialized menus that focus around exclusion and control, working on the same principle as anorexia, I GET the whole "buy local" thing. It's like, generally, I am alienated from my food along two vectors: mode of production and geographical distance; the "buy local" thing somewhat mediates the latter. But in terms of the former...man, for Lukacs sex was really all about capitalism, and for me, taking a subconscious page from Lem's phantasmagoria, I suppose, food is all about capitalism. I feel that this system is insane and inhuman, and I somatize and embody that in my food consumption. Hence my USAnorexia. Here is proof:
1. Any time I am shopping in Whole Foods, I think about The Apocalypse. The friendlier the service is, the more moms-with-babies-in-hemp-slings I see, the more lovingly the nutritional virtues of the samples are extolled, the more I envision how all these people will kill each other over shreds of garbage in a "Blindness"-type scenario. NB: this does not happen in Stop-n-Shop. I am just afraid of the food there more, but minus the abjection. Somehow my food phobia is compartmentalized from the class issues at play in my grand syndrom of USAnorexia.
1a. In similar vein, whenever I see that commercial for Olive Garden on TV, where a woman comes in and says she is looking for her date, and ha-ha-ha, it's funny, because she means her little toddler son, I keep thinking that the light outside the restaurant is the light that I imagine would accompany The Apocalypse.
2. I recently had a dream where all food became this one substance that was sold either in, like, bullion cubes or in cans, it was called NATURELLE and had an ambiguously ethnic woman with charcoal eyebrows an assault rifle on the label, and ALL food was that, it was like the food equivalent of that scene in "Being John Malkovich" where John Malkovich goes through his own portal. So supposedly all food was the same, but there were special stores where you could buy NATURELLE made from a mixture of fish kelp and crumbled brick, which were the two certified "natural" substances. The stores were you could buy this mixture were called BRICK AND MARTYR.
3. I have a strong paranoia that ever since Walmart started selling Organic, that label became meaningless, thus I am scared of ALL meat now, not just non-organic meat. I am also scared of everything that could possibly contain wheat gluten and thus melamine. I am scared of fruit with pesticies, and I am scared that fruit without pesticides is, in fact, secretly sprayed with pesticides.
4. I went to Whole Foods the other day and I bought ingredients that even Iron Chef couldn't make one full meal involving all major food groups from. I was buying ingredients that fell into the category of "these don't scare me," which is an ever-shrinking category.
5. I want to build a homunculus goat and keep it in my study and drink its milk, but I am not sure a homunculus would be considered organic.
6. I want out of this country before I malnourish myself.
7. Do you have another globe?
