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From "The Semiologies of Travel: from Gautier to Baudrillard."

"French travel writers' recurrent interest in food is symptomatic of a desire to come close to the other, to approach the epistemic structures buried beneath the surface of the exotic culture. Food is a way of tasting, exploring and ingesting the other in which the sensual and visceral can be experienced almost as powerfully as the sexual. Indeed the connection between food consumption and sexual consummation, as the words imply, is deep-rooted [...] "Boman [...] describes as follows the taste of Chinese noodle soup: 'Comme si maintenant la bolée n'était sirotée que dans l'attente, à chaque instant plus insupportable, des quelques algues - subtil arrière-goût de sel d'un con aimé' (1989:29) ['As if the dish were only sipped now in the expectation, at each moment more intense, of sea-weeds with the subtle salty aftertaste of a cherished cunt']" (Scott 2004:193-194). Geez! Scott, David. The Semiologies of Travel: from Gautier to Baudrillard. United Kingdom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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