It started somewhat innocently. I was thinking about one of those articles that tells you what to wear, or what exercises to do based on your body type. I’m used to seeing apple, pear, and sometimes chili pepper as the options in these types of articles. The thing is, when I walk around around in the world, I see people who are, I suppose, apples, who look more like, say, potatoes. Or I see people who looked more like butternut squash than a pear. One day, I started looking up non-pear, or non-apple foods and finding that there were more of these food body types out there! I encountered the butternut squash on one of these sites. (For that I felt vindicated.) But I also encountered the eggplant and broccoli. Broccoli? What? What?!?
Food is one of my great loves. I read cookbooks as if they’re novels, and I read many food blogs and magazines. While the term “food porn” is all over the place and typically refers to food images, I find that often, descriptions of food are downright erotic. Sometimes I find myself taken out of the context of what I’m reading because of the somewhat sexual sounding descriptions.
Once I began to think about that a bit, I remembered something that I read about ZZ Packer’s collection of short stories, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.” I recall reading about the way that she really described the skin color of the various characters in her story. I swear I remember reading that she had grown tired of reading descriptions of black skin in terms of food, say, chocolate or cafe au lait. However a cursory Internet search makes me feel like I made up that last piece. I remember at the time thinking that I have heard my own skin color described as so many foods over the years, none of which seemed accurate.
Finally, lately it seems as if I have found myself prey to an aggressive male gaze more often than seems normal. Many of these times I wind up thinking something like, “That dude looks hungry. He looks like he wants to roast and eat me.”
The marriage of the above mental wanderings has lead to this project. It is an amalgamation of food description kissed with innuendos, the ideas of hunger and consumption. It is an attempt to think about these things in a humorous way.