Although I possess nothing approaching a collector’s mentality (a hoarder’s, maybe), it is reliably a source of excitement for me when travelling abroad to explore the vernacular chocolate bar selection. A recently discovered favourite is the United Kingdom’s Toffee Crisp (no relation to the Coffee Crisp, one of my favourite Canadian chocolate bars). The bar is interesting not so much for its taste as for its structure, consisting of a lower layer of rice crisps held tightly in a sort of chocolate matrix, with a thickish layer of caramel (or, I suppose, toffee? What’s the difference?1) on top, all enrobed in chocolate. I say it is “interesting” because of how the lower stratum breaks apart, crumbles in a way that suggests defeated masonry more than food, before one’s top teeth have made it through the upper caramel level. I had no notion of how singular and almost disorienting this experience could be until it occurred. It is totally not what one anticipates, and very much gives one the sensation not of biting down but of biting up. The caramel is very chewy, and one is left with this resistant mass, the fragments of the crispy lower stratum scattered throughout it and about the recesses of one’s mouth. Cool.
I have never had masonry crumble in my mouth, of course. Likely the closest I have come is the off-putting yet nostalgic grit of eating potato chips or a peanut-butter sandwich at the beach, but I like that kind of non-food evocation. For the sake of mixing Latin and Greek, let’s call it a paravictual association: victual from the Latin victus for food, and para (to the side of, in proximity to but different from, sometimes against) because it concerns not only “non-food,” but non-food that hovers around the periphery, enriching or defining the food experience. This is something I have thought about plenty as regards taste and scent—as with Scotches or wines that call up associations with things that one couldn’t or wouldn’t normally eat, like slate, or peat, or tar, urine, et cetera—but of course texture has much to contribute as well. Whether this is substantively different from referring to chocolate as “silky” or “velvety” is open for debate, but I think there is something more exciting going on when we are struck by manifest and perhaps incongruous non-food associations when eating, as opposed to calling on readily available analogies.
Viewed in cross-section, it is surprising how little of the whole is taken up by the Toffee Crisp’s caramel layer, considering how thoroughly it dominates the eating experience. But, the allure of the cross-section as revelatory perspective aside (which is considerable, as histories of scientific imaging and theories of divine geometry in architecture/art history indicate), the tension between what is seen, what is felt, and what is otherwise “known to be true” about the bar is considerable. It is not the first time I have been given cause to reflect on the biting down versus biting up question, and why we think in terms of “biting down,” when what actually happens is our lower jaw swings up and pushes food against our top teeth (the other time also involved a chocolate bar, and gave me a much-appreciated excuse to draw a Mortal Kombat II analogy), although it is only with the Toffee Crisp that the veil was torn away, so to speak, and I was confronted by the actual experience of biting up. It makes me wonder to what extent the Toffee Crisp was designed to produce this sort of somatic disorientation (my guess is not at all). And how generalizable is my own experience? Is something of the uncanny common to those eating a Toffee Crisp for the first time? Or every time, even?
If so, it would be such a tasteful and awesome gimmick to engineer into a chocolate bar. To, by a simple structural trick, provoke a subtle dis- or re-orientation of one’s sense of one’s body parts’ relation to each other (one’s body’s relationship to itself, truly). I don’t know much about neuroscience, but I imagine this has something to do with proprioception, the sense and sensors that allow us to know the relative positions of part of our body. So I wonder: in the case of biting down, how much of our actual experience of biting down truly feels like biting down, and how much is it just a conventional label on a still-opaque set of spatiophysical sensations, a linguistic gloss?
I suppose for my own sake I could try biting into a bunch of things and thinking really hard about how it feels, paying attention to how my upper and lower rows of teeth move through whatever it is I’m eating, but I could only generalize so far. Initial tests suggest that it feels like both sets of teeth are biting through/moving toward each other at comparable rates, but I don’t expect that decades of discursive conditioning of somatic experience can be undone simply by thinking harder about it.
Ultimately, I am not really that invested in finding an answer, so much as I am intrigued by the further questions it can provoke. It is this uncertainty that attracts me in the first place, this lingering opacity at the centre of embodiment. Do I actually know how it feels to do this (bite down into a chocolate bar), or has it been eclipsed/constituted by my means of describing it? Or, leaving aside the old nature/culture imbroglio, how much does my identity depend upon proprioception, to say nothing of the entire sensory array that provides the experience of embodiment? Philosophers from William James and the phenomenologists up through Deleuze have been struggling with this for ages, and in recent years many of their dopey speculations have found increasing purchase in neuro- and psychological research on embodied cognition.2 It is already well established that severe insults to proprioception, such as amputation or stroke, can significantly affect selfhood, but developments in embodied cognition suggest this process may be less facile—and less “social”—than simply “learning how to live with a disability.” So what if we think of more mundane proprioceptive interventions and mediations in terms other than those of loss? Can a chocolate bar be a key to the corporeal spatialization of non-self-identity?
1 The inclusion of milk or cream (caramel) versus sugar and butter only (toffee), and differences in cooking time/temperature, apparently. I don’t know if toffee as a term is regulated the same way chocolate is, and there seems to be some confusion as to whether this distinction is New World–specific, but let’s say for the sake of simplicity that the sugary stuff inside the Toffee Crisp is what an American would likely call a very thick, chewy caramel.
2 See something like Andy Hamilton, The Self in Question: Memory, the Body and Self-Consciousness (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), or Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford, 2005), for recent philosophy-cum-cognitive-science discussions.