In honor of keeping my promise to publish something in between Crit weeks, here’s a poem. Maybe. I don't really know what to call it and I think I wrote it at some point last fall. I have no recollection of writing it, but reading it, I know exactly what I meant.
I ate a mini cucumber today
Gripped its body in my hand.
I bit its head off and
Crunched on its flesh.
I left my mouth open
Sloshed its juices out the side of my mouth.
I felt like a pig
Giddy for its slop.
I felt filthy but clean
Aligned with my nature.
Earth divine, can I hear you?
At the start of the pandemic when I was living at our college house in Austin, I developed this habit of buying the hottest salsa I could find and eating it until I started crying. I’d put it on tortilla chips (Julio’s, to be exact) and when I ran out of chips I’d use anything remotely similar. I used microwaved frozen broccoli at one point, under some guise that maybe I should watch my sodium intake. I’d sit down at our maple wood dining table, dip whatever vehicle I had in the jar, and quickly slurp it all into my mouth, making a mess on the table, my clothes, and my face. I’d only stop when my eyes and nose were running so badly I couldn’t keep going.
In practice, it’s disturbing and hilarious and a sign of something deeply amiss, but what made it simply fun was the fact that my roommates occasionally bore witness to the display. Maybe even partook in a couple of them too. Something about sharing those moments with other people makes them less concerning and more ridiculous. Probably some kind of symptom of growing up on the internet, where mining your weirdest habits can get you rich. (No further comments.) Probably also something about witnessing each other’s humanity and accepting it for what it is.
We all have our thing, the food that brings out our primal nature and renders us agentless against our instincts. How we feel about showing ourselves to others in that vulnerable state says a lot about our society. Very easy to extrapolate to European Victorian ideals of propriety and cleanliness and how a world built on racism and classism leaves us unable to accept our human behaviors and instead suppress them to seem “civilized” in the Western world. Even the way we eat is a product of colonialism. That’s why I think we should all recreate the tomato scene from LOTR at company dinners.
There’s a lot more to say on the nature of eating and what kind of eating is fine to do in white, western culture and what kind is frowned upon. We (being those from a Western cultural background) might consider sitting with the discomfort of a “messy” meal, and I think that’s why I wrote “Mini Cucumber” (I can’t name it that, can I?).
As always, I’d love to hear y’all’s thoughts, cuz I know you have them.