About Recipes for Trouble
Food connects us to the world.
Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin writes about eating:
“the body here transgresses its own limits: it swallows, devours, rends the world apart…”
The foods I and my family ate in an aluminum-siding clad suburban house in a small Canadian city connected us to a small village in western Ukraine, and to all the cities of Europe.
But now I know how eating itself links me to ways of being in the world that are unruly, excessive, even forbidden.
My own needs and desires have often felt like a burden, like a second body I carry on my back, a child who could never be fully satisfied. Food forms a bridge between the world and those desires. Flesh of my rewritten flesh, bodies whose queer desires for food, for love, for sex, rend the world apart, and create it anew.
— from Comfort Foods for Breakups: A Food Memoir (Forthcoming, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007)
