The Reverse Food Ick
What you eat when no one’s watching is the only honest data you have.
I eat chicken nuggets fully drowned in ketchup and mustard. Not a dip or swipe. A full glaze, so thick the breading disappears underneath it.
I know exactly how that sounds. I do not care.
I love the burning at the top of my mouth from drunken noodles with a hidden chili pepper... espeically when it makes my eyes water and my sinuses give up. I love stacking stinky bleu cheese, prosciutto, honey, and a pickle on a single Carr’s cracker and letting it turn to marmalade in my mouth. I love things that have no business going together until they go.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the food ick... the disgust your refined self insists on. Bananas. Eggs. That certain texture you cannot name but cannot tolerate, even if its for one meal.
This essay is the inverse.
The reverse food ick is the food your private self genuinely loves. It doesn’t survive the trip to your camera roll. The combination you’d describe to a stranger only after the third glass of wine. Treat you eat standing up, alone, in the soft fluorescent kitchen light at 11 p.m while the family is asleep.
Not to be confused with a guilt pleasure… Guilty pleasure is a confession. The reverse food ick is a thesis.
“The food ick is what your performed self rejects.
The reverse food ick is what your performed self pretends not to want.”
And once you start noticing yours, you cannot un-see how much of modern eating is actually performance.
