discarded notes from “take and eat”
In 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed into the frozen wasteland of the Andes. The passengers, trapped without food, consumed the flesh of their dead companions. Hunger turned bodies into meat, and necessity blurred into antropophagy. The boundaries of the edible, which seem so stable in ordinary life, shattered. The question was no longer what should be eaten but who. To survive, they had to look at a corpse and see sustenance. They had to unsee the person and see the flesh. Eating always involves this transformation—the breaking down of something that once was into something that is now fuel. It is only in moments of extremity that this truth is laid bare.
If hunger makes eating horrifying, so too does excess. The line between pleasure and disgust is thinner than we like to think. In Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (1973), four men lock themselves in a house to eat themselves to death. What begins as indulgence—sumptuous meals, culinary excess, and gluttonous pleasure—soon becomes unbearable. Eating ceases to be about nourishment or even enjoyment. It becomes grotesque, suffocating, inescapable. As their bodies swell, as they consume past the limits of their own pleasure, the act of eating collapses into horror. The exquisite meal, too long drawn out, becomes nausea. The line between consumption and self-destruction is never as clear as we pretend.
And then there is eating not for survival, not for pleasure, but for the sake of horror. Antonin Artaud’s Les Cenci imagines a world in which pain and cruelty are not accidental but fundamental. To eat, in such a world, is not simply to nourish or to enjoy—it is to violate, to dominate, to reenact the abyssal terror of existence itself. Georges Bataille reminds us that to eat is to thingify: to strip something of its former state, reduce it to fuel for another's survival or pleasure. But the horror of eating is not just in this objectification. It is in the act’s unavoidable concealment.
We do not think of the suffering behind the meat on our plates, the bloodletting, the slaughterhouse floors. We do not acknowledge that the pleasure of fine dining depends on disguising the indistinguishable mess of chewed flesh and broken-down matter behind napkins and closed lips. Even religious ritual acknowledges this horror—consider the Eucharist, its mystery concealed behind the iconostasis, as if to protect the faithful from witnessing the unspeakable.
The iconostasis—literally, the “image that stands between”—humbles vision itself. It partitions the sacred from the profane, ensuring that the moment of consecration remains unseen. In the early Church, under the disciplina arcana, the central rites of the Mass were hidden, known only to the initiated. Even today, in Orthodox Christianity, the Divine Liturgy unfolds behind the iconostasis, as if to shield the faithful from the mystery of flesh and blood. The paradox is clear: the icon veils the act, yet in doing so, it elevates it. It makes eating sacred, not by rendering it visible, but by making it unknowable. In a world where vision has always reigned supreme, the iconostasis reminds us that not all knowledge is meant for the eye.