Thursday 30 June 2011

Conspicuous consumption


I should stress before I begin that the inspiration for this post did not come from any weird repressed urges I have or have had, aside from the ones discussed below. Moreover it came from my lunch.

Happily munching on a cheese, Marmite and Tabasco roll, I considered my slightly weird food preferences. I take the lemon slice out of drinks in restaurants. This is relatively common. But I also love ketchup on my peas. I eat peanut butter by the spoonful. I once drunkenly made scrambled eggs in a wok and ate them with my £2.50 dirty Mexicano pizza, and it was delightful. As a child I liked nothing more than to be plonked in front of Mary Poppins - and yes it was always Mary Poppins - shovelling down endless bowlfuls of dry cereal until I either fell asleep or ran out of cornflakes. I considered these various eccentricities, failed to justify them, and then thought, well, at least I no longer eat paper.

Many people are aware of the delights of moderate paper-eating, and the times when it's actually worth doing - we're talking the curling, fawn-coloured corner of a musty copy of BOOK, not a shiny piece of A4. Many people grow out of it. But in the case of a few unfortunates, it's much more serious business. The absent-minded act of putting something in your mouth you instantly know you shouldn't have has become less of a furtive, quite rightly appalling act, more of a daily reality verging on addiction.

According to Wikipedia,

"Pica is a medical disorder characterized by an appetite for substances largely non-nutritive (e.g., metal, clay, coal, sand, dirt, soil, feces, chalk, pens and pencils, paper, batteries, spoons, toothbrushes, soap, mucus, ash, gum, lip balm, etc).
"The scant research that has been done on the causes of pica suggests that the disorder is a specific appetite caused by mineral deficiency... Often the substance eaten by someone with pica contains the mineral in which that individual is deficient."

But if the subject is especially interested in paper, which apparently they usually are, what are we to deduce from this? In this case does it cease to be merely about sustenance, more about, for want of a better phrase, intellectual nourishment?

"Did you enjoy War and Peace?"
"Why yes - I simply devoured it."

I wondered faintly if compulsive paper-eaters over a long period of time develop tastes. Aside from the quality of the paper and its vintage, does what is printed on it make a difference? Presumably more satisfaction could be gleaned from, say, Oscar Wilde than from 'bland' chick lit, or 'tasteless' dirty novels? Is there some kind of etiquette involved - do you eat from the outer edges in, or tactically, paragraph by paragraph? Is it polite to leave some of the narrative to show you're full?

A friend once told me about a man who ate a building.

I'm pretty sure this isn't true, and certainly couldn't find anything online to confirm it. But apparently he ground up the bricks and cement, bit by bit, and scattered them over meals, day by day - and in the end, I expect over the course of many years, had effectively consumed a house.

This method is intriguing and throws up a number of possibilities for those wishing to absorb more than simply nutrition from their daily bread (or whatever). Perhaps this is the logic behind cannibalism, or Keith Richards' allegedly snorting his father's ashes. My personal preference would be for a mummy - grated with generosity into my now relatively innocent-seeming sandwich, I would surely find myself charged with the power of the gods, or even get a glimpse into the afterlife - where, presumably, we can eat whatever we want, but which no doubt would have come a hell of a lot later if I hadn't just eaten Nesferenub's toe.

Or I'd turn to crime. Over a long, long period of time, and not without minor stomach pains and possible death, I feel sure it would be possible to tunnel one's way into a bank or a casino vault and make off with the contents. Of course the problem there is that having developed such a taste for non-comestibles the prize itself might then become irresistible. Money = paper. Nom.

Certainly though, it's an avenue worth exploring, though not by me because I do not as far as I know suffer from pica. Though are they really sufferers? I leave you with some wise and now famous words from Johnny Depp:

 "If someone were to harm my family or a friend or somebody I love, I would eat them. I might end up in jail for 500 years, but I would eat them."

NB. Obviously none of the above is to be taken seriously. The idea that I should be considered someone who glorifies mental illness, cannibalism or any kind of heisty behaviour is so loathsome it makes me want to bite my nails. Ohshi -