A little later, at age 10, the hot, fried apple pie from, yes, McDonald’s was the wild fulcrum of my most intense pre-sexual desires. I did not understand them:
I was moved deeply by something about the burning liquid inside the pastry package, the near-searing of my lips when I took a bite, the mystery of the musky, tangy ooze cut with cinnamon. I wanted that pie in a way I have never wanted any other food. (I think I was literally in love with it.)
Nor did my longing have to do merely with wanting to eat one. It was a more basic and primal longing than that, and probably one that could not have been satisfied in space and time.
That McDonald’s hot apple pie carried my sexuality through underneath the soil till it was finally ready to be revealed, first in the vague pleasure I got touching my armpits in the fresh spring of sixth grade (my mom: “What are you doing that for? Stop!”), and then in the dawning of confusing fantasies about punishing women’s breasts (seventh grade) and very clear ones about lying on Michael Zappalini’s lap.
(c) Donna Minkowitz 2012
Love this post and can relate at many levels. I too loved those pies, but not quite in that way. I loved Taco Bell’s Burrito Supreme in that way. Could it be more obvious — the shape, the oozing sour cream and lusty combination of beans, big-agri farmed beef and ‘cheese’ as it dribbled down the chin? Certainly, those amorous feelings were heightened by the connection to my Latino roots and summer visits with the family to dusty Mexican border towns! Thanks for the reminders, now I’m hungry for both!
Loved the comment — thank you! Especially the eroticism of big-agri foods.
Not that I support them!
Neither me…anymore!