To Eat His Own

A gastroenterologist is a doctor whose techniques nowadays include inserting an endoscopic light down into people’s intestines. One member of that elite community recently wrote a book about his work, entitled, The Tunnel at The End of The Light. If I may say so, the whole process of eating, digestion, and elimination is one that needs to have more light thrown on it – but not necessarily by me – and certainly not here.

What does fascinate me, though is that, with only one kind of human body to feed, we have such a vast variety of foods, culinary techniques, cultural rituals, and oddball eating practices. To start the ball of strange personal gustatory preferences rolling, I am reminded of this classic quatrain:

I eat my peas with honey,

I’ve done so all my life.

They do taste rather funny –

But it keeps them on the knife.

But for comestible kookiness, we might as well go back to the beginning – all the way to the story of the Garden of Eden, with its concept of Forbidden Fruit, linked inseparably with the supposedly essential sinfulness of our nature. History is also haunted by the cannibalistic idea that you acquire the characteristics of whatever (or whomever) you eat. And somehow this got carried over into Christianity, with the symbolic consumption of the Savior in the form of bread and wine.

But it is not only eating, but not eating, i.e. fasting, which is featured in the practices of many religions and cults. The purposes can vary, from wanting to purify yourself, to protesting on behalf of some cause. Jews fast on a Biblically-ordained “Day of Atonement” – deliberately afflicting themselves.

In recent history, there have been some famous “hunger strikes.” If the persons fasting are in custody, the authorities are presented with a perplexing dilemma – whether to let the prisoners starve themselves to death, or to feed them by force. A century ago in Britain, when faced with hunger-striking “suffragettes” demanding votes for women, Parliament invented a special solution, in the form of an Act which permitted hunger-striking women to be released, but then rearrested when they were strong enough to go back to prison. This piece of legislation (1913) became known as “The Cat-and-Mouse Act.” There’s no telling how the whole game might have turned out, because the outbreak of World War I in 1914 had the effect on both sides of calling the whole thing off. And at the end of the War (1918) women actually got the vote, both in Britain and the U.S.

The subject of food is one which can be as boring as a grocery-store shopping-list, or as thrilling as some of the epigrams on which I have built my own dubiously impressive career. Such original thoughts as the following (which somehow also all have to do with human relationships) have apparently captivated the fancy of sizable numbers of people — some of them not even personally known to me:

“I WANT YOU, HAPPINESS, AND CHOCOLATE— BUT NOT NECESSARILY IN THAT ORDER.”

“WHAT GOOD IS IT IF I TALK IN FLOWERS, WHILE YOU’RE THINKING IN PASTRY?”

“BUT AFTER YOU HAVE GONE, I WILL STILL HAVE PEANUT BUTTER.”

“EVERY TIME I THINK OF MY MOTHER’S COOKING, I GET A LUMP IN MY THROAT.”

It is startling to consider the gigantic spin-off industries which our obsession with eating has generated. Think of the plumbing industry, with its endlessly inter-connected sewers. Think of the millions of dentists, whose children many of us have helped put through college. Think of the garbage industry (now fashionably referred to as “re-cycling”) whose exponents seek ever wider and deeper areas, on earth and beyond, in which to dump our candy-wrappers.

Without eating, the exploration of the Universe would no doubt by now be on a much faster track. We would probably be in contact with worlds whose inhabitants have long ago outgrown the ghastly system in which all life feeds on other life.

In the meantime, however, we are stuck with the questionable delights of regularly pushing organic material through one orifice into our bodies and pushing it out through others.

And what is it all for? Nobody really knows. And to add to the mystery, not only humans, but a wide variety of creatures share these behaviors. Yes, insects eat and sleep – but for some reason, the latter state is instead designated “torpor” – a condition which I fear may befall some readers, if I don’t stop here.