Anne Enright finds food a turn off ...
If you look at the telly, everything is supposed to be sexy, these
days. Big cars, ice cream, really classy venetian blinds, plastic bottles of
spring water - all in slow motion with smoochy music and slow smiles -
they are all so incredibly sexy that we just couldn’t say how sexy they
are - we just have to rush out and buy them.
But eating --- that has always been sensual, hasn’t it? Food as love’s ally,
love’s other self. All that licking, nibbling sucking biting I won’t go on
you get the general picture.
Well yes, but not the way I eat, I’m afraid. And not the way most men eat
either. Most men trough down. Did you know that the jaw muscles are the
strongest in the human body? They can exert a pressure of 200lbs per square
inch. The face is a remarkable eating machine. So never mind the
candlelight, the music, the slither of the oyster, the champagne sparkle
fading on your tongue - love means sitting across from that mechanism for
the rest of your life. Tongue teeth jaw throat. Once a day if you’re lucky
and three times a day on your holidays.
I’d say more people fall out of love over a meal, than into it. It’s hard to
see the love shining in his eyes when there is grease shining on his chin.
And nothing is more rivetting.
You know of course it’s all a con. And one that disappears with marriage. I
know a woman whose husband can not bear to see her eat a lobster. Pick,
strip, crack, gnaw and demolish a lobster. Which she does very delicately,
and beautifully, and above all, thoroughly.
Perhaps, in these oversexualised days, we need all the turn-offs we can get.
On the telly, in the magazines, everything is sexy. Or at least charming.
When of course it is not. We are not. We are awkward and half-mad and dull
and funny and most of the time we are thinking about nothing at all, or
nothing much. Or ‘that’s interesting’.
And love has an ordinary poetry that you couldn’t use in an ad, because it
wouldn’t sell anything. There is something about love that has nothing to do
with appetite, that is neither ugly, nor pretty. Which is why we close our
eyes, perhaps, when we make love and open them to eat.
