A epitome of knowledge, temptaion, sin, food, and reality.

I see food as an abundance that most of us take for granted. Food is everywhere, in all forms and shapes – it can be used to relay tremendous messages like Jesus feeding thousands with a loaf of bread and fish, or it can be used to relay joys and inhibitions to slow down and take like day by day - as opposed to living and worrying about tomorrow. Food and knowledge will forever be tied in a constant string that time can never be displaced. In great literature, such as Homer's The Odyssey, The Book Of J, and Laura Esquivel's Like Water For Chocolate, it is possible for one to see the similarities that food and knowledge play in the continued struggle of understanding life.

“No quantity of scholarly learning can prepare one for the experience of life, and no lack of background knowledge can prevent a reader from feeling the truth and vitality of Homer’s poetry. Homer’s Odyssey in particular is human existence come to life; it is the struggle of human emotions” (The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation}. In The Odyssey, food is presented as a luxury. In books 9 through 12 we see Odysseus crew struggle with hunger, a hunger that Homer depicts as one that can only be quenched through putting their lives on the line. Food in this sense is used by Homer to convey a feeling of temptation, and ignorance towards knowledge.

For the characters that are Odysseus’s crew the ultimate temptation comes in the image of bread, wine, and meat, and is enough to lure them away from their indented course. One thing that struck out to me the most is Odysseus; his goal through all of his paradoxes is to return to Ithaca, his wife, and his country. He possesses knowledge that food cannot take away. The issue that Homer’s epic shows me is how food can corrupt one’s train of thought. How lucky of Odysseus that the gods would show him favor, in the form of Hermes appearing to inform him how to usurp Circe. After returning to Aeaean island and heading Circe’s warning’s of the coming perils that lay ahead, Odysseus then was told to not harm the Sun God Hyperion’s herds of cattle and flocks of sheep on the Thrinacian island – “If you leave these flocks unharmed, and think of nothing but getting home, you may yet after much hardship reach Ithaca; but if you harm them, then I forewarn you of the destruction both on your ship and of your comrades; and even though you yourself may escape, you will return late, in bad plight, after losing all your men” (The Odyssey, book 12).

Upon reaching the Thrinacian island, Odysseus made his men swear that they would live upon the food provided by Circe, and under no circumstance where they to slaughter the cattle on the island. While praying to the gods in Olympus, Odysseus fell into a deep sleep. When he awoke, and headed back to the ship where his men were, Odysseus then “began to smell hot roast meat” (book 12). Odysseus knowing better did not eat the meat at any point during the 6 days his men feasted. The forbearing that Circe gave Odysseus, and which Odysseus delivered to his men, came about. For when they departed Thrinacian, Zeus on the urging of Hyperion delivered upon them dark waters, and dark clouds filled with thunderbolts. Eventually, Odysseus’s ship was sent back towards the Charybdis, which swallowed his ship and spared only his life. If Odysseus’s men possessed any kind of knowledge they would have headed Circe’s warning, but there stomachs groan was much too loud for their voice of reason to reach there heads. One can say that through this experience Odysseus was better off with no crew, that only through holding onto knowledge could one in the era of The Odyssey withhold the temptation of food.

According to The Book Of J, man was created from the clay of the Earth, and women from the ribcage of man. The creator Yahweh said, “you can’t eat from it, you can’t touch-without death touching you” (The Book of J, P.63). That was the one rule given to man, by the creator .It as simple, do not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden - the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The context of food and knowledge literally go hand in hand here. The serpent, which through out history is represented as evil, shows Hava (Eve) temptation. A temptation to know what makes this fruit so special that it must not be eaten. If you interpret this as symbolism and therefore say that the qualities of evil and sin are traced back to that point, you should examine it in this sense. Most things today come with a manual; the purpose of the manual is to explain how that thing works. One can come to a conclusion that the mysteries of the universe are so infinite that even today we are no closer to solving them than we were millennia ago. One can also see that these works, such as The Book Of J, the Bible, the Torah, the Bhagavad-Gita, and many more are manuals that were written at various times in history to explain the question’s that are still unsolved today. With an open mind one can also see that the snake from a perspective of an individual reading these works as a form of literature can comprehend the snake as a voice of reason, logic, and even science. For we see, death did not touch the two “sinners” as god had once said. One can also conclude that the food from the tree of knowledge of good and evil gave Adam and Eve the insight to question their given reality and in turn create the story of sin. Did Yahweh not “sin” when he said death was the punishment for eating or touching the fruit?

Tita De La Garza, the protagonist in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water For Chocolate, had also gone through a phase where food and knowledge is exemplified. After she left the ranch in a stupor of rage following a fight with her mother, Dr. John Brown took in Tita as opposed to sending her to a physic ward. She stayed with him for a whole until she could recover. Tita had gone through immense emotional hurdles with her mother, and it all started sinking in, she closed her self off from the world and never talked… Until one day Chencha brings a hot bowl of Ox-tail soup that shakes Tita to her core and rejuvenates her. “Ox-tail soup! She couldn’t believe it…with the first sip, Nacha appeared there at her side, stroking her hair as she ate, as she had done when she was little and was sick, kissing her forehead over and over…Christmas rolls…chocolate atole, cumin garlic, and onion. As always, throughout her life, with a whiff of onion, the tears began…Chencha and Tita laughed reliving those memories…at last Tita had been able to remember a recipe” (page 124). The ox-tail soup brought Tita the knowledge of her past life, her sanity. The suffering of her human heart was eased with the memories and finally know-how on how to move past her current state with the first spoon of soup.


My question to you, readers, is – to continuously accept the given reality, how hard would it be to have a moment like Tita, Odysseus, even Eve, to move out of the normal, and into a new space of life? Through food, one can find a knowledge that can lead to an inner peace, or an inner battle. For Odysseus, food was never a temptation, as was the longing to return home. In the Book Of J, we encounter a tale of deception and the origin of sin, all through the avatar of food. We see temptation again, and how it is used to bring about the downfall of Adam and Eve. Not their death, but their down fall in the eyes of Yahweh. And Tita, who found the knowledge of how to be happy again, through food. One can differentiate between the causes of dilapidated situations in, but how many of us want to fix it.


Works Cited:

The Book Of J. Trans. David Rosenberg. Editor. Harold Bloom. New York : Grove, 1990.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Random House, 1961.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Samuel Butler. http://www.greekmythology.com/Books/Odyssey/O_Book_XII/o_book_xii.html

Esquivel, Laura. Like Water For Chocolate. New York: Doubleday, 1989.