FoodSexLit

A few weeks ago my mother and I went to see Julie and Julia.  There’s a great scene where Julia Child, played by Meryl Streep, stands in the sunny kitchen of Le Cordon Bleu surrounded by men in chef’s whites, a huge knife gripped in her hand, a live lobster waiting on the cutting board below.  The voice-over, taken from one of the many letters Child wrote to her friend Avis Devoto, is timed perfectly.  Just as she slices through the lobster’s head, her knife making a satisfying THWACK against the wood, Streep’s funny Julia-voice trills, “Turns out I am fearless in the kitchen!”

I want to impress my mother, so I turn to her and whisper, “I’ve done that.”

“You have?” she asks.  “You’ve killed a lobster?”

“Just like that,” I tell her.

*          *          *

Warning: Explicit Content

Before you read any further, I must tell you that I screened Julie and Julia before I saw it with my mother, because she doesn’t like sex scenes, swearing, or violence.  While this piece contains no graphic descriptions of actual sex (only some imaginings, distorted by my negative body image), and only one profane word, it does contain some violent images.  You might choose to stop reading at this point.  My mother would.

*          *          *

Jamie Oliver made me do it.  That and this 25 year old kid was coming over for dinner, and, to be perfectly frank, I was afraid.

In his professional life, S is a personal trainer, and he looks like he spends a lot of time working out—bronzed, muscles, no visible body fat.  In my professional life, I’m a teacher, and I look like I spend a lot of time reading student papers.  Suffice to say I’ve put on a few pounds since my own mid-twenties.

S. and I have known each other a long time.  Years, in fact.  We reunited on Facebook, and after a year or two of poking each other and chatting online about getting coffee, or even a drink, I rashly offered to cook him dinner.

So it was a kind of first date of sorts, and I was terrified.  Not of the date part (I’m GREAT on dates), but of what might come after.  I was filled with fear about how my post-thirty body would look to him: lumpy, riddled with cellulite, my skin still winter-white.  The Women’s Magazines all say that once you’re naked, men don’t care about, say, your love handles, but I still dreaded the thought of having sex when I hated my body so much—especially if I had to be on top.  I kept imagining my body looming over his; my belly hanging down, getting in the way; my wide hips straddling his narrow ones; say nothing of my shoulders, so impossibly broad.

I did what I always do to calm my nerves—I started reading cookbooks.  Specifically, I turned to Jamie Oliver.

Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook has not yet failed me when I need to impress someone.  In the fall, the Heirloom Tomato Risotto with Roasted Ricotta and Fresh Basil rocked my mother’s birthday dinner, as did the Grilled Spatchcocked Chicken with tons of fresh herbs and roasted lemon.  The Fifteen Christmas Salad, which I made with blood oranges instead of tangerines, was a huge hit as a first course for a New Year’s Eve dinner, and I can’t say enough the Warm Grilled Peach and Frisee salad with Goat’s Cheese Dressing—it cemented my reputation for making exceptional salads.  If anyone could help me, it was Jamie Oliver.

At first I flipped past the section on lobster.  And then I turned back.  Lobster.  Hmmmm.

Yes, lobster, slaughtered right in front of S., seasoned with fresh hot red peppers, slapped into a hot grill pan and then doused with grilled lime.  Lobster is an aphrodisiac, right?  Or maybe that’s oysters.  Anyway, the meal could serve as foreplay, the perfect erotic bolster for my nerves.  Or a substitute for sex should I panic and not be able to go through with it.  A food-fucking, if you will.

Besides, the idea of killing the crustacean myself, driving a knife right between its eyes, just like in the full-color pictures of a lobster and knife in various positions, was getting me kind of excited.  I pictured myself in a sexy dress, a cute little frilled apron, butcher knife in my hand, chopping through the middle of the lobster’s head.  A food dominatrix of sorts.

Jamie Oliver encouraged me: I could have the fishmonger do it, of course, but he’d really love for me to have a go.

I picked out a risotto with asparagus, lemon, and mint.  The citrus will marry the two dishes, I thought.  Then I made a grocery list and headed for the Metropolitan Market in a daze of blood lust.

*          *          *

A few years ago, I read David Foster Wallace’s classic essay, “Consider the Lobster” when it first appeared in Gourmet.

I read it in bed, propped up against the pillows, and I laughed out loud at his descriptions of the Maine Lobster Festival, particularly that of the Main Eating Tent.  But I found myself growing sober as the essay turned to the ethics of cooking live lobsters:

“A detail so obvious that most recipes don’t even bother to mention it is that each lobster is supposed to be alive when you put it in the kettle. . . They come up alive in the traps, are placed in containers of seawater, and can, so long as the water’s aerated and the animals’ claws are pegged or banded to keep them from tearing one another up under the stresses of captivity, survive right up until they’re boiled. Most of us have been in supermarkets or restaurants that feature tanks of live lobster, from which you can pick out your supper while it watches you point.”

That last sentence was unbelievably chilling: I pictured the lobster, tied and trussed, milling aimlessly around its watery prison, occasionally attempting a futile snap at a fellow inmate, turning to see the hand of its soon-to-be executioner pointing a finger of death: Yes, that one.  I want that one.

When I was a little girl, grocery shopping with my mother, I loved to look at the lobsters.  I’d drag her to the back of the store to their tank filled with cloudy water, the tiny trails of excrement wafting through the greenish liquid, and of course the lobsters themselves drifting languidly across the bottom, their claws bound together with thick rubber bands.

Part of me couldn’t imagine taking one home to cook and eat it—they seemed more like exotic pets.  But another part of me wondered what it would be like to bring one home and boil it in a pot in our big farmhouse kitchen.  I was no stranger to boiling creatures of the sea alive: for special occasion dinners, we would take the bus to the Pike Place Market and buy fresh clams and mussels, which my mother served with melted butter for dipping.  It was our favorite dinner: messy, decadent, and delicious.  A lobster, however, seemed very different from a mollusk.

That sense of a difference I experienced as a child was reinforced for me as an adult when I read “Consider”: Wallace takes on the “science” behind boiling lobsters alive, quoting a man named, (un-ironically, I’m sure), “Dick.” Dick’s “son-in-law happens to be a professional lobsterman and one of the Main Eating Tent’s regular suppliers—[he] articulates what he and his family feel is the crucial mitigating factor in the whole morality-of-boiling-lobsters-alive issue: ‘There’s a part of the brain in people and animals that lets us feel pain, and lobsters’ brains don’t have this part.’”  As Dick is described as a “florid and extremely gregarious rental-car guy,” I can hardly imagine he’s an expert on the neurology of aquatic arthropods.

Neither can Wallace.  He says that “besides the fact that it’s incorrect in about 11 different ways, the main reason Dick’s statement is interesting is that its thesis is more or less echoed by the Festival’s own pronouncement on lobsters and pain . . . ‘The nervous system of a lobster is very simple, and is in fact most similar to the nervous system of the grasshopper. It is decentralized with no brain. There is no cerebral cortex, which in humans is the area of the brain that gives the experience of pain.’”

Wallace points out that the even though the neurology in the claim about the cerebral cortex sounds sophisticated, it is perhaps not as accurate as those of us who boil lobsters alive may wish to believe.  “Pain reception” he writes, “is known to be part of a much older and more primitive system of nociceptors and prostaglandins that are managed by the brain stem and thalamus.”  To illustrate, he uses the example of putting your hand on a hot stove—you pull your hand off the hot burner before you’re aware of what’s going on, proving that the cortex, (which handles “reason, metaphysical self-awareness, language”) is actually “bypassed altogether; all the important neurochemical action takes place in the spine.”

Regardless of whether you agree with the science, however, there is still what Wallace describes as “the intimacy of the whole thing” when you “prepare” and “eat” the lobster:

“(note already the semiconscious euphemism “prepared,” which in the case of lobsters really means killing them right there in our kitchens). The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they came home in …whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous the lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster’s fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over.”

At this point, I had to stop reading and put the magazine down.  I felt a little sick.   The words, “the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain” kept playing over and over in my head.   I kept imagining the lobster trapped inside a steel pot of boiling water, its huge stalked eyes staring up through the huge bubbles to the silver lid above it, everything hot, hot, hot . . .

I fall asleep with the light on and the magazine on my chest, wondering if I could do it—ever kill a lobster.

*          *          *

After checking with S. to be sure he’s not allergic to crustaceans (wouldn’t THAT be embarrassing?), I head the grocery store.  I’m giddy, heady with excitement.  It’s a gorgeous spring day, and I drive too fast, sing along too loudly to the radio.  The thrill of killing a lobster, no, the fantasy I have about killing a lobster, has temporarily numbed my fear of the possibility that I might end up naked with someone I barely know—the agony of exposure each new position would open up for me.

I stride into the store and go straight to the back where the lobsters are.  Although it has changed names and owners several times since I was young, (from a Lucky’s to a Thriftway to a Queen Anne Thriftway to the Metropolitan Market) I’ve grocery shopped at this same building pretty much all my life.

And ever since those days when I considered the lobsters in their tank at the grocery store a sort of extension of the Seattle Aquarium, I’d always wondered if I could do it—make small talk with the man behind the counter as he fished a prime specimen out of the tank, wrapped it tightly in white paper, then slipped it into a plastic bag so I could bring the little guy home with me.

Turns out I can.

*          *          *

When I get home, I unpack my groceries, place the lobster carefully on the top shelf of my refrigerator, where it’s the coldest.  This will either go very well, I think.  Or it will be a disaster.  I could just see it escaping at a key moment: its spiny little bug body scuttling around my condo, antennae waving—my dog, Devon, getting all excited and chasing it, then catching it and mauling our dinner right in front of us.

To center myself, I read Jamie Oliver’s instructions.  Again.  They give me courage.  So simple.  So practical.  Jamie tells me that I can “of course” boil my lobster, but what sells me is that he

“loves to prepare it like this—it allows [me, Jennifer] to prepare it so many more ways.  So if [I, Jennifer] have a live lobster and [I,] plan to grill, roast, steam, or barbeque it, this is what [I’ll] need to do.  First, [I] need to kill it and cut in half.  Place the lobster on a big chopping board and look for the small cross mark on its shell, just at the back of its head.  Taking great care, place the tip of a large chopping knife at the center of the cross and quickly and confidently push the tip of the knife straight through the shell, chopping right down through the shell, chopping down through the head to the board underneath.” (278)

Jamie assures me that using this method will kill my lobster immediately.  If the legs wriggle a bit afterwards, I’m not to worry: it’s a reflex.  It will stop after a while.

I rather like this method.  Rather than the coward’s way of boiling the lobster alive and hiding in my living room until the clattering of the lid stops, this way feels brave.  I like the idea of myself as a butcher.  There’s something that feels primal, essential, about killing it with a knife, and that makes slaughter feel sexy.  I like the idea of getting back to earth (back to the sea?), of serving my lover the freshest, most luxurious food imaginable, and the violence of killing it myself makes me feel kind of like a culinary dominatrix.  Death, gorging, then sex.

I am not afraid to kill the lobster.

*          *          *

Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that my fear of killing the lobster has been pushed to the back of my mind, along with my fears of being on top.

I will conquer both.

The same way I just force myself to climb on top of a lover and ride, I will slice the lobster open right between its eyes—kill the lobster right in front of S.’s eyes—and then I will fuck him.

*          *          *

When S. arrives, I have a salad ready—Jamie’s Amazing Potato and Horseradish Salad with Fine Herbs and Bresaola.  The risotto I will serve alongside the lobster is almost finished.  We sit down to the first course, and then it’s time.  I am wearing my slinkiest black dress and my sweetest apron—the pink one, with frills.  I pour myself another glass of champagne and steel myself for the performance.

S. has named the lobster Fred.  “Poor little guy,” he says, as I unwrap him.

Fred is in a stupor from his stint in my fridge, and to my horror, I discover one of his antennae has been bent in two.  Its upper half waves feebly, while the other antennae whips from side to side more frantically.  I worry Fred is in pain, that he must sense his death, and suddenly it hits me:  I have to make this quick.

It’s no longer about the food-fucking, or my fears about the sex, or my housewife/dominatrix performance, or the gustatory pleasure of the aftermath, or S., or me.  It’s about this little creature and the finality of the situation I’ve created—he’s been hurt; I can’t just return him to the grocery store, and now I’ve just got to put him out of his misery.  I don’t feel sexy anymore, or brave, or lusty.  I just feel scared.

My sharpest knife and my biggest cutting board are ready to go, Jamie Oliver open beside it for quick reference and support.  I spread Fred firmly against the wood and look for his cross.  When I find it, I place my knife tip at its center.  Fred turns his eyes up to me, and he looks at me the same way Devon looks at me when he’s pleading for something: a treat, his dinner, a walk, a bite of what is on my plate.

I don’t think my knife is sharp enough.

Fred is still looking up at me with those eyes, his legs jerking, antennae flailing, the broken one still horribly bent and askew.  I take a deep breath and tell myself to push the tip of the knife through the shell.

I can’t do it yet.

I try as best I can to visualize it, and then I press down as hard as I can on the knife.  The shell cracks, but the knife doesn’t go through the head to the board underneath.

The lobster is flopping, frantically, and I let out a scream. There’s a awful, gaping crack in his shell, but Fred is not dead.

“Oh My God—Fred!”  S. says.  “Put him out of his misery!  Quick!”

I hack the knife through Fred’s head again, then again, and again, and again, smacking the knife against the cutting board several times until I am sure I’ve done it thoroughly.

Fred’s legs wiggle convulsively, just as Jamie warned they might.

I perform the rest of the instructions as quickly as I can: split Fred in half lengthwise, pull out his gritty little stomach sack, crack his claws.  I season each cut side with kosher salt, fresh-ground black pepper.  And after I douse him with olive oil, I sear him in my grill pan, pressing his body down with a lid until Fred turns bright red.  I finish him off with chopped garlic and fresh red chili, grilling two lime halves along with him for a garnish.

*          *          *

Here’s what Wallace has to say about the method I used:

Some cooks’ practice is to drive a sharp heavy knife point-first into a spot just above the midpoint between the lobster’s eyestalks (more or less where the Third Eye is in human foreheads). This is alleged either to kill the lobster instantly or to render it insensate . . . the problem with the knife method is basic biology: Lobsters’ nervous systems operate off not one but several ganglia, a.k.a. nerve bundles, which are sort of wired in series and distributed all along the lobster’s underside, from stem to stern. And disabling only the frontal ganglion does not normally result in quick death or unconsciousness.

*          *          *

I over-cooked Fred.

S. and I ate him anyway, with the lemon risotto and roasted asparagus.  We joined some friends for an after-dinner drink, then went back to my place and cuddled for a few hours.  No sex, just sweet, soft, long kisses.  Finally, unable to stand it, he jerked off and then went home.

*          *          *

My mother never asks me to tell her about cooking the lobster, and I’m glad, because I had not been entirely truthful with her.  Yes, I have killed a lobster.  And while I may have used the same technique as Julia Child, it was not “just like that.”