Long, thin strands of noodles, each one of whose fate is inextricably linked with that of every other; four or five greasy slices of pork floating in a clear broth, arranged atop one another as if forming a staircase leading nowhere; green and white shavings of spring onions maintaining their slightly submerged position just below the surface of the soup. And so on and so on. Sounds like a straightforward enough description of a straightforward enough bowl of Japanese soup, doesn't it? The image conjured up in the recent Japanese film Tampopo is neither especially tantalizing nor particularly repellent.
Were one instead writing about, say, the Japanese art of lovemaking, a sentence analogous to the one above would have all the hallmarks of the uninspiring denseness that makes up a first-year anthropology textbook. Just as there are ways and ways of writing about lovemaking, ranging from the sublime to the obscene, so there exists an infinite manner of depicting food, encompassing all forms of expression from the scatological to the most pretentiously lyrical.
Craving for Food
The craving for food and the urge for sexual gratification both appear to express the unseemly side of human nature. Surely, we all like to think, the materialist philosophers can't be right? Surely, man must be something more than a creature of appetites, no different in kind from any other member of the animal kingdom? Yet oddly enough, the general tolerance extended to works of art--or, come to that, any verbal or visual utterances--that border on the pornographic is not offered anything like so readily to images of human beings gorging themselves.
Compare the intense stillness that befalls a cinema audience when an erotic scene, no matter how explicit, is being played out on the screen, with the embarrassed groans, guffaws, and catcalls that greet a particularly graphic representation of, say, a feast and all its attendant grotesque consequences, or a hungry man setting to on a plate of beans and rice without paying too much attention to decorum, or a well-heeled dinner party where the guests insist on savoring every morsel of food and every sip of wine, neglecting in the meantime conversation with their neighbors--the ostensible purpose, after all, of the gathering. Moreover, the libertine is an accepted and even admired figure in society, whereas the gourmand is often an object of ridicule.
Carnal Pleasures
While apparently it can never be drummed into us often enough that for centuries religious and moral teaching strove to ensure that carnal pleasures would forever be connected with the experience of shame, few--with the notable exception of the Spanish film director Luis Buñuel--have made much of the fact that, to this day, we tend to regard an excessive interest in and enjoyment of food as perhaps an even more fundamental violation of social taboos. In The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, as well as in The Phantom of Liberty, Buñuel not only hilariously explores our obsession with food but appears to suggest that we are as little likely to find the ultimate contentment that constantly eludes us in coition as in attempting to indulge our craving for culinary delights.
In The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie meals are simply
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