Eating the Baby
For Father’s Day, I baked a lemon cheesecake, chilled it, and then stuck my baby’s feet into the surface to make little footprints. The effect was adorable and grotesque at the same time. Is there anything cuter than baby feet? Or more unappetizing around food than adult feet? I wanted to take it further, and make a mold of his foot that I could bake cupcakes with. I thought it was a uniquely creepy idea, but when I found the Amazon reviews for the food-safe molding gel, I learned that many people want to eat food shaped like their babies’ appendages. The example photos suggest butt crack molds, which takes the idea beyond what I imagined.
What’s up with this desire to eat our babies? We put him on the table during dinner, surrounded by condiments and vegetables, and tell him he’s the main dish. We show up to a friend’s BBQ with the announcement, “We brought 12 pounds of meat!” I like to nibble on his fingers or put a whole foot in my mouth or sometimes I’ll pretend to take a bite out of his belly. In English we say things like, “I could just eat him right up,” and when we show him on Skype to Anthony’s family I recognize one of the words I know: вкусно (“tasty”). He’s a dumpling, a potato, a loaf. When I first learned to work with dough, I was instructed to knead until it was “as smooth as a baby’s bottom.” I can’t remember if my Mom said that or if I read it in a cookbook. Regardless, the affinity of bread dough and baby skin stuck with me, the two concepts slipping into each other, yeast and warmth and soft supple roundness.
Apparently there have been studies about why we want to eat cute things that coined the term “cute aggression”. They chalk it up to emotional overload; it’s literally too much cuteness for our brains to handle and so they short-circuit into “dimorphous expression,” or behavior that’s the opposite of what we’re feeling. That doesn’t feel exactly right, though. The desire to eat is more specific than general aggression. I wonder if there’s something erotic in it, like the way people have sexual fantasies about cannibalism. Sometimes I hold this baby against my body and there’s so much feeling in my chest that it’s like I can’t hold him close enough. Maybe the desire to eat is really to merge, to become one once again.
“I won’t really eat you,” I assure him sometimes. “It would be inefficient.” (Or hyper efficient? Like an ouroboros.) Every one of his calories was once mine. Sometimes — frequently — I am amazed that I’m a machine that can take oatmeal and tomatoes and veggie burgers and turn it into baby material. I’m glad that he’s still made of me. It feels like a layer of protection — nothing gets to him that I haven’t metabolized and transformed first. I can feign some level of control this way.
The experience of being a new parent is walking around all day wanting time to stop. The baby I love is already giving way to someone else. I look at pictures from 6 weeks ago and it’s almost like seeing an ex — small details of the face or head that I knew intimately but have forgotten. I take more and more pictures to capture the moments, stockpiling for an imagined old age when I’ll need them to feed my nostalgia. Already living in a future of living out my past. So maybe the desire to eat is to consume the moment in all its ephemeral perfection, like a sweating slice of cold cheesecake under the late June sun.
We ate his feet and then Father’s Day was over. The Fourth of July came around, and I made an almond cake with strawberry compote and pistachio frangipane. Soon all the berries will be gone from the market and the baby won’t need the infant insert in the car seat anymore. By Thanksgiving, I realized recently, he’ll probably be eating sweet potato. It’s alarming. When the potato eats potato, I’ll have to admit to myself that he’s no longer a vegetable, but maybe, actually, a person. And as a vegetarian, I don’t eat that.
What I’m Cooking
Smoky Beet Lox (v, gf)
Salt-roasted and slow-marinated with tea and seaweed, these golden beets are my take on smoked salmon.
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