![]() ![]() ![]() Now, we tend talk of the consequences of food only in terms of whether it will make us fat, ignoring the more pressing business of digestion. Our grandparents openly spoke of foods being “indigestible” or making them “bilious” if they ate too much of them. But we are arguably more coy about the stomach than any previous generation. Thinking about digestion is a nasty appetite killer. Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, played on the fact that the comfort of middle-class life depends on keeping the pleasures of dinner well apart from its inescapable upshot in the bathroom. To a certain extent, this has always been true. We are in collective denial about what ingesting a meal really entails. ![]() Chewing, salivating, and digesting, never mind excreting, are aspects of a meal we do our best to forget as we pore over photos of toast with ramp butter and quail’s eggs or slow-braised veal shank. It is one of the paradoxes of our culture that while food itself is an object of desire, the mechanics of eating-in the abstract, anyway-really gross us out. ![]()
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