Failed Psychogastronomy

It's easy for me to forget that food can have dire effects on us. More than something that is tasty, or something to eat because you are hungry, it heats you up, cools you down, energizes you, makes you sleepy, gives you a headache, burns your cheeks, as well as plenty else. There are also all the long-term health effects diet may have, but I am talking about effects at an immediate level of sensation, emotion, and bodily helplessness. Taking a cue from bringing to light the abject aspect of digestion, I want to conceptually explode the body and the subject further. Rather than thinking of food as having effects upon the self or the body, but I would like to think of food's entry itself as a beginning of these identities. Let us take the adage "you are what you eat" to an extreme.

Can language do this? Can subject, object, and verb be arranged to bring about their undoing?

I bring this up because of a fairly mundane drink of yogurt, water, and honey. It was just what I needed at the time I drank it; it was soothing and cooling (both in the sense of temperature and otherwise). For a while it transformed what I could and could not sense. It would be nice to place cognition aside from this externalizing gustatory scene, but I'm afraid it too bends and is bent by eating. I began to write the recipe for this drink, which led somehow into reading lassi recipes online. My half-cognition of what happened recognized itself through a descriptor in one of these recipes: "soothing." This validated my feeling that the drink had brought about a change. Which brings me to trying to write this and having difficulty remembering anything beyond the words I read in that recipe somewhere (and I can’t find the recipe either). This doesn’t make the case for what I was saying about cognition at all. Damn.

Honey Lassi

1/2 cup yogurt
1 cup water
2 teaspoons honey

In a glass drip honey over yogurt. Use honey-covered spoon to mix together yogurt and honey as thoroughly as possible. Without removing spoon, add water. Stir until most of the honey is dissolved from the spoon.