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Eating is the continuation of language with other means.

On a physical level, language is formed in the throat, with the tongue and through the mouth and the pharynx. The same is true for eating, only eating is not expressive, it is internalised. However, eating is also a form of grammar – in the context of western culture, rules that only emerged at the beginning of the 19th century. The combinations of the things we eat develop like poetry out of the association of different thoughts or tastes.

The Austrian writer Ferdinand Schmatz very tastefully articulated this fact and the poet Schuldt from Hamburg once wrote a wonderful fictitious ethnographic text in which people from a specific culture only conversed through the way they ate: putting a particular herb into one’s mouth with a particular gesture meant a certain word or phrase. And when a professor of anthropology from Leipzig once visited that culture, a particular berry was soon used up. It was called ‘Pardon?’

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