There is something in the tearing of fresh pita bread that feels like the desire for flesh. It is like a soft leather. The dry dusting of flour on the surface may not, unfortunately, yield to my organicizing notions, but pita nonetheless persists for me as the most animal of breads. It contains hints of some imaginary or platonic form of skin, an analogy or synecdoche for life. It is the skin of some mythical pre-Christian beast. One side peels, delicately, from its opposite, as skin peels obligingly from muscle. But they are all the same surface.
I am not the type to hone in on the erotic qualities of food, for all my gastronomic preoccupations, but there are other pleasures of the flesh that reside in Eros’s shadow, lost in the eclipses of sex. I am suddenly struck by the ambiguity of the phrase “pleasures of the flesh,” for it denotes both the pleasures arising from the flesh of the subject and those deriving from the flesh of the object, and the pleasures themselves oscillate wildly between the two. The erotic does not exhaust the carnality of food, just as it does not exhaust the pleasures of the flesh. Because for all that it immediately invokes sexuality, carnal has meant meat as long as it has meant sex. Flesh and blood, making people crazy. Brundle knew it. Perhaps most satisfying: in this separation we find the desire to bite through something finally liberated from the necessary constraints of sex.