I have been chortling through Geoff Nicholson's essay, "Go Ahead. Spoil My Appetite," in the New York Times, and I just had to share the best tidbits from it. It's all about how he prefers novels in which the descriptions of what the characters are eating are either nonexistent or disgusting, so that he doesn't have to sit there feeling ravenous and food-envious "while sitting alone on the couch sustained only by instant coffee."
He prefers to read about characters suffering because of what they're eating:
"In 'Gravity’s Rainbow,' ... Tyrone Slothrop samples various hideous English candies, flavored with the likes of quinine, pepsin, eucalyptus, tapioca, until, choking, he’s offered a Meggezone, 'the least believable of English coughdrops.' This is a real product, a nasty little black lozenge, still available, and if my childhood memory is reliable, Pynchon’s description of its effects — 'Polar bears seek toenail-holds up the freezing frosty-grape alveolar clusters in his lungs' — gets it about right."
"'Moby-Dick' ... struck me as a vast smorgasbord ... of bad eating: the Try Pots Inn, where even the milk tastes of fish; the grim formal meals aboard the Pequod; and the notorious scene of Stubb’s Supper, in which the second mate gets a craving for whale steak and sends a crew member to slice some flesh off a poor dead beast attached to the side of the ship.... As Stubb eats he hears sharks in the water far below tearing apart the rest of the whale carcass."
And finally:"'Naked Lunch' contains my favorite description of disgusting food. Burroughs writes: 'In Egypt is a worm gets into your kidneys and grows to an enormous size. Ultimately the kidney is just a thin shell around the worm. Intrepid gourmets esteem the flesh of The Worm above all other delicacies. It is said to be unspeakably toothsome.' This is surely Burroughs’s own hallucinatory invention, but I’d still like the recipe."
Next up: some of my favorite good reads for good eats : )
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