Epicurean Reflections
July 10, 2010
THE POSTMODERN ANTIQUARIAN writes:
I often tell my wife that I’m a materialist, but just a very bad one. The same is true for my Epicurean aspirations, and I’m not sure that’s a negative trait. Let me explain.
Last night, I indulged in a feast at one of the finest restaurants in our area. The first course consisted of raw oysters, served with a sauce of “compressed fennel” and “carbonated lemon.” I cannot tell you what compressed fennel is, nor can I explain how to carbonate a sauce, but I can tell you it was exquisite. Veal agnolotti with a carmelized broth and a tender rib-eye steak followed. The meat induced in me an almost infinite gratitude that I am not a vegetarian. I can neither spell nor pronounce the name of the dessert, which involved lightly fried pastries with a hazelnut sauce, but by then I was numbed with ecstasy.
However, by the time I had walked to my car after dinner, I experienced a strange attack of emptiness, a feeling of pointlessness that haunted me the next day. I cannot explain this. It made me wonder if food has an un-quantifiable mystical quality. My wife and I used to frequent a very fine restaurant, but the food always left me empty — not physically, but spiritually.
The well being I experience at home is never replicated when I eat at a restaurant, even when I’ve spent hundreds of dollars. Years ago I remember eating at a restaurant operated by a yoga sect. A yoga guy at the cash register told the story of a colleague whose anger suddenly flared in the kitchen. Everyone working in the kitchen yelled in unison, “‘Get him away from the food! Get him away from the food!'” Perhaps this was not such an absurd idea. Maybe love and affection, as well as anger, can affect the quality of food. Maybe whoever compressed the fennel and carbonated the lemon didn’t really love me.
— Comments —
Krsitor writes:
I am reminded of the famous passage in C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, wherein he is discussing the modern obsession with sex – which is to be distinguished from sexual love – and comparing it with an obsession for food:
You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act—that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?
One critic said that if he found a country in which such strip-tease acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that country were starving. He means, of course, to imply that such things as the strip-tease act resulted not from sexual corruption but from sexual starvation. I agree with him that if, in some strange land, we found that similar acts with mutton chops were popular, one of the possible explanations which would occur to me would be famine. But the next step would be to test our hypothesis by finding out whether, in fact, much or little food was being consumed in that country. If the evidence showed that a good deal was being eaten, then of course we should have to abandon the hypothesis of starvation and try to think of another one. In the same way, before accepting sexual starvation as the cause of the strip-tease, we should have to look for evidence that there is in fact more sexual abstinence in our age than in those ages when things like the strip-tease were unknown. But surely there is no such evidence. Contraceptives have made sexual indulgence far less costly within marriage and far safer outside it than ever before, and public opinion is less hostile to illicit unions and even to perversion than it has been since Pagan times. Nor is the hypothesis of “starvation” the only one we can imagine. Everyone knows that the sexual appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titillations.
A man goes to see striptease acts, and looks at pornography, because at heart he longs for the love of a woman who loves him so much that she wants to take off all her clothes and offer herself to him, to him in particular, and to no one else. A woman who will take off her clothes for the sake of the world at large is giving to any particular man only that portion of her sexual love equal to the ratio of him to all the men in the world; she is giving him 1/3,500,000,000 of her love. So that portion of her love is worth more than zero, but only by a little; it is not nearly enough to sate his desire (which I guess is why pornography can be addictive). What a man wants is a woman who will give him 1/1 of her sexual love; i.e., he wants a faithful, loving wife.
Likewise with food. Better a humble, nutritious meal that has been prepared for me with love, than an exquisite dinner prepared for the love of the art of cooking. The Food Channel is not popular because Americans are underfed, but because they are underloved. Ditto for porn.
