AustLit

'On many occasions Patrick White professed a love of cooking. As acclaimed author he gained universal fame, and remains the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize for literature. Both cooking and writing are creative processes and this essay draws parallels between the creative process, the digestive process, defecation and excrement. Of course, defecation is a natural bodily function resulting from food consumption and without food the body wouldn't survive. Syllogistically, without the corporeal there is no mind and without either body or mind there is no identity. In their introduction to Culture and Waste Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke contend that "expelling and discarding is more than biological necessity - it is fundamental to the ordering of the self" (Muecke 2003, xiii). Therefore, taken in the context of the biological and ontological duality of expulsion, I contend that food, in its many guises, is inextricably linked to identity. (Author's abstract)