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On Shrimp and Intimacy

by
January 26, 2009

I am at my friend Ame’s house for dinner. Hers is the kind of house where a girl can get comfortable. The wine is flowing, garlic is being chopped with fresh basil, and some sort of sauce is simmering. In fact, cookies have just come out of the oven… because it was on anyway, Ame explains.  They are not for dessert. She has prepared fresh cherry pie for that. Her teenage sons walk in and out of the room, getting a drink, eating olives, talking about school, rolling pizza dough, helping to chop. I sip my wine and help myself to a pre-dinner cookie. There is just the right amount of clutter and activity for me to feel at home. Ame is a food writer, so no meal at her house is ever just about the food. It’s food as culture, identity, the power of the present as it exists in relationship to past and future. Nourishment, sacrifice, giving, receiving, love, sex, passion, art, performance all find both a practical and academic life in this kitchen. Do you eat shrimp? Ame asks. I feel a surge of guilt with this question, but with a decade between me and my vegan years and my rabbi father safely tucked into Friday night services in Oregon, I nod yes. 

Great, can you shell these? She hands me a bag of whole shrimps and two bowls (Coincidentally, Ame’s father was also a rabbi). I reach my hand into the cold, damp bag and pull a juicy little guy out. His tail and tentacles wave up at me. I slide my finger into the soft belly until I feel the crack and peel back the clear shell. Without the shell this shrimp looks awfully naked, tender and exposed, a curled fetus-like piece of pink flesh in my hand.

I hear my father’s voice. Shrimps are bottom feeders. Do you know what that means? It means they live off of other animals poop. I look at the lump of flesh in my hand. You eat shit, I think, and place him alone into the ‘shelled’ bowl. I grab the next from the bag and rip his tail off first. I can see no head. Without an obvious mouth, where and how does all of this shit eating happen, I wonder, placing him into the bowl next to his naked brother. I imagine an amoebae like process of inhalation wherein the shrimp lays its whole body in the shit and consumes through its pores. I suppose this is something one could look up, should one find the time. I continue sliding, ripping, cracking and exposing. The bowl begins to fill.  

I am struck by the actual process of taking something into the body and making it your own. There is something very subtle about the notion of taking a bite of something external, and that bite finding the perfect place in you, changing cells, reproducing, expanding, nourishing and ultimately being expelled. The physical act of eating exists in the binary between public and private. When you take a bite of something, its flavors are yours and yours alone to experience. The juiciness, the tartness, the temperature, the way a morsel fits between your teeth, slides down your throat and enters your body, becoming your body, make the act of consuming food intensely private. Simultaneously, how you eat, what you eat and who you eat with are all inextricably social, political, bound to culture and thus, public experiences. You can learn a lot about someone watching them eat and you can learn a lot about a person based on what they cook for you.

Most of us straddle this binary effortlessly. We eat with friends and we shit in private. Aside from the occasional fetish, there isn’t much confusion or mixing of the two. Yet, holding the shrimp in my hand, the line becomes fuzzy. I can smell the spicy sauce he is about to be drenched in and I can feel the cold, sticky weight of his body in the palm of my hand. Exterior. Ame is talking about the idea of intimacy and she says “…it’s such a false promise, such crock of shit. I spent all these years searching for something outside of myself that would bring me closer to myself, and then I turned 50 and realized the intimacy has to start here. With me. So I cultivate relationships in my kitchen. I nurture my children. I nurture my own cravings. And I find I am closer than I have ever been…but I can’t name what I’m closer to.” I am listening, responding, but I also have my finger up a shrimps ass. I feel almost awkwardly intimate with him. But he is not part of me. He is something I can set down. Put aside. Pull my finger out of. Place into a filling bowl.

When the bag is empty I hand the glisteningly naked shrimps to Ame. With the swiftness of a master of culinary intimacy, she begins to massage marinade into their bodies- first the herbs and then the sauce. Her fingers slide in and around them, flipping them and rolling them between her two hands. The skillet is hot and she throws them on.  A steam rises up around them and as the smell of garlic, basil and chili fills the room, my mouth begins to water inadvertently. It is not something I think about. It just happens. Arousal. My body desires the small body that just left my hand; not as a lover, but as a nurturer. Sustenance. Interior and exterior meet.

Within minutes a plate is in front of me. The spread, as per usual at Ames, is amazing and vast. I do not have to eat the shrimp and I will still be sustained, my desire satiated. In spite of this I guiltily place a few little guys on the side of my plate, my fathers voice still a tangible presence. I cannot disassociate this shrimp body from what it once ate. Its inherent ‘dirtiness’ has been imprinted into my understanding of piety, of being the good daughter, of social order, of what I might become if I consume him. I think about lovers I have been intimate with; the idea of taking someone or something, into the body. I wonder what they may have eaten and intrinsically expelled as they entered me. I wonder if they were always clean, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. I wonder if there are kosher rules for what a partner consumes. I suppose there are. But I am getting off track here, because this is about shrimp, not lovers. It is about shrimp and intimacy. I stare at my plate and realize that the guilt associated with this particular pleasure makes the desire that much more dynamic, more alive. Interior and exterior join hands.

I bring the now seasoned and toasted brown shrimp to my lips. The plump, warm body rests for a moment on my tongue before I close my teeth around it and a thousand flavors burst forth- sweet and salty and spicy at once. I swallow and trace the food in its pathway down the back of my throat, my chest, my stomach. I can no longer taste or even physically sense the bite, although my mouth has stopped watering. I do not have to take notice of the shrimp anymore because he is me as much as the saliva in my mouth and the gastric juices that now break him down. The shrimp becomes me, shit and all. Interior consumes exterior.

It is late September and the Jewish New Year has just passed.  Interestingly, in Hebrew we call this time Rosh Hashanah, the ‘head’ of the year. This personification implies that a head is crowning and intrinsically, a body will follow. We set intentions for the year as we are each personally responsible for how that body is born, who will nurture and care for its process.  I always take comfort in the idea that in this time we can shed old habits and places of stuckness, like an extra skin.  I make note of the fact that what I choose to take in this year, to consume and make my own, is intensely personal and always public, always politically inscribed. My intimate acts are always up for judgment, always open to interpretation and yet, this does not limit the act itself. When I open my mouth, I make the choice, and I make the contact. I sympathized with the shrimp as he was a cold object in my hand, and I empathize with him now in my belly. Perhaps he will be expelled tomorrow morning, or perhaps he will show up somewhere in the spread of my hips, the back of my thighs, the curve of my neck. Interior and exterior intermix. They become one.

My belly is full.  Full of wine and vegetables and grain and shrimp. Ame has gotten up to warm the cherry pie. I lean back in my chair to facilitate better digestion, make room for what’s next.  If the waste of one animal nourishes another, then is it really waste?  It is, in fact, the embodied act of recycling. I peel away the layers of guilt that haunt my relationship to what I have just consumed; that fragile skin that coats, shields and makes every effort to protect. I want to crack it open from the center and look inside. What I see is a set of laws designed to facilitate eating with intention. What I see are pathways for making sense of a chaotic relationship to the intimate act of consumption. What I see is a script for eating in relationship to divinity. What I see are openings for thinking about shrimp in relationship to intimacy, to love, to sex, to god, to living. Interior gives birth to….interior expels exterior.

As I leave. Ame hands me a tupperware full of fresh cherry juice. Leftover from the pie.  It has the ruby color and the sticky sweet thickness of blood. I sip it as I walk home. 

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Rachel is a midwife and founder of Earth Birth International Women's Health Collective. She is a doctoral candidate in Women's and Gender Studies.

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