In choosing a title for this book, I harboured some concern that Eaten Back to Life might suggest to the reader a sort of memoir of self-discovery and rejuvenation achieved via food. Taken this way, it could well conjure the romantic trope of a poor desperate soul—down in the dumps, over a barrel, suffering the mean reds—who, through adopting a culinary trade, eating healthy, or (god help them) starting a food blog, rediscovers their lust for life. This is the last impression I would hope to give, and the reader who embarked with any such expectations was, I regret, doomed from the outset to disappointment.
Eaten Back to Life is in fact a reference to the 1990 debut album of the Buffalo, New York, death-metal band Cannibal Corpse. I have no particular nostalgic connection to Cannibal Corpse (unlike, say, Bolt Thrower and their 1989 “World Eater,” which was the first death-metal song I ever heard, tagged oddly enough onto the end of a Fugazi tape my brother dubbed for me, and also might have made for a passable book title), but the cover of the record depicts what is a probably freshly risen, living-dead type crazily devouring the hell out of itself (the undead need flesh to live, of course, although conventional wisdom goes that they tend to turn to the living for this purpose). The paradox is too inviting. The image and phrase together present a painting-oneself-into-a-corner type of situation, which suggests as its inevitable end result the creature reduced to an embarrassed, immobilized head and one-armed torso, who looks around after this frenzy of revitalizing, intoxicating autophagy and, realizing its predicament, thinks to itself, “Ah, nuts.” Eating back to life, then, is of course always an eating-toward-death (Essen-zum-Tode, for you Heideggerians), driven and derided by taste.
A lot of mileage has been gotten out of the metaphoric potential of food for thinking about life, with greater or lesser degrees of profundity and success. But in the form of this hapless, heavy-metal ghoul we have a reminder that food, like life, is but another ever-twisting hole down which you descend, chasing some sense of satisfaction. You never truly reach the end; you just run out.