Carnival is the tomb of gastronomy – 02/17/2023 – Cozinha Bruta

I spent some time mulling over what to write in this column. My bad mood was vented against the dictatorship of joy at Carnival. Or if, alternatively, he played for the crowd with praise for the ziriguidum, the balacobaco and the telecoteco.

In either case, he would be lying. I neither hate nor love Carnival. I just don’t fit.
I don’t know how to dance, I have a phobia of crowds and a serious aversion to chemical toilets. I am a foreign body at Carnival, I show my inadequacy whenever I challenge my own nature and I jump –I lie: walking slowly– behind the cordon.

Disembedding manifests itself even in the area I chose to write. Carnival is the tomb of gastronomy.
It’s easy to tie almost any subject to food culture – because everyone eats, and food permeates all human activity. Politics, music, sport, literature, civil construction.

At Carnival, however, the pleasures are different. Gluttony is locked up, punished, while the reveler goes after the other sins. Food, cuisine, cooking and gastronomy do not fit in Carnival. Or rather, they don’t fit in the Brazilian Carnival.

I was in São Paulo at an event to promote Mardi Gras – the New Orleans Carnival, in the south of the United States.

The party, as if it were a birthday, had cake. A typical carnival donut, made of sugar and cinnamon, with colorful candies.

Was it good? Whatnot. Of course I didn’t eat. Where have you seen eating cake at Carnival?

It is evident that people also need to eat during Carnival. It so happens that the act of eating strips itself of any sensual connotation, it becomes a mere physiological need.

Half because you’re busy with other pleasures, half because it’s a hassle to feed yourself in the installed mess.

The ancients recommended chicken soup to replace the energy spent at Carnival, but there is rarely a grandmother’s soup waiting for the crippled reveler.

After spending the whole day without remembering to eat, the carnival designer outlines what is within his reach. Oxxo’s soggy potato bread. The last kibbeh from the greenhouse of the most suspicious pub. Stale bread with bananas and glitter in some stranger’s kitchen.

Anyone who rebels against the feast has no better luck. Restaurants take the opportunity to give employees time off. And the ones that open are physically unattainable.

It takes a few episodes of embezzlement, between one block and another, until the human being learns that it is a bad idea to take the car out of the garage at Carnival. Going out to eat, only if you go on foot, to the dirty place on the corner, where the hatter went to work upside down after the Sambódromo parade.

Eating at home is a resigned way out for anyone fleeing the drums. Cooking is something of a silly protest against the state of things. Friendship, the world couldn’t care less about your dinner. It’s Carnival. Nobody wants to know.

The mouth, in Carnival, is used for kissing, drinking and singing. In the order or disorder of your choice.

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