Good News: ‘Cooking with Your Mouth’ Not Expected to Catch On

Image: YouTube screen grab

Last September, AppleEats provided a “how-to” on separating eggs using your fingers. Three months later, a video surfaced that seemed to take the notion of using your body parts as cooking utensils to a whole new level.

The video, which appears below, shows a woman “prepping” the ingredients for turkey stuffing using her mouth in place of a knife, spoons, and so on. As an article in The Times of London notes, she dices “garlic, onion, carrot and celery with her incisors, grinding spices with her molars and whisking eggs and softening butter with her tongue, before regurgitating it all into a bowl to be mixed and stuffed into the waiting turkey.”

If it all sounds — and looks — disgusting, that is what the creator, Australian video artist named Nathan Ceddia, intended.

Although some food journalists took the video seriously, as a “cooking tutorial,” if you will, Ceddia’s intention was to critique food porn. Ceddia, who studied hospitality and hotel management and is a serious cook, told The Atlantic in an interview that one of his first projects in food design involved sploshing. This, he explained is where people strip naked and “cover themselves in food for fun. It’s maybe a sexual thing, but also a playful thing. There’s a whole community.”

The inspiration for “Cooking With Your Mouth” came when he was in a friend’s kitchen:

My friend was trying to find some utensils and I said, “Well if you don’t have utensils, why don’t you use your mouth? What’s the sharpest tool in the kitchen right now? It’s our teeth.”

The idea of chewing food and then spitting the resulting bolus into the mouth of one’s young, known as premastication, has been around for millennia. It is still used by some species to feed those who lack the capacity for masticating their own food.

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