Black coffee is good. Even better if you also have a banana, because if you eat your banana with your coffee your banana tastes like ice-cream. It felt indecent, somehow, to be devouring a banana during my nine o’ clock seminar while the professor was talking about disconnection and différance and de-differentiation and Deleuze and Derrida, among other d-words. So yes, I was studying comparative literature and I was mildly illiterate. By that I mean, I was only amenable to things that sat well with other things that had long solidified in my heart, or my mind, whichever is more impenetrable. I was deconstructing my banana, when the professor went on to talk about those two fundamental truths of the human condition. First, the most important thing about life is that we are going to die, our existence is a death sentence, and god is the first murderer because he makes us mortal. Second, the truly existentially horrible thing is the present. Nothing we are doing is really justified. Our daily routine is merely avoidance behavior. I chewed my banana and wondered whether any of my gestures were truly authentic by that logic, such as how I was handling the situation with this coffee and this banana. At the same time I was also thinking about whether any of this could feed into my thesis on food porn. Then I got distracted by the hand of the guy sitting in front of me, who was doodling scenes of obscenity on his notepad. He was German, and because of that he spoke English with the usual cruelty of non-native speakers. For instance, he once said, referring to our professor who just entered the room, wow it’s like Death himself just walked in.

After class I stretched myself all out on the lawn in front of our departmental building. Frankie’s class ended at the same time but in a building far, far away. It would take her a while to catch me. I lit a cigarette and smoked with my back against the cold grass. A second later the German guy walked by, noticed me, and started to talk about some book. I sat up and he talked while standing. I nodded from time to time. Then he said it was outrageous that our readings were all excerpts. One should definitely expect students at the graduate level to read at least two complete books a week, no? Indeed I said, though I don’t know if it’s possible to read Life and Fate in a week, I get your point. He took an interest in me because I was the only undergraduate in that seminar and he found every opportunity to impart a lesson. Finally he left, apparently quite satisfied with himself. I lay down again and checked my messages. There were a few from you.

You were talking about grains and vegetables being

the great inventions of men

that men and vegetables condition each other, that rice

is what rice is today because we have been cultivating it for thousands of years

that evolution is an illusion

a hope conjured up by our linear perception of time

or should you say, one hope

or should you say, perception of linear time.

I had my eyes closed for a second. I could smell freshly cut grass, bacon and butter biscuits from the cafeteria, and a mixture of colognes sending various signals

and I replied to you:

(I’m lying on the ground, by the way,)

if we are necessarily limited by our perception

or should I say, unmediated perception.

And you replied:

if you are lying on a ground as big as yourself.

We were both confused by what the other said, perhaps. And for some reason that confusion prompted you to talk about Kafka

or should I say, Kafka’s books.

You said your landlord had a few Kafka

that he left all his Calvino Borges Bulgakov Dostoyevsky Kafka behind and

went to law school

that he sublet his apartment and moved into a place down the street

with his girlfriend

and he was a happy person free from some torture.

I saw Frankie walking towards me, upside-down with her black sunglasses and black ripped jeans and black leather bag. As Frankie became more concentrated in my vision I was struck by how much we dressed alike, or should I say, how much I dressed like her. She sat down next to me and asked for a cigarette. The sun was just out, pouring and pouring on the thin snow gathered on grass. For a cigarette’s time we were both busy texting someone else. The guy Frankie was texting was a philosophy student who loved free association and rhyming. Frankie was trying to come up with words that rhyme with drool. She replied, Istanbul. The philosophy guy said, failed. Frankie said no, depending on how you say it. The guy said ugh. Frankie said haha but I will say this is more fun than I thought. Then the guy said fish is door gun fan guy bought. Then he said yeah that’s true I don’t want it anymore I don’t think I need it anymore I don’t know why I didn’t feel like it anymore I don’t. Yeah that’s what happened when we did this snow day at work today and we all had fun together we got the same stuff together together and together together. Frankie shoved this message in my face as if she thought I out of all the people in the world should understand. I read it and told her very sincerely I wasn’t sure either what he was getting at. Frankie took off her sunglasses, sighed, and declared that she was fed up with these intellectual, ethereal men.

We went to a coffee shop on Broad Street and sat at a table next to the window. Outside our window were cherry trees that were not blossoming, not yet, but soon. Next to our table were plants in smaller pots which, in retrospect, now that I know more about indoor plants, might have been coffee plants. Frankie got a goji-cacao superfood oatmeal and a black coffee. I got a popsicle. Cookies and cream. I stuck that popsicle into my mouth and stared at my screen, at the first few lines of my thesis. Various people had warned me that I should never start with the opening, but I wouldn’t know what to do with the rest of it if I didn’t get the opening right. I had written:

What is sexy about food porn? Dislodged from the kitchen, food, devoid of its nutritive or taste qualities, enters the realm of the performative.[1] We all have that experience, catching ourselves mesmerized by an Instagram post of the very moment when the dripping syrup lovingly pours over the steaming pancakes. We find it—the carefully framed picture—flirtatious. It seduces. It makes us really, really want a pancake with real, shimmering maple syrup. Captivated, we gaze at these photos of exposed food as they tease us with their sensuality. This desire to look rarely has anything to do with real hunger; instead it says something about the voyeuristic pleasure in our interactions with the visual capacities of food, a pleasure evocatively named “#foodporn” according to social media conventions. By engaging visceral, and “fleshy” elements, the performative aspect of food imagery invites ostensible comparisons with sex,[2] such as this Instagram post of a gooey egg sandwich [NTD: insert picture of gooey egg sandwich]. This thesis concerns itself with everything you will ever want to know about food porn but are afraid to ask.

Re-reading this I could feel my stomach throbbing so I had to take a sip of Frankie’s black coffee. Frankie never said a thing about my eating habits. She stocked her fridge with ice-cream and juices and could go without a real meal for days. In those days we pictured eating as something spontaneous and even a bit reckless. There was nothing ritualistic about the way we did it—the way we ate—and we would like to keep it that way so that we would never become one of those people who ate the exact same thing at the exact same hour every day, which seemed to be the surest step to a mid-life crisis at which point you suddenly realize you have been ruled by, what is it called, a regiment? A regimen.

We sat in that coffee shop until it closed. From time to time I texted you again. I remember at one point you told me you were taking a shower, because the heater had been sending you sweats and you were too lazy to adjust the temp. I replied that it was quite impressive, the level of your laziness. And you said actually in your opinion it was your way of phrasing it that was more impressive. And I said well this hubris is not good for your soul. Then I thought about whether I should say something about me being too lazy to eat, that all I ate that day was banana and ice-cream, but I decided against it. When the shop was about to close and I was looking out wistfully and seeing nothing at all worth writing about, Frankie suggested we go to a real restaurant for dinner. Research for your thesis, she said. Then I’ll have to apply for more funding, I said. We ended up going to Piedmont, her favorite. For the longest time we thought the name was French or Italian, until this day when we were eating dessert and, bored from the eating, we googled it and found out that Piedmont is actually a plateau region that crosses several southern states, or at least that was how the restaurant got its name. When we were digging into the lava cake Frankie and I discussed how little we knew about this country in which we had been living for four years, and how much longer we would still be living here. It was depressing.

I’m getting fat Frankie said, as she made a gesture signaling that she was unbuttoning her ripped jeans under her sweatshirt. Me too I said, but it’s okay, it’s still winter. It suddenly occurred to Frankie to take out her phone and get a picture of the half-eaten lava cake. As she was doing that, I looked at the cake for a few seconds, zooming in on the dark liquid dripping, melting, flowing, and thought about its material connection to sensuality. It is conventional in Instagram food posts to use the present continuous tense, but the -ing is not a truthful account, at least not the whole picture, of what happens (is happening) here, for the present continuous tense prescribes motion, a piece of time, a lived experience. What we see here, instead, is a frozen image, which is always at once an embodiment and a denial of the passage of time. What further complicates the situation is that this frozen image, fixed, unchanged, unchangeable, is also made perpetual in its circulation. Capturing a moment in motion lets us imagine a temporality that flows beyond the specific image, beyond the present. It lets us imagine a pleasure that is not restricted to particular, temporarily discrete acts, but a long history of pleasure, a flowing continuity, and a moving world out there beyond the frame of representation. I was feeling nauseous, from the wine, the cake, or the words and phrases that were giving birth to themselves in my head, in particular constellations of desire.

We returned, slumped and heavy, to Frankie’s apartment. An apartment with gigantic exposed pipes and walls of the most vibrant red. I was sitting on her floor, playing the guitar, playing with the guitar, actually. Meanwhile Frankie was looking for something in her walk-in closet. It was so big that it should really be called a sleep-in closet. From time to time, Frankie shouted things at me through the red wall, this or that guy, mostly. After a while Frankie finally emerged from her closet with an off-the-shoulder black top and a pair of really short shorts in faded blue. She was putting on earrings in front of the mirror. When Frankie walked—and she loved walking around without a definitive purpose in her enormous apartment—you would think she was dancing. There was something musical in how she moved that I just had to stare at her legs. I couldn’t help it. Looking at herself in the mirror, Frankie said to me, to fuck without love, you know, is a glorious thing that you should try sometimes. I smiled at her in the mirror. Frankie knew, and felt very attacked by the fact that at this point of my life I had only really slept with one person. Until very recently, I was still madly in love with an intellectual, ethereal guy who dumped me for beautiful boys, or, should I say, the potentiality of beautiful boys. I said to Frankie, sometimes I really wish I had a penis. I think what I have is this more literal version of penis envy, not the kind we read in literary criticism or theory, no. I look around and see walking penises and really, really want to chop them off and lock them up in display cases made of beautiful glass. They do have a point when they talk about the castrative power in some women. Frankie gave me a look that weighed like misplaced compassion.

Frankie was determined to go out. Tuesday nights are for Franklin Street. She asked if I wanted to join and told me who else would be there. I briefly imagined the type of conversations we’d have and declined. She took another two minutes to adjust her hair, and then she swung the door shut. I lay down on her floor again. With Frankie out of the picture I abandoned myself to the turmoil in my stomach.

I had been texting you non-stop, by the way

and at this point I told you I felt the need to

empty myself. Then I did.

I threw up everything into Frankie’s pristine porcelain toilet and felt

lighter in a strange ecstatic way. You asked

what happened. I returned to the floor with

a hollowness that was

all-encompassing and told you

I don’t know. Might be food poisoning

and when I typed that I realized I didn’t like saying anything concrete to you like that

because I never wanted you to speculate about the inner workings of my body and

to my great relief you said something like

maybe one of those food ingredients didn’t like to work with the rest.

I sat near the edge of Frankie’s balcony, lit a cigarette, and looked down. The swimming pool down below looked like a giant sanitary pad. For some reason I wanted to jump right in from her balcony on the fifth floor. I really wanted to jump. The temptation was enormous. I had to keep asking myself in my mind to please please please don’t jump. Then I got hungry again and circled around to reach Frankie’s fridge, careful not to drop any ashes from my burning cigarette, and took out a tub of ice-cream.

I went back to smoking and ice-cream eating and texting at the same time. It was incredible how many hands and mouths I had at my disposal. You sent me a number of things.

You told me you had been revitalizing your fantasy and fascination

for mundane desires

so a goal, a common goal, is good

like the pursuit of a great voice, or, people’s breaths, you said,

and their scents, you look into their eyes and they’ll do crazy things in response

(oh the texture of their voice I said.)

yes you said

but you said you had yet to encounter a great voice,

outside cinema, at least

(the vibrations and variances I said.)

yes you said, and the accents and rhythms

diction

(and I said, I have yet to encounter anything great outside cinema (well not really))

and you said, greed is good

desire is good

appetite is good

down with the monotheists

want is good.

(And when you said that I was thinking, and you are good, you are very very good. And I asked you, do you really believe all that?)

nope, you told me you couldn’t really be fluent

now that you came to think of it

you don’t write about desires

(and I thought, my desire is something about which I cannot be fluent, now that’s a good line.)

Then you made a prophecy. You prophesied that I would eventually

tell you everything, everything, all the secrets I kept like things I wanted to say but didn’t

and you said

about to sleep, or fall asleep

whichever comes first.

I didn’t reply after that. It was nearly four and you should sleep. You drank too much and slept too little. I smoked too much and ate too little. I thought about this void and this excess and I smoked one cigarette after another until I was not really feeling anything disturbing. What are the things I really wanted to say but didn’t? Too many. All my/our sadness, frustration, envy, and self-doubt seemed to stem from this inability to speak. Perhaps it is true. Perhaps it is indeed the case that we, women, have something else, some shortcut, forever beyond the symbolic order, which, after all, is an order built upon the name of the father. We are said to have something else, but because that something else is beyond the reach of language we could never say anything about it. So we fall into our predetermined silences. All the theoretical terminologies were flooding in my head and I welcomed the tides, the warm embrace of those letters and words and phrases that refused to be spoken, and at that moment my only wish was that I could figure out what it was, what it was I really wanted to say to you.

^[1] By “performative,” I am emphasizing the dominance of a food item’s visuality or appearance, as opposed to its nutritional functions. I’m also using the word to describe various ways in which food porn is an ongoing and socially constructed domain (via practices such as image sharing, tagging, commenting, etc.), in a similar vein to Judith Butler’s description of gender as performative, and how some language is performative à la John L. Austin.

^[2] Andrew Chan, “‘La Grande Bouffe’: Cooking Shows as Pornography,” Gastronomica 3, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 47–53.

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Food Porn was published by Game Over Books in October 2024. You can order a copy here.

Sienna Liu is the author of the book-length essay Specimen (Split/Lip Press, forthcoming in 2025), the novel Food Porn (Game Over Books, 2024), and the poetry chapbook Square (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, 2022). Her English-to-Chinese translations include Rachel Cusk’s Second Place (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2023), Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 (forthcoming), Ali Smith’s Companion Piece (forthcoming), and a new translation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (forthcoming). Website: siennaxliu.com