Food and Horror Quotes

“Food is fuel, food is pleasure, food is guilt. It stands to reason that with all these digestive undercurrents there are storytellers who will treat a shared act of consumption as a sort of shared subversive act, a communion of Oh, I shouldn’t really. We shouldn’t.”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings

“Making them want controls everything. That’s real power. Real horror, too, as it’s so good at removing agency, at turning personality into puppet.”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings

“My parents, more successful in instilling manners than lack of greed, stood happily by, completely unaware that there was murder in my heart.”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings

“Edmund, I had to acknowledge, was a little shit. (My language was somewhat better then, but the sentiment was the same.)”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings

“In another genre the consequences of that identification may also be innocent, but in horror the guilt spreads, because if you identify with monsters doesn’t that mean that part of you understands them? Even if you don’t know they’re a monster—especially if you don’t know. If the identification is innocent then there’s no bias; the recognition is untainted. And if you recognise a monster by your identification with it, by its reflection in yourself, doesn’t that make part of you a monster too? An innocent monster, perhaps. One not awake to the potential of your own nature… but the potential remains regardless. And when the monster acts as monsters do, then don’t your sympathetic responses share the responsibility for it?”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings

“Part of the reason for this is that the relationship between food and guilt—between food and shame, between food and blame—is so often already present. I’m not even talking about when an individual’s relationship with food has degenerated to the point of disorder, as in anorexia or bulimia, although that is certainly fertile ground for horror. I’m talking about the constant low buzz of Should-you-really-be-eating-that?—the internal and external voices that judge what people put into their mouths, what they presume to swallow against all outside advice or expectations. Too fat, too skinny, too much sugar, too much gluten, too many calories, too many preservatives, can’t you just eat some carrot sticks, but really are carrot sticks all you’re going to eat?”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings

“In Fantasia, the physics is different. It’s not the property of mass that’s causing people to throw themselves into the Nothing, to let themselves be devoured into suicide. It’s imagination and feeling and inspiration that’s the basic currency of this world. The expectation of wonder is what holds Fantasia together—wonder and creative currents, fantasy and inventiveness. These are the things that give meaning and purpose to Fantasia and its citizens. So when the Nothing comes along, devouring all these things indiscriminately, undermining their importance in a fundamental way, its very lack calls to the part of the Fantasian people that is the very opposite of imagination… the angst and nihilism inherent in each individual. The part that says What if we’ve been wrong all along? It doesn’t take much doubt (just a little chunk) but the resulting horror feeds on every positive thought, every creative impulse, until the symmetry of lack between the Nothing and the despairing individual acts as gravity, drawing them closer and closer to the Nothing until the only alternative is to become part of it. It really is like a black hole.”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings

“What happens when one can only combat another’s destabilisation by undermining one’s own sane perspectives? How much of another’s horror can reasonably be taken on?”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings

“Because so much of horror is destabilisation—and often destabilisation come from an outside source (an alien invasion, a horrible plague…)—there is a temptation to think that destabilisation is the story all through. That civilisation collapses, that transformations are inevitable. But the response to destabilisation is frequently a matter of choice.”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings

“And while it’s problematic to describe other people as alien or the other, science fiction has a long tradition of trying on different perspectives through alien masks. It’s rooted in the desire to communicate, I think, to talk about issues in what can be a less incendiary way. To slide the conversation in sideways.”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings

“Except horror, as a genre, isn’t all that fond of destiny either. It smacks too much of stability and fixed points and too little of chaos.”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings

“I don’t know what else you’d call all the panic and screaming and the sudden loss of anything remotely resembling common sense from people who should be making for the nearest door but don’t as the house eats up their fear and synthesises it into often bloody disaster.”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings

“A mother avenging her son is one thing, a noble lady showing interest in the local children another… but when they start eating them, well. We expect ladies to be nicer than that.”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings

“[...]the brain that survived in large part due to scuttling and blind terror under the feet of dinosaurs, due to the ability to run and hide and slide under the notice of the things that would make it dinner.”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings

“If, in a free-association exercise someone says to me “saltwater crocodile” my first thought isn’t evil man-eating beast from the pits of hell (Australia), it’s reptile. It’s reptile, then crocodilian, then evil man-eating beast and so forth. And even as I say the last I don’t think of it as a true classification. I’m aware that instinctive emotion is over-ruling the logic behind my organisational impulse.”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings

“Feeding someone a stew made from their own child? That’s personal. That’s hate. That is grossly over-the-top malicious.”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings

“She’s picked her family, has Procne, and it consists of sisters instead of sons.”
― Octavia Cade, Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings