Eating Like a Child:
Interactive Performance Piece
Marlena Spieler
Subject: Sept 2003: Nurture
As an adult we eat calmly, or are at least expected to. We cut and chew and lift food to our mouths according to the culture we come from. We may even taste food we don't care for, or forgoe food that we know we shouldn't eat at the moment. We might murmur: isn't this delicious! or praise the cook, but seldom to we give into the waves of sensual emotions that children feel when faced with a plate of food.
Within us is this island of child-eating, this area of purity in taste. A child's feelings about food is passionate, whether it is love or hate. It is vehement: sometimes closed minded and irrational, something so pleasurable that is is no less than bliss. It engulfs the whole child and belongs to the child. It is pure and untouched by the latest fashion in food (though advertising for childrens' junk food might influence choice, it doesn't influence that enjoyment and honesty).
Hate and Love, undisguised and unconcealed by layers of politeness. When a child hates a dish he or she spits it out, hides it in the napkin, feeds it to the dog under the table. When children hate a food they won't put it near their faces, let alone their mouths. It is repugnant! And most children would rather sit forever at the table than finish their meals of offensive dishes. If you hate egg and on your plate something eggy appears, it is a personal affront! made even worse if some of the egg touches anything else on the plate.
When a child loves a dish, they want to eat and eat and eat until they can eat no more. They want to feel it on their fingers, on their cheeks, on their lips besides simply in the mouth. Did you ever take your fingers and smear chocolate custard/pudding on a sheet of wax paper or butcher paper? Make a picture, lick your fingers and suck off the edible paint! Feel the pleasure extend from your tongue to the very centre of your being. How many of us ever ate too much chocolate as a child? Or wallowed in a bowl of your favourite food, thinking that you could eat it forever?
Did you ever take a millenium to eat an ice cream cone? You can do it again, whenever you choose.
Some children are picky. Some are adventureous. Some picky eaters grow up to be adventurous ones. And while it is a very multi-cultural thing: children love and hate different foods depending on the culture and country they live in, the overriding, unifying quality of childhood eating is love and hate.
And it is a typical child thing to go through phases of love and hate: one minute you love mushrooms and the next week you hate their slimey existence!
As we are civilized at the table we learn the rules of ettiquiette which make us more pleasant dining companions but mute our own passions. When sometimes tastes so delicious it makes you gasp, gulp, and sigh in amazment, do you want to rip off your clothes and roll on the floor? Or do you even feel the passion?
Do you remember eating spaghetti and sucking up the strands of pasta, letting them flick and slap against your face as they did, the sauce flecking your lips, cheeks, eyebrows. When you ate sandwich biscuits or cookies, how did you eat them? Did you bite and chew vehemently? Did you open them up and lick the filling? did you scrape the filling with your teeth? Did you bite the uniced biscuit or did you put them back together again? Did you did digestive or graham crackers into milk or juice, then suck up the wet mushy wafer, drink down the juice or milk with its soppy crumbs? How did you eat cupcakes/fairy cakes? Did you lick the icing off, then eat the cake? Did you trade icing for cake with your best friend? Did you throw away the cake after the icing was gone? Did you make your Marmite soldiers march around the plate? Did you put your whole face onto the top of a sloppy joe and just let your lips smoosh around and nibble, your tongue lick? Did you take bites of buttered toast and turn it into animals and creations, into people and faces and places, constantly being transformed as each time you nibbles on the edges the shape changed. Did you line up your peas, arrange them into tiny pyramids, or turn them into polka dots in the mashed potatoes before you ate them?
Or did you demand that your foods be kept separately on the plate and did you feel a distinct unease if the carrots touched the potatoes, or horror of horrors, the gravy touched the beans.
The object of this paper and our gathering today, is: to reach deep within ourselves and feed our inner children, to remember how we felt about how we ate: how we chose what to eat and what to reject, and the imagination games we played when we first started feeding ourselves. And of course how this relates to who we are and what/how we eat now.
To do this I will attempt to trigger these feelings by offering an array of tiny goodies, and making suggestions as to how to eat them, though they are suggestions only, a starting point because the real way of discovering our own inner child is to discover our own inner feelings. Don't eat them yet: we will eat them together!
On our tray are:
- Black stoned olives: stick one on each finger as if they were little helmets. Wiggle your fingers around and make them soldiers, firemen, pirates! Eat them all off, one by one!
- Cubes of jelly: squish them. suck them. bite them. chew them. let them dissolve in your mouth. Do you like red or green best?
- M&Ms: arrange them in the colours that you like best and hate most. trade with your friends. Close your eyes and see if the different colours taste differently. I hate beige with brown in second place, and love yellow and green best of all. Blue scares me and red is magic. How is it for you? Place one in your hand and see if you can tell which color it is without looking. Take several candies and chew them violently. Don't swallow! Open your mouth and expose the chocolate multicolour mush within. Try to disgust your neighbour. If it disgusts you, keep your mouth closed and close your eyes too so you don't have to see everyone else.
- Tiny chunk of cheese: smell it, smash it with your fingers, eat it and lick the remnants off your fingertips. If you have a doggie, even an imaginary doggie, let him or her lick your fingers off.
- Dog/Cat/Horse food: crisp tiny things like cereal, crisps, etc) on the ground. get down on your hands and knees and eat it like a doggie. You ARE a doggie. Bark like a doggie. (altnernatively: saucer of milk, you are a kitten! lick it, mew accordingly). Or perhaps you are a cowboy's horse. You are on the prairie and this is your prairie food. If you are the cowboy say: Eeeee-harh! If you are a horse eat it, then shake your head and say: neiighggghhhhh or other horsey sound.
- Something very spicy: lick it gingerly. does it scare you? take a small bite... can you handle it? Do you love it? (Eat it if you do.) Do you hate it? (Spit it out! if you hate it.)
- Place a small piece of something delicious (choc?) in your mouth. let it melt. slowly. melt melt melt... mmmmmmmm. make it last a long long time. then grab your neighbour's choc when he/she isn't looking. Remember, you're a child; you can do these things.
- Wrap up a handful of Jelly babies, spiders or bears in a paper napkin and take them away, for later. When you want to, take them out. Make them walk around, dance, do things. Then bite off their heads! Suck their tummies, chew on their little paws or legs! Which end do you eat first? Why?
- Quarter of a sandwich: Are you happy with the bread (one side is white, the other is whole grainy sort of sprouted wholewheat). Do you wish it were all white? So you like the brown bread, do you think it tastes nice and nutty? Open the bread and look inside. take everything out and look at it. do you want to eat it separately? Why? Do you want to close it up again? Do you want to throw away the whole wheat bread and keep the white? Do you wnt to change the shape of your sandwich by rolling the bread around the filling instead of eating it flat? Do you want to cut it up into a million pieces with your spoon? Do you want to squish a little bit of bread into a tight little ball in your fingers and throw it at your neighbour? do you want to lick the filling out? do you want to throw it all away? Our sandwich is peanut butter and Marmite. Do you love it? Do you wish it were peanut butter and jelly, or cheese and pickle, or salami and mustard? Do you hate me for making peanut butter and Marmite?
- Pickle/gherkin: sour, crisp, crunchy. Lick the sour vinegary outside. Put it between your lips and pretend it is a cigar.Then take a little bite, chew it thoughtfully. Do you like them way it makes your salivary gland tingle? Do you like the flavour? Close your eyes and enjoy it if you do. If you hate the pickle, fling it away, say: eeech, bleeacccchhhh, or yuckkkkkk!
We shall of course be providing lots of little paper wash-cloth packets!