Tuesday, 21 April 2015

It's better to talk while eating

That way, you can ignore how disgusting the act
of eating is, especially if you're looking at somebody
famous.
[Hillary, Queen of Chipotle]
I've been developing a theory about how ugly
the act of eating is. I grew up in the post-hippy
era in Canada and we made fun of the older
generation that did everything in public

kissing, petting, f^**king, grooming
and though  we were not prudes, we 
kinda saw that "total freedom" to do what you want
makes for a very ugly scene. 
Italians call it 
bruta figura

That also meant changes in swimwear. Gone
were the budgey-smuggler nutbag Speedos
for guys and back to swim trunks. In this example,
all you have to be is an aware person, with
your eyes open to see how it doesn't help 
guys to have their frozen gonads on display,
in public, cuz you're not getting sex there.
If you were to, you'd be leaving. But it's called
swimming. not leaving.
This rhetorical position has nothing bad to say
about chicks in bikinis. That stuff is quite 
alright.

Anyway, in public life you have to tolerate
lots of things, like idiots that cause you stress.
We also have to deal with doing things amongst
this amorphous mass, like eating.

I think eating is ugly because it harks back to
primordial times when eating was part of survival in the
wild and meant lots of blood and guts and K9
teeth.

The following documentary only scratches
the surface of this primeval drive:

Actually Yankovic represents well our position about
being "cool" and how to puncture egos.

Anyway a famous cook noted this unedifying
habit seen as people follow politicians:

[is that processed rat parts, or humans they're eating?]

checkit: Guardian


Ed Miliband and the infamous bacon sandwich; David Cameron and the notorious hot dog.
Jay Rayner
Sunday 19 April 2015 10.00 BST
There’s one photograph all politicians fear: the one of them eating

Politicians used to be allowed to be distant and dignified. And when it comes to eating in public, it should stay that way. Just ask Ed Miliband or David Cameron

Short of being photographed as one of those curving toilet doors on a Virgin Train slides gently open, revealing a mess of bare knees and shirt tails, there is one photograph that the modern politician fears more than any other: the eating shot. Look at what that image of Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich did to him: the way the lips folded back and curled, how the eyes began to roll back in his head like he had reached some private moment of truth. That one image raised a brutal question: could you imagine this man, the one with the expression like the ketamine has just kicked in, running the country?

Now consider all the politicians run ragged by the election campaign so far, and have pity on their souls. For all day every day what they are thinking is this: please God, let nobody take a picture of me eating. It so terrified David Cameron that, apparently haunted by Miliband bacon sandwich gate, he responded to a hot dog encountered on the campaign trail by eating it with a knife and fork. And he still managed to look a bit of a knob.

It’s terribly unfair. In the old days politicians were allowed to be dignified and remote figures, other-worldly emissaries from Planet Leadership. Now, in the age of the selfie and the close-up, we insist they be just like us. We insist they be human. And what could be more human than the act of eating? Eating is genuinely a shared experience. The problem is it’s an ugly, ungainly shared experience. It’s just too human.

Try watching the people you love eating. It’s a mess. As you open your mouth, there’s a flash of wobble and pink of the sort the pathologist will see when they come to conduct the inevitable postmortem on your chilling cadaver. There is the sticky shine of saliva, there’s the way your eyelids flutter, your lips roll outwards. Ever seen a German Shepherd running excitedly towards its owner, its tongue flapping in the wind? That’s you, photographed eating, only without the excitement.
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This shouldn’t be regarded as a negative. Eating is messy because it’s meant to be. Show me someone who daintily forks away morsels between tidy, pursed lips and I will show you someone who could never be my friend. Recently I was invited to participate in a wretched “art” project, which involved eating with other people in silence. No surprise that it would be in Berlin. I would rather lick the inside of my composting box than take part in something like that which sucks the life from the dining table. Eating should be noisy and generous, a mess of flailing body parts.

Curiously, moving images of people eating are fine, which is good because television is full of them. Some of them are of me. It’s the freeze frame that doesn’t work. Even Barack Obama, the coolest politician on the planet, looks unelectable when photographed eating. If you really want to put yourself off your lunch Google the image of Barack Obama and David Cameron eating together at a ball game. They look like unloved cats expelling fur balls. Me, I refuse to be photographed eating. It’s a red line. I won’t do it. And do you know who else was never photographed eating? Winston Churchill, a chap who knew a thing or two about maintaining his dignity. That’s who. I rest my case.