Andrew IbáñezSEGUIR Updated: Save Send news by mail electrónicoTu name *

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What is the Great Exhibition of Atrocities?, question J. G. Ballard in his book of the same title. The answer is simple: it is not a museum fool, that is the body. The interior of the body, that which most horrifies us and that I never wish to see. But there is another Great Exhibition of Atrocities perhaps even worse. It is the food. What enters the body and becomes the body. The act of chewing and swallowing, the horror of having to kill to live . This horror is old and gives way to many myths. According to Joseph Campbell, Freud was mistaken when I believed that original sin came from the ritual death of the father, which then was devoured. No, the primitive felt guilty for having to kill bears, bison, deer, to feed. That’s why they became gods, asked for forgiveness, transformed them into sacred images. is The food is sacred, and scary.

Nothing gives so much disgust or fear as the food. We have all felt that terror that force us to eat something detestable when we were kids. In the Gospel of Thomas, we read: “Jesus said: ‘blessed is the lion which when consumed by man becomes man; the abomination is the man that let itself be devoured by a lion, and this is makes a man'”. In the Prasna Upanishad describes a universe predator where everything is food.

The sun is the dining room, the moon is food. To the Lord of Creatures, everything else is food. is Gary Snyder speaks in a poem about a deer that “trap” men by making them hunt and eat, they hide within the men and expect. When you have many deer in the minds of men, then, one day, the deer will take power. Take it “from within”. Is it an indian legend? It is always so: the food is guilt, revenge, horror, decay, entropy. I have to say: there is a relationship between the fault and the food, between the violence and the food. to Deny it is to deny something obvious. Only by changing our way of eating we will change the world.