A Certain Hunger

by Chelsea G. Summers

Everyone in food seemed to know everyone else; it was one long human centipede of fuckwittery, where not only was everyone suddenly a writer or a celebrity, but also chefs and sommeliers and even bloody butchers were stars, crossing oceans and running symposiums, Facebooking and tweeting and Snapchatting about the whole incestuous, writhing mess.

I learned the precise ritual for kosher killing, memorizing its intricate choreography, its slitting of carotid arteries, jugular veins, vagus nerves, trachea, and esophagus. I mapped out this ballet on a human body, likewise the body’s necessary exsanguination, stripping of veins, caul fat, and sinews.

One thing most people don’t fully comprehend is that the USDA, the United States Department of Agriculture, is for all intents and purposes run by big agro. Let me put it another way: the USDA is a giddy dystopian wonderland designed for the pleasure of big agribusiness. There are only a handful of American agribusiness corporations, and they essentially dictate what Americans eat because they essentially control the USDA. For example, the USDA created the nutritional pyramid first and foremost to serve agribusiness’s interests—not human physical needs. And thus the meals served to schools and to prisons reflect not what the bodies of growing boys and girls or aging men and women need to thrive and/or survive; rather, these meals, planned and vetted and carefully created by lockstep scads of bureaucratic drones, work to buttress the agribusiness economy—while costing the State (or the corporation running the institution) as little as possible.

Here’s another way to look at it: in the 1930s, there were 5,000,000 more American farmers than there are now, not quite a hundred years later, and these millions of farmers grew a wider range of foodstuffs on these predominantly family-owned-and-operated farms. Most important, these farms don’t exist today. That cool six-figure loss hides the explosive growth of corporations like Monsanto and DuPont, shrouds the decrease in differing crops that American farmers grow, and obfuscates how what we eat is making us sick because what we’re eating is in no small part dictated by the big businesses that grow the raw materials for our meals. We’ve gained cheap food (and the cheapest food goes to public schools and for-profit prisons), but we’ve lost everything else.

Being a wealthy, smart psychopath with superb cooking skills and the best small appliance that the federal corrections system allows makes me a powerful person.

Marco’s head was like a starlet’s breasts, tethered to the performance of decorum with the help of space-age polymers.

There’s no good way to turn animals into meat. Statistically, traditional stunning and shochet killing fail at about the same rate, roughly ten percent of the time. No matter what measures you take, you’re killing an animal to harvest its glorious muscles. Death is rarely pretty. Indeed, death’s very predilection to go horribly awry gave Marco the genius idea to start the organic conventional side of his business. When his team of expert shochets slipped up, when their knives were nicked, when they cut too close or too shallow, when the trimmers perforated the stomach, when the cow’s lungs weren’t smooth, whenever something, somehow, somewhere rendered that cow not kosher, Marco had an immediate plan B: feed the goyim.

On the conventional side, a long line of men in white coats, tall rubber boots, netted heads, and paper arm condoms systematically turned dead cows into slabs of meat and tubs of glistening viscera. On the kosher side, the same thing happened with many, many more steps. The cow was not merely disassembled; it was scrutinized, parts turned inside out, upside down, blown up, and pored over. Any tiny imperfection rendered it unacceptable, and swiftly, like a plague victim, it would be whisked away to the other side of the divide.

Had I all the time in the world, I’d have cut a cunning little circle around the anus and tied the lower intestine off with a bit of string, but I didn’t have that luxury, so I half-assed it, as it were.

Only intellectuals are more gullible than idiots.

Wasserman and her CrossFit thighs. I imagined her skin oiled and salted, apple in her mouth, pirouetting slowly on a spit. “I just got so flustered.”

Could she, who clearly sustained herself on a diet of horse meat, egg whites, and kale in wet, dehydrated, pureed, and juiced forms, be my nemesis. Had I finally met my match. You’d think I would be thrilled.

She was viciously talented and ridiculously hardworking, and people who truck with elite institutions didn’t—couldn’t—forgive her reckless attitude toward traditional models of artistic creation.

They belong to three separate subgroups: sexual cannibals, intrauterine, and size-structured,

Beds, for all their vaunted symbolism of rest and peace, are sites of strife. Show me a human who hasn’t silently, stealthily, lain in bed and wished for the sudden horrible death of the person lying next to them, and I’ll show you a liar. We can only take so much intimacy before we close our eyes and pray to our gods for a cerebral hemorrhage.

Wasserman looked at me and smiled the smile of a hyena sighting a particularly slow-moving wildebeest. My blood coursed icy, falling vertiginous in my gut.

I have a limited attention span for anxiety; I grow exhausted, and then I become bored, a feeling I envision as Millennial Pink: a faintly labial shade that manages to be both irritating and unobtrusive.

But spending time with a lawyer is much like spending time with a therapist, which is to say that while your conversations may run to the intimate, when your time is up you never hear from them again.

How much sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a faithless friend.

one of those men who moves as if he had fifteen pounds of undigested red meat sitting in his colon.

I wanted to hear from Wasserman’s own naked mouth that she had colluded with Emma. I wanted to bear witness to my own destruction because how many of us get to see our own undoing. All humans are bad. Most of us merely live our lives with our worst, most unethical acts lying like bodies clad in concrete, undiscovered, quiet, and dark. What is heaven but the hope for righteous acknowledgment, and what is hell but the fear of discovery.

I imagined Maggie’s slow evisceration of Wasserman. I saw my beige lioness stripping the flesh off the State’s evidence, gore staining her maw. I envisioned Maggie the surgeon, Maggie the drone operator, Maggie the butcher.

Culture refuses to see violence in women, and the law nurtures a special loathing for violent women. Unfettered violence, anger unleashed, the will to destroy, the need to undo—these acts run counter to everything we like to think we know about the feminine nature. Yet women weren’t always the angels in the house, and angels weren’t always benevolent beings playing harps on the tops of trees.

For all his earnestness, Alex was a deep-down dirty pervert, a man who liked to let fucking linger; he spent hours in flamboyant constructions of pleasure. I can’t say enough good things about sex with engineers. Sensuality hides in the dark, dim recesses of the mathematical mind.

You can’t have erotic love without the rank grittiness of dirty bodies, and bodies, like desires, are disgusting.

Women, on the other hand, kill for only two reasons, or so the people who study women killers say. We women kill for personal financial gain or to escape an abusive relationship. Of course, this binary stereotype is insulting and inaccurate.

Our unshakeable belief in women’s essential goodness is a wondrous, drooling thing. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we act as starry-eyed as Margaret Keane paintings about the eternal sunshine of the spotless female mind. It’s as if none of us ever had mothers who ever acted cruelly, and we all did. Some more than others.

Love, as much as any other human passion, made me kill. Love, anger, fear, hunger—take a flashlight to your soul and tell me that these emotions don’t burble and stew as one.