{"id":530,"date":"2021-01-04T17:06:43","date_gmt":"2021-01-04T17:06:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gcolemanmn.wordpress.com\/?p=530"},"modified":"2023-08-25T11:18:17","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T11:18:17","slug":"free-lunch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/2021\/01\/04\/free-lunch\/","title":{"rendered":"Free Lunch"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Originally published as part of the Digestable <\/a>newsletter.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh\u2014 my twitchy witchy girl
I think you are so nice,
I give you bowls of porridge
And I give you bowls of ice
Cream.
I Give you lots of kisses,
And I give you lots of hugs,
But I never give you
Sandwiches
With bugs
In.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This poem appears in Neil Gaimen\u2019s book Coraline<\/em> and its 2009 film adaptation. Coraline<\/em> is the story of a girl from Detroit who moves to a creaky old house with her botanist parents who are too busy with work to give her the attention she needs. While exploring the house, Coraline finds a Being John Malkovich-<\/em>y door that leads her to a mirror world with an Other Mother and father who give her attention, joy, and lots of tasty food. Later in the film it\u2019s revealed that the mirror world with its fun and spectacle and treats is all an illusion, a web woven by the spider-like Other Mother to trap Coraline and steal her soul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I ordered takeout from a Japanese place in my neighborhood last week. I ordered tofu katsu curry but when I got back to my apartment and opened the bag, I found I had been given someone else\u2019s order of seafood ramen and chicken katsu. Thankfully the restaurant called<\/a> shortly after to apologize for the mix-up and refund my order but there I was, a vegetarian holding \u20ac30 in free meat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I ate the seafood for dinner and the chicken for lunch the next day. I\u2019m not one to waste food and every rule has its exceptions. I\u2019ve lost my taste for meat so I didn\u2019t exactly enjoy either meal, especially the squid, that was a new one for me. But it filled me up and it got me thinking about free lunches and free food, especially food that doesn\u2019t turn out like you expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Food plays a key role in Coraline.<\/em> In the real world, Coraline is offered things like beets, swiss chard (my favorite), and saltwater taffy; but her Other Mother gives her cupcakes, strawberry waffles, and a full chicken dinner. It doesn\u2019t come up explicitly in the film, possibly because the ick factor would be too much for children\u2019s media, but it seems that all this delicious tempting food must also be nefarious, as the poem\u2019s reference to \u201csandwiches with bugs in\u201d would suggest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two other pieces of media I\u2019ve consumed recently, Boots Riley\u2019s Sorry To Bother You<\/em> [exit here for the spoiler-phobic], and David Mitchell\u2019s Slade House<\/em>, also make use of this illusory food trope (I love the word illusory, it means \u201cnot real\u201d). In Sorry to Bother You<\/em>, Cassius Green heads to evil rich person Steve Lift\u2019s basement office to snort some not-cocaine that may or may not turn him into a horse person. Slade House<\/em>, part of David Mitchell\u2019s soul vampire filled literary universe, follows the victims of two such vampires who are lured into the house to eat \u201cbanjax,\u201d disguised as a damson plum or a pot brownie, to free their soul from their body so it can be eaten<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It would be easy to root this trope in the bible, in the garden of Eden with Eve biting the apple (Why is it always \u201cbiting\u201d the apple but never \u201ceating\u201d it? A question for another week.), but I think that\u2019s kind of boring and honestly who among us would not bite the apple? Seriously Eve did us a solid back there. And anyway, there are lots of other old versions of the trope like the lotus eaters in the Odyssey (I know, Homer again. Don\u2019t @ me) and probably a million other examples outside the Western canon I\u2019m not aware of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Temptation is part of it but, it seems the power of illusory food as a literary device is in its intimacy. All the victims of Slade House cross the threshold of the vampires\u2019 lair, but it isn\u2019t until they willing take the banjax into their body that their fate is sealed. Cassius Green transgresses multiple times out of temptation and necessity: he crosses the picket line as a Power Caller, ditches Detroit\u2019s art opening for Steve Lift\u2019s party, and even partakes in a sort of minstrel show<\/a>, but it isn\u2019t until he consumes the not-cocaine and takes RegalView and Worry Free into his physical body that he surrenders his humanity. Lucky for Coraline, the Other Mother needs her to willingly pluck out her eyes to give up her soul. If bug sandwiches was all it took, she\u2019d be totally fucked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So food is intimate, and yes that\u2019s scary when you\u2019re being tempted to relinquish your humanity or your very soul, but it doesn\u2019t have to be. There isn\u2019t such a thing as a free lunch under capitalism, but at capitalism\u2019s borders and beyond its reach the intimacy of freely given food builds relationships and community. Coraline shows this at the end of the story when she shares pizza and lemonade for her neighbors as they collectively plant a garden. All those pizza calories are guilt free and guaranteed not to steal your soul. Even when the food is tainted as it is in these stories, bodies still make use of it in unpredictable and productive ways: Cassius\u2019s ingestion of the not-cocaine is what moves him to fully participate in the movement against RegalView, even before he turns into an equisapien. Likewise, the residual energy of the souls taken in Slade House<\/em> and Coraline <\/em>are what allow the soul vampires and the Other Mother to eventually be vanquished. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nothing scares me more these days than going into someone else\u2019s house, breathing their air, and eating their food. The most intimate parts of ourselves, the breath and the space we share just so happens to harbor a secret enemy. The only thing that will save us is taking a little bit of that enemy into our bodies as a vaccine. But that\u2019s what having a body has always meant, opening yourself up and taking parts of the outside world into yourself to stay alive. For more body and food stuff, check out Julietta Singh\u2019s No Archive Will Restore You<\/em><\/a> and Niel Cicierega\u2019s Toy Food<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter. Oh\u2014 my twitchy witchy girlI think you are so nice,I give you bowls of porridgeAnd I give you bowls of iceCream.I Give you lots of kisses,And I give you lots of hugs,But I never give youSandwichesWith bugsIn. This poem appears in Neil Gaimen\u2019s book Coraline and its… Continue reading Free Lunch<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[22,16,28],"class_list":["post-530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digestable","tag-culture","tag-environment","tag-food","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":741,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530\/revisions\/741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}