Lowther, Neruda, and the secret wisdom of food

Popular culture visualizes eating as self-gratification, as the exercise of power: the 'other', the food object, is destroyed and re-created int he form of the self. As if in a bizarre illustration of postcolonial theory, the devourer degrades and annihilates the indigenous original, totally assimilating it to self-as-controller. Pat Lowther conceives of food radically differently, not only with political satire, but also with a series of variations on the motif of fusion and expansion, and even transcendence.