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One day, during lunch break at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, a colleague offered to share a slice of sausage with Franz Kafka. A strict vegetarian, Kafka is said to have replied: "The only fit food for a man is half a lemon." Nutritionists would probably disagree. However, in "The Hunger Artist," the story of a performer who declines even a piece of lemon, a virtuoso of abstemiousness who flaunts his ability to fast for weeks and months, Kafka elevates refusing to eat into a principle of aesthetics.
A rich tradition exists of literature, film, and painting that celebrate la joie de table, the conviviality of convivium, shared delight in pleasures of the palate. However, there is also a counter-tradition, a line of renegade artists who refuse to eat their peas, who defy proper dining etiquette, through displays of anorexia, bulimia, cannibalism, coprophagia, necrophagia, veganism, starvation, and other culinary aberrations. Modernism arose as an adversarial impulse, a challenge to bourgeois conventions. It often manifested itself in bad table manners. If ritualized ingestion is the most formalized sacrament of the Western middle class, a secular form of the Eucharist, then artists who reject the prix fixe menu assert their claim to the avant-garde. At the risk of sounding like Carry Nation at a beer bust, I offer food for thought about aberrant thoughts on eating.
Sigmund Freud's theory of sublimation explains artistic ambition by recourse to a diverted libido. But François Rabelais locates the impulse for art not in the groin but squarely in the stomach. In The Fourth Book of the Heroic Deeds and Sayings of the Noble Pantagruel (1552), he writes: "Sir Belly - is the true master of all the arts.. ..To this chivalrous monarch we are all bound to show reverence, swear obethence, and give honour." And much literature, painting, and film - functioning as a toast to pain grillé and more sumptuous fare - does just that. "Food," quipped Fran Lebowitz, "is an important part of a balanced diet." It is also an essential ingrethent in the Odyssey and Beowulf as well as In Search of Lost Time and To the Lighthouse. It is celebrated in what is now a familiar canon of culinary films: Like Water for Chocolate...