CALAMARI, THE ITALIAN WORD FOR SQUIDS, HAS long been a staple food source in the Mediterranean, but took a bit longer to catch on in North America where now, along with the buffalo wing, the potato skin, the jalapeño popper, and the mozzarella stick, it dominates the appetizer sections of menus at establishments both gourmet and shitty, served alongside dipping sauces that range from lavender aioli to balsamic vinaigrette to tartar to marinara sauce.
I’m a food obsessive and a squid obsessive, and I therefore began to think a lot about what it meant to eat—to take into our bodies—something that once featured in our myths. I started working in restaurants when I was eleven, washing dishes in a fast-food chicken on the outskirts of Chicago. I started keeping a journal, which persisted throughout my restaurant work years—just a quotidian record of my life and its silly ornaments. As such, I thought a lot about food over the years, touched a lot of food, caressed it, manipulated it, changed its chemistry, physically massaged a lot of food, extracted—with a series of very sharp knives—parts of food from a whole, ever chronicling, however inadvertently, how my relationship to food evolved. I left home at age seventeen, and bummed around the world picking up restaurant work along the way, apprenticing in a series of kitchens. I think that at the center of PtG is a question of appetite. Why do we feel the need to make myth of some narratives (or facts—like the giant squid), and not others? And: why, eventually, are we compelled to kill our myths and invent others? And why are certain things—again, like the giant squid—the recipients of our desire to keep them in the middle zone, between myth and reality, ever-fluctuating between the two—its role as myth and monster killed then resurrected, killed then resurrected, one tentacle here, another there, spread-legged and immodest? And why does monstrosity permeate so many of our myths; the need to see our myths as Other, and thereby, perhaps, as our possessions? We use them until we use them up. What sort of hunger drives us to do this, and what sort of appetite are we trying to satisfy? What sorts of hungers (actual and metaphorical) do you have, and how do you go about trying to satisfy them?
