Abstract

Taking as a basis of reflection La grande bouffe (The Big Feast), by Ferreri (1973), this article intends to show to what extent eating constitutes in the contemporary world a perfect emblem of consumer society and of subjectivity itself. After it is separated from its meaning and good sense as nutritional need, eating becomes obsessive. Instead of “eating to live”, our voracity and insatiability (already essential features of the human being) seem to lead “to eat until death” or, as in the Ferreri/Azcona film, to eat-towards-death. We have become swallows and gluttons, in a delirium of excess, as an answer (absurd and, at the same time, logical) to the impossibility of transcending the “ingestion” not only of food, but also of Everything. In this sense, the last of the arts should be the culinary art, which should seduce us to wish to eat when we no longer have an appetite. On the other hand, from the ethical point of view, Ferreri/Azcona invite us indirectly to think, that while some human beings are starving, we die fed up with our insatiable satiety. In this way, Ferreri’s film becomes a very current mirror of the contemporary world and a strange, ironic and sad, but lucid, apology for the seductive and deadly art of cooking, which excites our voracity, if one may say so. Ten years later (1983), Creosota burst, fed up with eating, from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

Keywords: Culinary art | Consumption | Gluttony | Obsession | Meaningless | Suicide