Some Thoughts (from class lecture)

As we have seen, thus far, food involves both the fulfillment of a basic need as well as a primal pleasure, and represents a system of the sweet and bitter, as well as the tasteful and distasteful that, if not well balanced, can lead to either a culture of excess, or one of malnutrition and death.

The perishable character of food, its ultimately ephemeral nature may make of cooking a hopeless task, but the sum of meals (much like the sum of our days), the succession of prepared plates, soups, breads, desserts have a durable value (they become our history—the history of both our needs, as well as our desires), such as Tita’s book of recipes. Not only are Tita’s recipes passed down from one generation to the next, but they become a kind of archive of the Mexican Revolution and of the history of women. The relationship of people to food, the way in which people connect with food, the social significance of food and the assignment of food preparation to primarily one gender over the other tell us a great deal about who we are and about our place in the world. A close look at the way people ate in 19^th century in England, for example, may tell us a great deal about class. What we eat daily, the types of food we choose to buy and/or prepare are choices that amount to the formation and transformation of culture. Food has both to do, as we have seen, with the art of loving and the art of dying; this is seen both in John Keats’ Isabella or the Pot of Basil, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. We can also see this in the concept of the wake, a celebration with food, drink, and song (perhaps even dance) that takes place around a burial. Food consumption has also to do with death, if we consider that we, too, become food stuff when we die—as we have learned in Romeo and Juliet, we are devoured by death. Some believe that, when we die, we go back to nature, and that eternal life and redemption is ours through the act of eating (the Eucharist, for example) and that the act of fasting (Ramadan, for example, which involves abstinence from both food and sex from sun up to sun down) gets us closer to our spiritual being.  What we eat may also be an ethnic marker, such as the eating or not eating of pig.

Eating habits make up a space where tradition and innovation weight equally, where past and present are mixed to serve the needs and desires of the moment, to ornament the event, to bring joy to the hour, to change family dynamics, to create a revolution (if only, seemingly, within the domain of the kitchen—let us think of Tita and her cooking). With its strong affective investment and ritualization of ordinary tasks,  cooking may be, for women of all ages, an activity that brings them and others happiness and pleasure; it is also a source of love, as well as pain (if we think of the reasons behind eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia).

 As we have began to see and experience in Like Water for Chocolate, cooking and the kitchen arts demand as much wisdom, as much intelligence, imagination, memory, as those traditionally held as superior or those that may have easily identifiable values, such as those upheld during the time of war. But it takes courage to put ingredients in a pot, turn on the fire and hope for the best; it takes as much guts to twist the neck of a chicken, as it may take to point a gun at someone’s head in the name of freedom; it takes as much strategy to prepare a meal with little to no food in the pantry, as it may take to plan a military ambush. The prosperity of a family, of a country, is perhaps best expressed in its daily diet—the famine of some is the overabundance of others.

          With the passage from “The Potatoes,” you have encountered (and we are all, for the most part, well aware of this model) a feminine model that we are supposed to discard—that of the woman in the kitchen, the woman as master of the potato; however, with Tita, we a  different interpretation of the same feminine model. Cooking for Tita is something that comes from the body and, for the narrator, from the body of women from her lineage, incorporating her into the anonymous ranks of women (not only Mexican women) who have found the power and the magic behind preparing a meal. Tita not only learns the pleasure of eating and cooking good meals, but (much like Dr. Brown) that of measuring, mixing, inventing, of incorporating the old into the new. In her meals, the mestizo and criollo cooking of Mexico come together, a revolutionary feat all on its own. With Tita, the interminable repetition that cooking demands is contrasted to the household tasks that she must also perform, such as those that have to do with the caring of Dona Elena. The succession of meals become a way toward intimacy with the body of others, in particular with Pedro’s body, but also that of Gertrudis and, with negative results, with the body of others, such as the way the tears in the wedding cake affect the bride and her guests. Her recipe book becomes a way to preserve the alchemy of the history of not only the Mexican revolution, but also the history of the female body in captivity, trapped by tradition, by politics, racial prejudice and injustice, if we think of Nacha and Chencha.