To write this blog is to find new ways of describing how food is disgusting.

I hate cooking. Have I mentioned that? Also I want to do nothing but cook.

On the one hand, the need to eat is an obstacle to the rest of life. I don't want to have to eat. But I'm always eating to preempt hunger--not so much a a desire to eat as a visceral awareness that I need to eat. Hastily and begrudgingly I try to fill myself with adequate food so that I can get on with life. Can’t I get this over with?

Most mornings all I really want is tea. I want to have my time with tea, or I should say of tea: it is supposed to pull me out of time’s regular flow into tea time. Tea is in this way a kind of pastry. However tea is in reality never enjoyable by itself. One has to be enjoying something else--to be enveloped by, focused on, or occupied by something else for tea time to happen (or not happen) at all, if it does. Usually, lacking in some other enjoyment, tea time really is no time at all, in the wrong way. It passes quickly, bringing me almost immediately to tepid sloshings of acrid, camel liquid--then out of (in the sense of having run out) but very much in time and out of tea. So, dispassionataely, I cook breakfast out of necessity. This is how I hate cooking.

On the other hand I want the same impossible thing from cooking that I want from tea. I want to escape through cooking. I want the process to be involving enough that I forget everything else. I want a kind of productivity for which there is no need. The taste of the results, really, is not all that important.

Biscotti are dry, crumbly, tasteless things. Hunks of stuff to have with coffee. By themselves they are blah. Good coffee has a slight aroma of shit. This is an incomplete metaphor that doesn’t work; it doesn’t just leave a slight trace behind, it leaves whole swaths fallow.

One can’t not eat, and one can’t only cook--then one would be a cook, and would have to get one’s jollies elsewhere.

Corn Dodgers & Lembas

"True Grit" (1969) has corn dodgers.  The Lord of The Rings has lembas.

I could pretend to subtly treat these foods with their very different functions in their respective narratives, but the truth is I'm wrapping them both, and all of their cousins that I'm too lazy to research, into a doughy mass of sloppy exemplarity called "traveller's food."  Traveller's food is at the heart of one of high fantasy's fantasies: the long journey on foot.  (Westerns share this, but by far more often on horse.)  An adventurer, Bilbo might reminisce, does not travel bogged down with food.  No, he pops out the door with a knapsack and a cloak and is on his way.  In his knapsack he has a few bits of traveller's food--some bread and cheese perhaps (or some corn dodgers).  Traveller's food is rations but romanticized--hard tack but less disgusting while just as imperishable.  Despite its portability it is highly sustaining.

Traveller's food is one of the more extreme ways that food can compel that I have been trying to communicate.  Can one ever really make traveller's food?  No, but if you're me as a teenager, its impossibility can be easily forgotten. There was a time when I labored under the illusion that I could walk for days in the mountains with nothing but the biscuits I had baked before embarking.  The fact that I always came back before the next day was due to a personal failing and was not a reason for disillusionment.  Moreover it wasn't precisely that I went home; I simply stopped being the adventurer.  I paused the game.  No, the conflicting logics of "it was a personal failing" and "I paused the game" are not problematic.  They exemplify the necessary discontinuity of living in two.  In this manner I adventured for weeks in the wooded mountains while only doing so for an hour every day or two.  On the one hand adventuring army of one, on the other, at home on my computer.  (Not a strange combination at all, actually.)  The biscuits, obviously, did what they were supposed to.

Pastry's Conspiracy

In The Last Unicorn nothing is quite what it seems. Great monsters are puffed up from the aspirations of common animals with a bit of magical trickery, and a unicorn goes about unrecognized as anything more than a white mare. The book’s tangle of seeming and being is much like what one encounters when one tries to unravel tasting and eating.

Food may be elevated to the snobby heights of having a “palette” because at some level it is a bare necessity. As animals, to live is to eat. There’s no getting around that. But we may sculpt food and manipulate it into dreams that could otherwise not be dreamt. Eggs may, for instance, be separated and whipped into sugary clouds. This is pastry.

The whole object of pastry, it seems to me, is to create something unreal. With pastry we may believe briefly that hunger and nourishment do not exist, and that beauty and taste are everything. Defined this way pastry comes to include not all desserts, but things such as ice cream, candy, and, liminally, some forms of haute cuisine, decorative bento boxes, and even molded gelatine. It is a strain of magic in cookery. In a purely imagined history it began as delights for jaded court royalty and eventually expanding to industrially produced Hostess cakes.  The empire of pastry has wriggled its way into the fabric of many lives and has necessitated enormous quantities of sugar plantations. Unlike the Illuminati, there is no one to cackle at bringing abstractions into the world. There is no pastry sorcerer* triumphantly grinning and wringing his hands. Pastry is its own sorcerer, its own cabal and its own cult leader, and it has no more control over its destiny than those that do its bidding.

The meringue is a meagre beast, yet as beautiful and powerful as it is full of air.

* Although there are pastamancers and saucerors.