Food Got Magic

We eat, we drink, we sleep, and we work. We do a lot of crazy stuff in our life, but how are we able to do so many fatiguing tasks? Where does the magic happen? From where do we get all the magical powers to do what we do every second? It’s very unfathomable, the idea that various foods have their own peculiar influence in the living body. Food is one of the life essential elements, and also the one whose broad effects are not wary to us. Food is used as a form of communication, could be used as a means to show culture, or can also have a magical effects that might not make sense straightaway but might have a very strong meaning hidden behind it.

Laura Esquivel’s “like water for chocolate,” presents the story of a Mexican girl, named Tita De LaGarza, who possesses an ability to transport her emotion through the food she prepares. She believes that the food has that power to relate one’s emotion to another. Thus if prepared with love will spark off feeling of love in other people or if prepared with a broken heart will generate feeling of hate among people who feed on it. In the story, Tita, while making a wedding cake for her sister’s wedding with a watery eye, pours her sorrow in the cake and thus as a result everyone in the wedding gets a bad stomach. On the different context food is also shown as an element that can evoke sexuality in living body. As in story, after eating the “Quail in Rose Petal Sauce,” everyone starts acting like an aphrodisiac. The rose petal that is used in the dish is of the same rose that Pedro hands it to her. It seems the idea that everyone acting crazy as being Tita’s own sexual desires that she wants to gratify with Pedro but can’t as being watched by Mama Elena. Also, to make her relation healthy with Pedro she prepares the food for him. Thus, In the story, Tita conveys her emotions with the help of the foods she makes.

The tale of food and magic continues in the Homer’s epic poem “ The Odyssey.” The poem starts with the protagonist “Odysseus” having a feast in the palace of Phaeacians. They come across many life and death situations, and in between all those situations they are depicted as feasting, feeding, or killing another form of life which signals that food has to do a lot with the consequences presented in the Odyssey. In the poem, the Odysseus reaches a land of lotus-eaters where his comrades eats the strange plant and fails to report back. It can be coated as “but whoever ate that sweet fruit lost the will to report back, preferring instead to stay there, munching lotus, oblivious of home” (Homer 9.94-96). In another setting, when the Odysseus is in Circes’ palace, Odysseus’ man are fed with the potion that works its magical power and make them forget of their homeland. In the same setting, Hermes gives Odysseus, a magical herb that cuts the effects of the potion later to be given by Circe. In yet another backdrop, Odysseus is depicted as pouring libation to all the deads and sacrificing ram, ewe and heifer. This shows yet another magical power of the food that even causes the souls of the dead to come out of their underground caverns. Food in the form of wine is also shown to have a magical effect in the poem. While being inside Cyclopes’ cave, Odysseus feeds him with wine causing him to sleep. Thus, foods in the odyssey are described to have magical, bizarre and hallucinogenic effects. It is shown as if it is the food that turns the impossible into possible.

So, food in our life has a very vital meaning. It is the one to make our day go bright and it is the one to make it hateful. Perhaps that is the reason behind people saying you are the direct representation of what you eat. If it weren’t about the magic in food, how would a small living body grow into a giant one feeding upon the bit of grain or a crumb of bread? It is the question to ponder on.

Work Cited:

Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate. New York: Double Day, 1989.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Stanley Lombardo. Indiana: HacketPublishing, 2000.