YOU MAY SING TO YOUR supper, exalt your soup of the evening, apostrophise your haggis, or even — as Neruda did without obvious irony — assure onions that they resemble Aphrodite’s breasts. But none of these eatables will respond: they are all dead.
If you want your nourishment to register your utterances, it must, at least, be alive, like the witchetty grubs, plump with wood-pulp in their guts, that Australian aboriginals chew to death, or the lice that Nenets pluck greedily from their own bodies, or the larvae that infest the honeycombs Ethiopians eat, or the cattle from whose wounds Masai squeeze fresh, refreshing blood.
In Western culture, the Bread of Life may answer your prayers, but only one merely material foodstuff is a potentially attentive addressee. Oysters are,…
