Woman, Eating Quotes

“People---aging and mortal---are like flowers, seasonal, wilting and finite; while I'm like a tree.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“I’m not really sure what I am anymore, though- wether I’m a monster or wether I’m just a woman, or both.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“I suppose food is a part of life that most humans can control. They give food a lot of power - food can make a person more beautiful, or less beautiful; it can improve or damage skin; it can make a person's body more attractive, help make hair and nails stronger; it can heal you or slowly kill you. There's also clean food and dirty food; if you eat clean, the message is that you are a clean and pure person; if you eat dirty, then the message is that you are dirty and impure. If you lose control in your life, you can find control in your food.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“The memory of human blood manifests now as a kind of visceral reaction to seeing people's veins and their necks. The skin on a neck appears to me as different from the skin anywhere else on a body. It seems as thin and consumable as rice paper wrapped around a sweet. It is too blank compared with skin everywhere else, as though it is asking to have marks made on it, like very expensive calligraphy paper, or cold-pressed Fabriano. Often, I wonder whether the urge I have to make art is the same as the urge to consume and destroy the blankness of a human neck. While at art college, I read that the best paper used by artists in the seventeenth century was made from the skins of lamb fetuses. This skin was soft and absorbent, and had an even texture right across its surface. For a long time, the process of creating art has been linked to the killing of living things. My dad, even, used fine silk stretched across wooden frames in his own work as a painter. Once, when we still had some of his pieces, I looked at the odd geometric shapes he created on a huge sheet and thought about all the silkworms who had had their cocoons torn open before they were able to become moths.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“I realized that "demon" is a subjective term, and the splitting of my identity between devil and God, between impure and pure, was something that my mum did to me, rather than the reality of my existence.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“I think I realized quite a long time ago that the demon isn't necessarily linked to God; it's not the antithesis of human, or of the soul. It is just a different animal, which has a different diet from humans.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“You know, lobsters just get bigger and bigger without aging and, if there were no other threats to them, they'd live forever. Sea sponges too, Mama." I call her what I used to when I was a child. "They stay beautiful and bright and they live for thousands of years. That's us.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“I go to one of my favorite Instagram profiles, the.korean.vegan, and I watch her last video, in which she makes peach-topped tteok. The Korean vegan, Joanne, cooks while talking about various things in her life. As she splits open a peach, she explains why she gave up meat. As she adds lemon juice, brown sugar, nutmeg, a pinch of salt, cinnamon, almond extract, maple syrup, then vegan butter and vegan milk and sifted almond and rice flour, she talks about how she worried about whitewashing her diet, about denying herself a fundamental part of her culture, and then about how others don't see her as authentically Korean since she is a vegan. I watch other videos by Joanne, soothed by her voice into feeling human myself, and into craving the experiences of love she talks of and the food she cooks as she does.
I go to another profile, and watch a person's hands delicately handle little knots of shirataki noodles and wash them in cold water, before placing them in a clear oden soup that is already filled with stock-boiled eggs, daikon, and pure white triangles of hanpen. Next, they place a cube of rice cake in a little deep-fried tofu pouch, and seal the pouch with a toothpick so it looks like a tiny drawstring bag; they place the bag in with the other ingredients. "Every winter my mum made this dish for me," a voice says over the video, "just like how every winter my grandma made it for my mum when she was a child." The person in the video is half Japanese like me, and her name is Mei; she appears on the screen, rosy cheeked, chopsticks in her hand, and sits down with her dish and eats it, facing the camera.
Food means so much in Japan. Soya beans thrown out of temples in February to tempt out demons before the coming of spring bring the eater prosperity and luck; sushi rolls eaten facing a specific direction decided each year bring luck and fortune to the eater; soba noodles consumed at New Year help time progress, connecting one year to the next; when the noodles snap, the eater can move on from bad events from the last year. In China too, long noodles consumed at New Year grant the eater a long life. In Korea, when rice-cake soup is eaten at New Year, every Korean ages a year, together, in unison. All these things feel crucial to East Asian identity, no matter which country you are from.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“An idea has formed in my mind. At university, I performed pieces where I'd sit on various materials that had long life spans, like plastic, trees, stone, and I gradually glued my skin to them, or else connected myself to the material with clay or plaster and painted the joins to look like the material---the bark of a tree, marble, cement. I wanted to look like I was a part of whatever material I was using and it was a part of me. I think that those works came from a kind of naive and youthful desire to be seen for what I was. For my body to be seen for what it is: this un-decaying, eternal thing---familiarly human, but also not.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“There is a plant called the ghost pipe, because it is ghostly white, almost blue. Were you to cut open this flower and study it, you'd find no chlorophyll inside. It can grow in the dark, under the cover of fallen leaves and undergrowth in forests, under soil. It doesn't need to photosynthesize, because it is a parasite. It uses fungal networks to suck energy from photosynthesizing trees. Its roots look like clusters of tiny fingers that grope toward and connect with huge white webs of fungus that in turn connect with the thick roots of trees.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“I think I've thought about it before, but I get confused sometimes about what are my own thoughts and what are thoughts other people have had and then posted on social media.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“Whenever there is something planned in my life—either meeting a friend, going on a school or uni trip, going for a walk, or, like today, starting an internship—when it actually comes to the day I have to go through with the plan, it goes from being something I’m excited about to something I dread. If I arrange to go to the cinema in a week’s time, for instance, when the time to go comes around, it becomes the last thing I want to do. My instinct, always, is to stay in.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“The beginning of love, maybe, but not quite that either. The feeling that comes from being brought to almost-life by a person, of having tasted their blood, of feeling the rhythm of contractions, the feeling of being forced to breathe air for the first time...”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“The powder in that box feels like it represents so accurately what I am: a thing that is completely and utterly removed from human life, or even animal life; a thing that's been sucked dry of everything that once sustained a real living body; something that is so devoid of life that it doesn't even rot, but just sits in the corner of my studio out of the fridge, in its box, unchanging. The thought of consuming the powder revolts me; the thought of it going into my body, becoming a part of it, makes me feel like I myself am revolting.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“There's no more space in my brain for my mum at the moment. I feel as though if I let too much of her in, I might have to push something fundamental - like my capacity for emotion, or for making memories, or understanding language - out.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“Sometimes, I've wondered if a simple life like this one might be the life I'd choose to live if I were human.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“I think about this now, looking around at all the things that I suppose are designed to help residents retain a feeling of identity and belonging, and wonder if my mum denied herself more than just blood from anything "higher" than a pig while I was growing up. There'd been nothing in our house that we'd had just because my mum liked it; nothing that stood as a memento of her human life, her life in Malaysia. Everything was about convenience, not her taste or personality.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“I've often thought that people get quiet after sharing personal things with me; maybe it's because I don't react in the way they want a person to react, or give them enough sympathy or advice.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“I often wonder what kind of food I would like if I were fully human. Would I purposefully eat Japanese food, to strengthen that part of my identity - my Japanese ethnicity passed down from my dad - or would I reject Japanese food and fill myself with as much British food as possible: vegetables and roots grown in British soil, fish caught in British seas, meat from animals kept in British fields, in British landscapes - hills covered in wildflowers and heather, slate mountains, flat yellow and green fields, little farmhouses, people in Hunter Wellington boots, with several dogs on leads they hold in a bunch, white cliffs in the background?”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“We only ever got pig blood. This wasn't because it was the only type of animal blood the butcher had. "Pigs are dirty," my mum said once. "It's what your body deserves." But it turns out that pigs aren't naturally dirty. Rather, humans keep pigs in dirty conditions, feeding them rotten vegetables, letting the mud in their too-small pens mix with their feces; the filth of the pig is just symptomatic of the sins of the human.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“Memories fill my mind, as though they are my own, of not just events from Gideon's life, but of various flavors and textures: breast milk running easily down into my stomach, chicken cooked with butter and parsley, split peas and runner beans and butter beans, and oranges and peaches, strawberries freshly picked from the plant; hot, strong coffees each morning; pasta and walnuts and bread and brie; then something sweet: a pan cotta, with rose and saffron, and a white wine: tannin, soil, stone fruits, white blossom; and---oh my god---ramen, soba, udon, topped with nori and sesame seeds; miso with tofu and spring onions, fugu and tuna sashimi dipped in soy sauce, onigiri with a soured plum stuffed in the middle; and then something I don't know, something unfamiliar but at the same time deeply familiar, something I didn't realize I craved: crispy ground lamb, thick, broken noodles, chili oil, fragrant rice cooked in coconut milk, tamarind... and then a bright green dessert---the sweet, floral flavor of pandan fills my mouth.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“It's just there, right in the middle of the foreshore, quite pretty---greens and blues, a white wing, a rusty breast: a duck, dead on the riverbank. It's so pristine, and elegant in the way it is lying, that it looks like a sculpture, not an animal. Never until now have I seriously considered letting the blood of a bird and, with it, that bird's spirit, its experience of drifting along, pushed by the currents of rivers, its experience of flight, of breaking through clouds---the blood of something so beautiful---circulate around my body.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“I've heard of a crustacean that eats just the corneas of sharks until the sharks are blinded, and butterflies in the Amazon that drink the tears of turtles---yet these animals aren't demons, they're just animals, and many people believe them to have been made the way they are by God. Of course, there are also animals that survive on blood; and others that crack open eggs and eat the young, or the runny yolk inside; and others that eat their own young; and, then, humans too eat meat and eggs and blood, only in specific ways, in specific shapes, with specific herbs, and these animals and humans are not demons.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“I would love, though, to be able to forage---to pick the rosemary that grows near my mum's house, the dandelion flowers and their leaves that I've seen on the little patch of grass outside the studios---and to be able to eat the foods the artists in this building are growing, the mushrooms, tomatoes, herbs... I'd love, also, to be able to just go to a normal shop and buy my food, to peel back an aluminum and plastic lid on a polystyrene box and tuck into my dinner in the way a human can with instant ramen.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“In that moment, he looks like a da Vinci portrait; his plump, white face, his soft-looking ginger hair, his gentle-looking eyes. In da Vinci's portraits of people pointing to heaven, his models, no matter their age, always look almost cherub-like. Ben stays pointing for a while, and then the illusion is broken.
"Yeah, thanks," I say.
Ben grins, and his eyes turn into little slits with crow's-feet on either side that haven't yet become permanent folds in his face; I can tell they will, though. Over several years, Ben's skin will form wrinkles that will act like physical reminders of his personality and nature. Meanwhile, I'll remain looking the same; my face will give no clue to the kind of person I am. "That man looks kind," people will say when they see Ben's face when he is old. When the same people see me, they'll say nothing.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“Now I wonder if I’ve been useful to her only as something she can pour everything she despises about herself into, something that she could raise to hate itself so that she’d have company in her feelings.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“I'm not really sure what I am anymore, though-whether I'm a monster or whether I'm just a woman, or both.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“there always seems to be something that suffers of dies as a result of any form of food consumption, and once all suffering is whittled out of a human's diet, they can't survive themselves.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“I think I have known for a while that neither side of me can be separated from the other, and that this is true of my mum too; that I can't punish the demon by making it eat only pig blood without punishing the human; I can't listen to just one side, and block out the other; I can't force one side to be dominant while I live a life pretending to only be the other side; I can starve either side out of myself. Really, I don't even have "sides" at all. I'm two things that have become one thing that is neither demon nor human.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“All the animals - human, bird, and pig - had felt something larger than themselves that they were a part of, families, flocks, or something bigger and less definable. Now, I feel only the absence of something like love, of something like faith, of purpose, meaning, of appreciation for anything. But, I don't want to have to eat to get these things back. Or else, I want to eat but the thing I want to consume is the food humans lovingly make for themselves and for each other: home-cooked meals, and tea, and hot milk, and things like that.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating