What You Wish For (in Gastronomy)

I am talking about the movie, cannibalism, meat eating and veganism too

I am pretty sure that, researching for this movie, its screenwriting team bumped in this 8-year-old Reddit post asking about pozole and cannibalism. It both takes the film to a destination - a luscious Central American country - and a grand opening for a meal¹.

I enjoyed this movie that is, however, a bit all over the place if I’d had to analyze it with my “screenwriters’ hat”. Let’s cut the chase and go straight into…

The Menu

Four courses.

First course: Pozole

Course two, turnip spaghetti carbonara, cured egg yolk, and sage beurre noisette.

Third course: thigh Bordelaise and beets.

The final course: tongue sashimi with pear sorbet.

This menu looks all over the place too, just like the screenplay, but similarly to the menu in The Menu (the movie), it could ideally be a one Michelin star lunch menu somewhere.

Minus the human meat, of course.

It is a menu typical of those Chefs who pick here and there and butcher culinary traditions to feed their ego in a frankenmenu that looks, feels and tastes like a melting pot.

Not so good, indeed.

Why? Because:

• It features a local food (pozole in this case)

• It features an Italian course (turnip spaghetti carbonara), but in a low-carb version (with turnip), and with a touch of refinement to show that you got inspired from Milan (and thus, Paris), not from Rome - with the beurre noisette.

• It features a French sauce-based course because this is a Michelin trope, and we are all for French: Bordelaise.

• A sashimi, because no fine dining is complete these days without incorporating random Japanese food, especially elevated and posh ones such as sashimi.

How to improve it?

What this menu is missing, if we would be going along with the tropes, are:

• A small selection of initial bites before the pozole. The hideous tartellette filled with tartare, a macaron filled with liver paté, and a jelly of eyeballs with a crumble of crunchy deep-fried skin.

• Before the dessert, a palate cleanser in the form of a kakigori, a sorbet, or grattachecca (which is a Roman autochthonous coarse version of kakigori). Seen the dining environment, with agave. Maybe syrup, maybe liquor.

• A proper second dessert, and here, they missed out entirely on the possibility of making chocolate and blood ice cream, inspired by Tuscan Dolceforte but also by whatever Aztec, Inca, or Mayan heritage the country they portrayed in the movie may have had.

Photo by Justin Snyder Photo on Unsplash

Have You Ever Eaten Human?

I usually ask gastronomers this question. Really, and thoughtfully.

I am not considering meeting with Hannibal Lecter, but you never know. Eating humans is (or was) a complex ritual in Papua Nova Guinea, the Amazon, as it used to be in the Aztec tradition.

In Europe, mummies were routinely eaten throughout the Renaissance; even before that, blood was a medical food - and thus consumed.

In Mesoamerica, "Both boiling and grilling were used in Mesoamerican ritual anthropophagy [or cannibalism]"- as I am aware of, not sashimi or Bordelaise sauce, though.

Our local European Neanderthals practised “gastronomic cannibalism", so much so that scholars think it was commonplace and habitual—both to meet nutritional needs and to kill off local competition.

Throughout my life, I have met people who have eaten unusual things, including dogs and cats.

One person told me they were fed humans, so my question is not too far-fetched.

Eating Meats

When I was young, I didn’t eat meat voluntarily.

I was forced to do so, and in most cases, I ended up chewing, spitting out the chewed ball, and then discarding it on a napkin. I started eating fish at 13, and even then, it was maybe once a month, and not even that often. Throughout my life, there have been more times when I was a vegetarian than when I was eating meat, as you may know in reading this blog.

I can frame two periods where I ate meat: in 2010-11, when I lived in Tuscany, and between 2018 and 2023, when I decided to “try everything” and I did so: brains, entrails, sausages, any seafood, I would probably have tried human meat if you would have served it to me.

At some point, however, meat tired me, and I know this time is the final straw - I do not want to eat meat (I strive not to eat any animal product, if possible, but socially, sometimes I have to give in and eat fish or milk-based products, or products containing eggs).

I would rather not, but this is our world, where people are so unimaginative and unskilled that they cannot correctly avoid animal products in fine dining. Being able to craft an entire menu completely plant based is, for me, peak culinary achievement. Not putting caviar or angulas or truffle in some dish.

It always happens when I stop eating meat and animal products: the smell of animal products cooking becomes disgusting.

Even frying in butter becomes a bit icky, and I can taste the eggs in pastry, with that lingering metallic aftertaste.

Some time ago, I was served a piece of sashimi with foie gras on top, and I ate it before realising it.

It was too late to refuse, and I had to swallow it while wholly nauseated. What a horrible, horrible sensation. It tasted of decay and grease, making me think of the inside of a sink after an entire restaurant had finished washing up dishes.

Terrible, disgusting.

I never have a gag reflex when I eat vegetables or fruit - even when rotting or spoiled. I can even eat vermin - many hazelnuts with worms and many apples with another kind of worm have passed undisturbed through my mouth. But those are invertebrates or insects. It's not icky (as seafood is not disgusting to me).

The ickiest thing I remember eating is sweetbreads.

I actually didn’t know what those were (the English name, sweetbreads, means nothing at all in terms of entrails. It means something pleasant).

I just said yes.

I felt very nauseated every time I tried them, and they are typically served after a person has finished the entire menu, so you are already full. Even when I wasn’t eating plant-based foods, sweetbreads and liver gave me the instinct to gag - yet I tried them over and over, to discover new cultures and flavors and gastronomies. They were also very new to me. For instance, I ate liver for the first time in 2019, sweetbreads in 2020, tripes in 2006 and then again only in 2021, and brains once in 2023.

But I dutifully ate everything and tasted everything I could, of course - I was a gastronomer in training.

You need to know everything, thus, to taste everything, if you want to learn this trade.

I may still taste animal products in the future if they are unfamiliar to me, so that I know what they are, but I will not eat them.

By the way, I did not happen to come across human meat, while I was still eating meat.

The more I detach myself from eating meat, the more I see how culturally ingrained eating certain meats is: why do you eat cow and goats but not dog or guinea pig (like in some parts of China and Ecuador, respectively)?

They are all cute.

They all taste good, on a physiological level.

Why do you eat a bunny but not a cat, I wonder?

Therefore, if cultural aspects can significantly impact eating habits, it is these cultural aspects that we must work towards to achieve a plant-based society.

And, despite all deniers and reluctant, we will have to build the most plant-based society possible - or climate collapse will do it for us anyways, but less gently.

If, today, most people feel sick when eating certain parts of an animal (yet scarfing down “easier cuts” and meat loaded with condiments such as steaks and burgers), I think the ick factor may extend to eating the whole animal, even if it is a cow, in the future.

It will take a cultural change, exactly as it took a cultural change to go from eating “nose to tail” for our grandparents to just eat “a slice of non-recognizable meat” today.

A simple cultural switch.

There is an aspect of monstrosity in thinking of eating humans. Still, it is also an entirely social construction, as it is eating (or refraining from eating) any other animal on earth or in the water.

To be clear, when I was eating meat, I did not factor in this ick factor, and I was always very open to tasting any kind of meat or animal. I would have surely tasted anything placed into my plate. And I mean it.

Now that I have moved to a plant-based approach, I still think the same: if you eat meat, you should be open to eat any meat - otherwise, you are a victim of your socially constructed gastronomical understanding of what is edible and what is not from a purely cultural way, and this cultural over-construction will always limit your views on gastronomy.

The bottom line is that if you are a gastronomer and want to be free of the pre-imposed social construct on gastronomy, you eat (or taste) meats or all of the meats and animals, or you do not.

Eating just some part of some types of the possible animals already locks you into a pre-conceited and pre-conceived cage that will obfuscate and naturally impair your gastronomic purity as a thinker and philosopher as long as you recognise that you are socially constructed and not deconstructed, all well. But do not pretend to be objective.

Please.

It is all or nothing.

I never said being a gastronomer is easy, but you can always keep eating the handful of “western-socially-acceptable” meats and pretend you are a great gourmand. Just do not try to teach lessons on how to be a gastronomer - because you can, at best, be a foodie—a well-inserted-in-your-social-context one, but not a researcher, a philosopher, a gastronomer.

You can be a gourmand. Perhaps a gourmet. Not a gastronomer.

And, fret not, that openness may as well include alien meat.

Photo by Jesus Alejandro Moron Guadarrama on Unsplas

Reviews

How Tomnay focuses on the five-star preparation of Pozole soups and sashimi tasters versus the messier butchering of "produce" displays a refined flavour of thrills. Not to say "What You Wish For" is a template for sustainable food sources, but there's an ecological tinge to Tomnay's film that is disturbingly well thought out - for Slashfilms

Nick Stahl gives a great performance as someone who, before the events of the film, was a screw-up but now has to think on his feet to… well, keep his feet as he has to navigate to his newfound reality of the uber-rich and their monstrous tastes. - for PunchDrunkCritics

Ryan is by no means a likable protagonist, landing in a morally gray area of self-perseveration and a guilty conscience. Once the real cooking starts, he slips into the role of chef with an uncomfortable but obvious ease. - for ScreenRant

The film is done a disservice by equating the haves and the have-nots, positing that moral bankruptcy knows no economic background. Though Ryan ultimately feels the burden of his brash decision, the obvious Aesop’s Fables-inspired lessons make what could’ve been an extraordinary meal into something far less memorable. - Variety

1. https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/what-you-wish-for-2023-transcript/