User:Aitantv/Kraus, C (2000) Aliens & Anorexia

Kraus, C (2000) Aliens & Anorexia. Semiotext(e), Los Angeles. (Download: https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/p/aliens-anorexia/9200000086115932/)

"To feel at home in this desperate world of ours is the surest sign that one has failed to recognize it. Alienation, as Plato well understood, is the first sign of recognition—recognition of what is there, and, more importantly, of what is not." (Kraus 2000)
"Perhaps the body is, after all, our spaceship, the only vehicle we have for transcendence. But how do we use it?"(Kraus 2000)
"A single moment of true sadness connects you instantly to all the suffering in the world. In the world of fairy tales, sadness is redeemed by acts of gentleness and kindness. Feeling your head exploding, feeling your brain on the point of bursting to bits. The longer that a person cannot eat, the harder it becomes for her to find the perfect food."(Kraus 2000)
"Halfway out the LIE, I stop the car and vomit. Since the age of 21, I’ve been living with a chronic inflammation of the small intestine known as Crohn’s Disease. It is despair that triggers chronic illness, a state quite different from depression. I never know when it will hit, but when it does, my body’s pitched into a battle between the inflammation and the desire to stay well. It is a question of control. Sometimes the inflammation wins, and when it does, I lay under it" (Kraus 2000)

"There is a can of Campbell’s “Home Cookin’ Fiesta Soup” inside my cupboard. I open up the can and study it. There are rectangular white cubes which must originally have been potatoes, peas and carrots held together in a gummy broth. The vegetables don’t look like they were ever in the ground. Impossible to eat food if I can’t picture where it came from. And yet somewhere in the background of my stomach, chest, or mind there is this craving for… nutrition. What if the Campbell’s soup suddenly became home-made gazpacho? I can’t be sure… Gazpacho’s less than perfect because the only tomatoes sold in Southern California are thick-skinned squarish objects wrapped in cellophane. I need food but am rejecting it and everything at the most cellular level. I feel it in my cells: I’m starving. Daily life turns into a terror as soon as you start doubting food—"(Kraus 2000)
"Curiously, Judaism comes closest to conceiving of an a-personal anorexia through the orthodox belief in mitzvah. Food is blessed before it is consumed. The blessing is an affirmation that the food is only good, or holy, when it fuels good deeds by humans."(Kraus 2000)
"Has it ever occurred to you that food’s intensely social? There is just so much to think about before you eat. The origins of food, the social politics of its production. Its presentation. The presence or the absence of true happiness. In its journey to the table, was this food handled by anyone who cared or understood it? None of these circumstances can be the least bit alienating in order for food to taste good. Food’s a product of the culture and the cynicism of it makes me sick."(Kraus 2000)
"When I lived in New York City, I didn’t leave Manhattan once for seven years. Bruising easily from malnutrition, I stayed mostly in my apartment, reading books and staring out into the airshaft and dreaming about food. Children playing kickball in the late afternoon, the torn-up yards, the smell of dinners cooking up and down the block, “It’s getting late!” Corned beef and cabbage. Remembering someone else’s childhood as your own. But since food’s a disembodied signifier, there’s almost always something missing, something wrong with the picture. (When I can’t eat it’s because I feel totally alone.) To question food is to question everything. To question food is to recognize the impossibility of “home.”"(Kraus 2000)
"My heart and stomach flip while waiting in the endless gourmet take-out line at Say Cheese on Hyperion. This is the third full day not eating… I stare through thick plate glass at tureens of baby peas in mayonnaise. Ten bucks a quarter pound, they’re canned. Little bits of foreign cheese displayed on the top shelf like so many sad specimens. English Stilton, Camembert. From the bodies of imprisoned animals to the air conditioned case, it’s obvious this food was never touched with love or understanding. The chubby woman up ahead of me seems to think this food is good. She is luxuriating in the moment when she speaks her choices to the shop girl, even though the girl is bored and hardly even listening. I’d hoped to trick myself to eat by ordering the most exquisite food but now this place offends me. Say Cheese, Say Choose. She wraps the names of foods around her tongue, pleased with her passable pronunciation. Why do I hate everything? The food here is so vastly overpriced, it no longer smells like food, it smells like bills and coins and plastic."(Kraus 2000)
"Everything turns to shit. Food’s uncontrollable. If only it were possible to circumvent the throat, the stomach and the small intestine and digest food just by seeing."(Kraus 2000)
"Cynicism travels through the food chain. To stop eating is to temporarily withdraw from it. Dear Walter Benjamin, without love it is impossible to eat."(Kraus 2000)
"On the last page of her London diary, Weil writes wistfully about symbolic food, foods that are sacraments of tenderness and roots. There were Easter eggs and Christmas turkey, strawberry jam, plum pudding. The panic of altruism, the panic of starvation. “The sustenance that a collectivity provides has no equivalent in the world.” She must’ve felt her cells contracting. Hungry yet repelled by food, she asked the Ashford nurses for some potatoes, not mashed, but gratinée: cuisine bonne femme, she mumbled, prepared by a French woman, the French way."(Kraus 2000)