CakeCakeCake

FOOD, OCCASIONS, & TRADITION

Within the past week, I’ve been more perceptive of the ways we relate to food on special occasions.  Percy the Globetrotter, One Direction, Dora the Explorer, among many other pop culture icons adorn the birthday cakes I saw in Morrison's.  While on the one hand, I should be able to eat my Harry Stiles cake with a gleeful and carefree disposition, I'm simultaneously living in a society that guilts me for eating these fatty foods.

Perhaps Londoners have the right idea in making fancy fondant cakes so accessible in a normal grocery store aisle, as opposed to having it be a coveted specialty item like I've experienced in the US. If someone places a steaming plate of fettuccine alfredo behind the bars of a jail cell and they throw away the key, doesn't that just prime your taste buds for fettuccine alfredo?? (The lesson here is that we want what we can't have, or in the case of these cakes, what is difficult to access.)

I think if we weren't so preoccupied with "good" and "bad" foods, we wouldn’t be caught up in the "wanting what we can’t have" complex. This isn't just about what we eat, but how we're presented with it and how it impacts our relationship with different kinds of food. 

The associations we make with food are not inherent to their composition—the butter, flour, and sugar that makes the cake—but is created by its visual rhetoric as well.  It is interesting to observe how the physical can translate into the psychological relationships between us and what we eat.

A side note: I was fortunate enough to eat a piece of Percy the Globetrotter as my official birthday cake, though it reminded me of an idea discussed in a course I'm taking at the University of Roehampton called "The Literature of Food." It is somewhat gruesome in nature to shape our foods into beloved childhood cartoons...

Admittedly, if I'd had any emotional attachments to Percy or to pigs in general, I probably would've had a little trouble carving into his succulent, cream-filled body, no matter how delicious.

Me, surprised, as I am presented with a "Percy the Globetrotter" birthday cake

Me (left) and my friend Andy (right) after I'd smashed a birthday cupcake in his face.  I have to pose this question: is it also a weird tradition in the UK to smear cake on the birthday person's face? Either way, I won.