Taste, Mortality Salience, and the Toad

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Running commentary again.

Not related to the text at all, unless it comes up later: Cooking is an act of playing god. On the other hand, eating and drinking can be seen as giving back: while hardly the most reverent example, Dungeons & Dragons has two excellent examples of this (I know, I know, nerdy as hell, but you gotta stick with what you know): gnolls (hyena-like humanoids) and troglodytes (reptilian humanoids) both worship their patron deities (Yeenoghu and Laogzed, who is pictured, respectively) simply by eating: “When his followers digested food, he would siphon a portion of it into himself, allowing him to feed from those who worshiped him… making simply eating a ritual” (Laogzed). Pretty neat, and depending on how you view it, us humans do the same thing. Except our food is normally both dead and cooked when we start eating, but hey, different strokes for different folks.

Speaking of, taste in religion is weirdly subjective. Humans tend to say the love of the divine is sweet, because we have an evolutionary preference that sweet = good. The wrath of god is a bitter harvest, and while this metaphor is breaking down a touch and I’m definitely making shit up here, we have a craving for suffering in religion (sometimes our own suffering, but mostly the suffering of someone on our behalf) because blood and tears have the salt we crave, too. Ok, wasn’t expecting to see a recipe for still-living roast goose, but hey, just proves my point: suffering can be desirable as long as it isn’t us. And, again, the human obsession with death and suffering: why not eat something that could kill you? Why not choose to ignore the fact that some peppers and spices are actually toxic, and relish the flavor of something that’s supposed to have made you dead by now? We’re at the top of the food chain, like Ackerman says, but “we don’t seem to have gotten used to [it]” (171). (As an aside, Laogzed himself is actually rather horror-movieish, looking back at it: gross, slimy, around 10 feet tall and 12 feet long, and basically just a mindless beast that would even eat its own followers if given a chance (who apparently loves swallowing his prey whole so he can feel it wriggling in his stomach while he digests it, as if he wasn’t foul enough already)). 

And, like I said in my last post, taste is tied as the most intimate sense, because you can’t exactly do it on accident: you need to seek it out, or accept it when it seeks you out, because otherwise it’ll never happen, or it won’t happen in a way that’s pleasant. With communion or a sacred meal, or even (going back to D&D) just dedicating the meal to whatever you call god, it’s intimate. It’s necessary to eat to survive, but you can live by making the food you eat enjoyable, especially when you share the meal with the divine.

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