It has been said, by some, that a good meal is better than sex. While this is hard to quantify, some meals do come fairly close. And the comparisons are appropriate: Our appetites before, and the sensations we experience as we dine, our insatiable hunger for something so all-consuming and delicious one feels as though they will never get enough, rank cheeses, herbs and spices that envelop the senses.
The smell of onions cooking in butter. There is very sensual about that smell. Add the onions to your steak, cut thin and cooked rare. Vegetables from the garden, asparagus, Brussels sprouts, broccoli cooked in oil and salt and lemon. Have something from rivers or ocean: Trout cheeks are the best part of the fish, as soft and nearly as rich as pork belly. Honey with the cheese.
Tension builds as you wait for your food to cook and the smells and the feelings float through the air around you. And as sexual tension comes from a strong want/desire/need in our brains and bodies that goes unrequited, postponed and growing stronger with each moment that passes, so too can the same be said about the feeling of want in the kitchen – waiting for dinner to be done, for breakfast to be ready, for the coals to grow hot enough to lay meat or produce across them, for the meal to arrive on plates and in bowls to be eaten without shame.
When We’re Hungry
But sometimes, as with sex, satisfaction is the death of desire: The meal ends and leaves the wanting as still the most prevalent piece. Like a poor sexual partner (of which there has been many for all of us), a poor meal leads to disappointment. Left wanting more, left unsatisfied, is it better to be left wanting than to have something that reminds you that life is often full of disappointment when it could have be so very, very beautiful?
But, better, and (so much) more memorable, sticking in your mind, burned there forever, is what does satisfy completely. So good, too good almost the words leave us unable to describe what we feel. Feelings throughout the entire body. It is the energy running from head to toe, the *tingling* left at the end of fingertips, the involuntary smiles that curve lips upwards. The increase in heart rate and explosion from tongue to thought and back again.
I told a girlfriend once, “I love your smile.”
She said, “Thank you.”
“I will fill it with good things to eat.”
And she said, “Marry me.”
But we have a strange relationship with food in this country – this country of excesses, either too much or too little. Overindulge to the point of obesity and diabetes, or cut out completely (gluten-free by choice this week, or vegan, or simply not eating at all) while not understanding the true, tangible good and the beauty that comes from a meal.
Conversely, and perhaps unsurprisingly, we have a strange relationship with sex in this country as well.
My roommate in college lived in a room right next door to mine. It was a small house near campus. The sounds of him having sex with his boyfriend and me having sex with my girlfriend would blend together in a beautiful chorus (or a symphony) of cross-gender pleasure. And after we would eat together at the table, in varying states of undressed still humming and warm. Eating and laughing. What had transpired moments before no longer as important than the state of perpetual bliss and hunger we had found ourselves in.
The frying pan sizzling with eggs. Toast in the toaster. A frozen pizza in the oven. Anything, really, on a college student’s budget, that we had in the house put onto plates to be eaten, fingers, crumbs, wiping sweat leftover on brows, underneath the single light at the kitchen table/in the kitchen.
This was unique perhaps. The traditional dinner table looks less like this, both with less intimacy (often/usually) and with more decorum – my grandfather wouldn’t let me sit down at the dinner table without a shirt.
Dining, and Sex, as Performance
When I think back to our largest (most memorable, rather) traditional meals, typically/often associated with special events like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, or Sunday dinners after church, what comes to mind is the anticipation for the meal, waiting to be satisfied. For potatoes, chicken and ribs, salads with pecans or walnuts and pears, tall glasses of lemonade, hot dish (not nearly as hot as the name implies, usually macaroni noodles, ground beef, canned tomatoes, salt and butter), peas and carrots, and desserts of pies, bars (peanut butter bars, another Minnesota specialty), cakes, pudding.
And everything in between: The dinner table as the arena for families to come together, to butt heads, maybe, or share and appreciate. Those holidays and special days bringing the whole family together. Family and friends, acquaintances, people we might not normally wouldn’t spend time with on the street sitting across from us, eating together. And when we eat together we are forced to converse and talk to one another and connect.
Luis Bunuel understood this well. May of his greatest film scenes (and one of the greatest film scenes in cinema history) revolve around dining, eating, drinking.
Dining in large groups, i.e., dining surrounded by people, is something of a performance – you’re supposed to follow rules. Etiquette is most-important. Have something to say, have amusing anecdotes and personality. Know how to use a knife and fork properly at the very least and know when to groan appreciatively and compliment, decline third helpings, pass the butter, salt, wine. Know what to say, or not say when you’re crazy aunt goes off, or racist uncle speaks offensive about the headlines in the news today. Understand inherently, the things that make for the experience to be enjoyable.
Just as you are also in the bedroom: Being a good dining companion and a good love maker are two things deserving of praise. Unforgivable, and worthy of ridicule when mis-performed.
But all it takes, on some level, is an appreciation of these things. These things that bring the utmost joy and pleasure for us as humans. The sensations, the appetites, the insatiable hunger for something so perfect you simply cannot get enough.
Take out the politics, the stale traditions, the droll need to perform and instead let loose to let mouths and bodies and minds enjoy. With sex and with food, two things rooted in pleasure in ways that nothing else really can be, there is need only to feel. It is only to want/need/desire. That is enough. Everything else will either fall into place or fall by the wayside. Everything outside of this is extra.