Coupling the Culinary and Literary Arts
My writing life as wife to a chef
Before I married my husband, who began his career as a chef after our wedding, I’ve been writing about many things. But there was one thing I particularly struggled to write about: food. I struggled to sensuously, sensually, describe food.
For something like food that’s fundamental and universal to human existence, I struggled to make sense of it for writing. Who on earth could possibly be dispassionate about food — the varied experience they bring, the cultures formed around them, the memories they evoke?
I eat like any regular human being, but what I lacked as a writer was a profound, even mystical, connection to food-as-language: oral, gastric, poetic. The coupling of food and word as desire and jouissance — pleasure so intense it’s intolerable, like orgasm.
It took me a soul’s union with my husband to transgress to this state wherein food is as basic as words to my physical and emotional being. The deeper I loved my husband, and he me, the more lyrical and gastro-sensate my relationship with food came to be. I didn’t realize how bland my language was till my husband’s love and his food evoked cravings I never knew were there, and satisfied them.
