Self-Evaluation
In my capstone ILC project entitled “Lustful Eating: Food, Consumption, Sex, and Pleasure” I chose to explore intersections of sex, food, eating, consumption, erotica, and pleasure. What is it about a good meal that makes your mouth water and your eyes widen in the same way you may be excited for your lover to come home? What is it about our human desire and attraction to one another that mirrors the passionate desire we feel to consume good food? I explored each of these curiosities and many other historical and modern instances of our desires in practice, using a variety of mediums from journals, novels, and textbooks to paintings, sculpture, poetry, and religious texts.
From my very first source I picked up on one of the key themes of the quarter, when in Sex by Angela Mea I read “The recognition of cooking as “foreplay” is something that can be dated back to pre-Christian times, before appetites became something in need of “civilizing” (Mennell et al. 1992).” My annotations pondered the social guidelines of eating, questioning what happens when we set guidelines on the civility of meals, if we lose the innate, passionate acts of eating that human beings have participated in for years. I did not think too much of the act of foreplay until I began to find this idea repeated out throughout most if not all of my research this quarter. In Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, I took special note of a dinner scene in which our main character’s lust for her forbidden lover is transferred through her food to her sister who is them overcome with passion and runs away with a solider. I pondered this idea of food and cooking as foreplay again as I read this chapter over and over, conceptualizing meals that may be considered “sexy”.
Exploring what it is that makes food attractive was a key piece of my capstone research, food porn being an obvious example of the interactions between the edible and the erotic. In Aesthetics of Food Porn by Uka Tooming what stood out to me was the discussion of sensory arousal. When we see food porn we receive it in a sensory manner, imagining the taste and texture, triggering reactions such as drooling. Both erotica and food pornography also succeed by utilizing shock factor and fantasy, something that makes your eyes widen and your heart race. As well as studying food porn, I also explored attraction from a racier perspective, looking at what foods we associate with sex and intimacy. Through religious texts such as The Songs of Solomon (from an Old Testament section of the Bible entitled Ketuvim), tales from The Golden Ass by Apuleius, paintings such as The Judgment of Paris by Henrri Pierre and The Wedding Of Cupid And Psyche by Joachim Wtewael, and poems such as Figs by D.H Lawrence, Feast by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Café Paradiso by Charles Simic, I was able to observe the kinds of foods often used as descriptors of body parts or as sexual innuendos. These were fruits, chocolates, sweet syrups. spiced wines, saffron, cakes, and other foods often considered luxurious or indulgent. If we believe that the root of our desires for both sex and food are interconnected with the same pleasure, the same lust, it would stand to reason that the foods we find “sexy” would be those that share the same level of indulgence as you do in your lover.
This quarter was a major success, I used twenty sources to build up three main takeaways that were presented to a freshman/sophomore program as part of my final presentation. These were; 1. Our desire for food and our desire for sex share the same internal root, we lust after them in the same manner. 2. Consumption is considered sexual as a human instinct to survive, derived from a historical need to store fat and reproduce. And 3. Foods that we find “sexy” are often fruits, wines, chocolates, and other luxuries and indulgences. They mirror our sexual partners in our belief of their splendor. Despite this being my last quarter for Evergreen, through the completion of this project and my many ILC’s at Evergreen I am prepared to face the world of community eating, social policy, human/plant interactions, and learning through food.
Academic Statment
Despite starting Evergreen fresh out of high school, I was already immersed in the professional world of non-profit and political organizing I sought to spend my life in, I viewed my ongoing education as a tool to increase my knowledge base and improve upon skills to use in future professional and community endeavors. While all of this has remained true, a sophomore year switch in my degree focus took my work from a simple interest to the beginnings of a lifelong study in food, ethics, and social policy, a passion that supersedes anything I had experienced before. Now that I am leaving the Evergreen State College, I can look back upon each one of my projects with pride and nostalgia.
My best work over the last four years was done through Individual Study Projects (ILC’s) sponsored by Sarah Williams PhD. After taking her full-time program “Taste: What We Hunger For” in the beginning of my sophomore year I completed eight between Spring 2022 and Spring 2024. One of the biggest standouts in my work happened early on, when just days after I submitted a proposal, an ILC entitled “Digital Reading to Understand Food and Gender Politics”, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Suddenly my project was not only interesting, but also controversially topical. Texts like “From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food” by Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber “Choosing” Wisley: Paralleling Food Sovereignty and Reproductive Justice” by Dr. Vaughn, were selected to highlight the intersections of food sovereignty and issues of gender politics. I also began to read “Skim, Dive, Surface” by Jenea Cohn to further my understanding of digital reading and online literacy, a theme that would run throughout the rest of my project work as I challenged the boundaries of learning, questioned the format of information, and chased the meta-analysis seen in my favorite journals.
Over the Summer ‘23 quarter, I opted for an intensive project entitled “Hunger Among Students: Exploring Anti-Hunger Infrastructure through Digital Reading.”, which studied the meal gap in college students across the United States, and created a detailed report of ways in which The Evergreen State College could improve their student social services to increase food access and distribution. My experience in creating these kinds of reports was nonexistent prior to this project, but with several weeks of trial, and error, and reading as many examples as possible, I became confident not only in writing reports of this style but in my ability to learn skills such as these in a self-directed manner.
In my senior year I began to truly expand my bounds of learning, moving into multi-medium research, experimentation with expression, and developing my own teaching and presentation models. In my Winter ‘24 project entitled “Consumption and Expression: Reading, Writing, Experiencing, and Eating”, I combined journalistic research, fiction reading, poetry, film, food and cooking, to create a twenty-one-page portfolio of works reflecting these many styles. Creating something inspired by pieces of work that stirred something within me allowed the freedom to not only to bite into these rich and complex subjects but to chew and digest them in a manner that left an aftertaste, a curiosity to continue my exploration. I combined readings such as Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, and Crazy About Her Shrimp by Charles Simic, with movies like The Menu, Bao, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show to create a diverse and dynamic collection of works that also showcased my own recipes and family traditions.
My Evergreen experience was closed with a capstone project that examined the very heart and soul of experimental exploration in food and social policy, a deep dive project entitled “Lustful Eating: Food, Consumption, Sex, and Pleasure” which dissected the relationship between our desires for good food and our desires for good sex. This proved to be my most intense project yet, as my subject matter was controversial to many and rooted in both historical, metaphorical, theological, and scientific means. My sources included historical and modern artwork, fictional and non-fictional readings, poetry, and more, capping a year of dynamic research. While the content was sometimes overwhelming, I had endless options of research to pick from, and every medium had explored edible erotica from one angle or another.
With several years of positive feedback from sponsoring faculty and trackable improvement in skills surrounding analysis and annotation, I am prepared to face the world of food, policy, and community eating. I look forward to further academic adventures!
Final Presentation