So there’s a video circulating the Internet about cooking with your mouth. What? Yes, you read that correctly: cooking with your mouth. And, yes, it’s as gross as it sounds. If you’re feeling up to it, here’s a snippet of the 6-minute-long video:
Why?…And Why Not?
TG; DW (too gross; didn’t watch): the artist who shot the video, Nathan Ceddia, states that “cooking is boring…why not take it to the next step?” There are plenty of reasons to not take it to the next step because obviously, this is downright unsanitary. Besides that, cooking in such a primitive (could you call it that?) way completely undermines amazing techniques that may take cooks and chefs months or even years to develop. Try to tourné a potato in exactly seven cuts if you don’t believe me.
In an interview with MUNCHIES, Ceddia explains how his fear of injuring himself while cooking inspired him to use this method in the kitchen. Replacing knives with teeth is a great idea, right? Suspiciously, that reasoning sounds a bit different from thinking that cooking is simply boring. The good thing is that you have no reason to be afraid that the next dinner party you attend will have orally-prepared dishes. The Times says that the video is a spoof, using surrealism to explore the relationship between food and sex (let alone the fact that it’s super gross). Ceddia has more videos like this one, as well as more projects focusing on food. One of them, called Cake Holes, shows naked butts smashing perfectly good food. It’s interesting, to say the least.
Food and Fornication
That there is a relationship between food and sex isn’t debated. Pleasurable things, like eating good food, release the neurotransmitter dopamine, which activates the brain’s reward pathways. Sex essentially does the same thing. Additionally, the cravings for food and sex are both biological drives. Depending on who you ask, a combination of the two may either be great or terrible.
So how does cooking with your mouth relate to the eroticism of food? That’s a great question. Perhaps it’s the intimacy, involving trust that the cook isn’t sick or the sheer fact that the food has been in someone else’s mouth. We can’t be sure. But what we can be sure of is that Cake Holes is all about sploshing, or using food in the bedroom — to a very messy extent. Although it’s sad to see beautiful food go to waste, it is most definitely food for thought (I’m not sorry for that one).
The eroticism of food doesn’t have a sound psychological basis. Theories include that it’s a grown-up way to play and make a mess, defiance of parental rules to not play with your food, alleviation of a sensory processing disorder, and enhancing the primal behavior of sex. Whatever the reason, it’s just another thing that people do. We can’t judge them for it.
Nathan Ceddia is doing what artists do: use shock to get people thinking. This shock just so happened to be in the form of mouth-cooking and food-sitting. He is addressing an interesting and not-well-understood part of human behavior, so maybe it’s something worth looking into. But if you choose to stay away from it, that’s okay, too.