When Eating a Wolf

Fame and glory abound for the ingesting of either quantity or obscurity. That seems ubiquitous these days. Competitive eating comes in clips on shows that mock everything except themselves and dining on the bizarre has become a television ritual of understanding another culture rather than an ethnocentric exaltation of the other that results in juvenile fascination and a, “Ewww, he is not going to eat that,” mentality. To note this is ubiquitous.

So this is about the other side of it all.

All too often in publications digital or print, there is a call for readers to submit their bizarre eating practices and that results in a varied list of varied levels of homogenous groupings of strange ingredients. Creating the Garbage Plate, posted on Bitten, is an example of late. This is not admonishing this type of call to readers, it is an excellent question to see what people can make out of uncommon combinations. It’s almost a quick survey of what people will ingest when left to their own devices.

However, there is a moment that seems to happen when something out of the ordinary is eaten, something flirting with taboo; that taboo being personally or culturally imposed. It breaks routine, calls to the moment, and leaves a lasting impression. Or does it?

This is the question that seems to run a bit deeper. After ingesting a plate full of brains pictured above, what comes over is a mixed experience that points to some essential parts of eating.

The food is consumed.

And then it is gone.

This is a simple relationship and is not being touted here as prophetic or especially mind-blowing. Rather, it’s important to remember, because it seems to make things memorable. The plate of brains above were eaten in a busy Rajasthani restaurant in a suburb of Mumbai. The waiter was mostly inattentive and frightened of screwing up the order for white people. The customers languished stares at the foreigners in that way that Indians can do exceptionally well. It was not noted as particularly bizarre by my eating companions that I was ingesting mutton brain.

But what sticks the most to the surface is ultimately melancholy or exhilarating. And this is the point of eating weird shit.

There seem to be two types of eaters, the ones that finish a meal and revel that it ever happened and those that clean their plate slowly knowing that it is nearly over. These essential qualities of eating become benign and unnoticed, shadowed in the normalcy and constancy of the action. Eating is generally performed daily and anything performed daily can be lost in habit.

Eating, or watching someone eat, weird shit will consciously or unconsciously draw the unchanging essentials of eating to the foreground and help that moment become memorable.

But what seems to surface is ephemeral. Eating and remembering look like two Russian aristocratic cousins from a Dostoevsky novel. They will probably sleep together but they really should not, being that somewhere in the past their relatives have already made this transgression.

And so the brains are eaten and the memory lingers and their two melancholy offspring live in my head, sloped foreheads profiled on two cameos facing each other and waiting. Waiting to make their own offspring that will pale the original mating of the brains and the moment even more.

Then I will have to eat my brains again.