San Francisco Blog

Mark Andrew Gravel's new mag goes down like a psilocybin samwich.

​The connection between drugs and food is rarely mined in mainstream food circles, which is a shame considering they're both ingested, and food, like drugs, can give pleasure, cause physical discomfort, satiate, and spark cravings -- even alter perception. Famously, at The Fat Duck, wd~50, and, of course, El Bulli, chefs concoct surreal conflations of science, art, and culture, playing off diners' memories and the broader expanse of human experience, doling out mind-bending adventures more than meals -- kind of like trips.

Take, for example, Heston Blumenthal's Not-So-Full English Breakfast, one of a dozen dishes you might see on The Fat Duck's tasting menu any given night: parsnip cereal, nitro-scrambled eggs, bacon ice cream, and hot and iced teas. That might give non-prescription face-melters -- twiggy bits of psilocybin dunked in peanut butter, $6 tabs of acid, pot brownies -- a run for their money, at least when it comes to actually changing how you see things you thought you knew already. And you won't end up standing at the edge of a baseball field during a downpour, flicking a chain-link fence for two hours straight until your nails chip and yours fingers ache, listening to an echo ripple over the black, swaying trees, getting louder and louder, but never quite loud enough.

What's more, food writers both large and small, both glossy and matte, often muster, usually with limited success, frantic, gonzo-fied recounts of dining hedonism, sounded at times as if their subjects -- whether they be burgers, raw fish, or stinky cheese -- have riddled their brains and bodies with currents of improbably electric joyous ecstasy, like good drugs at the right time, or sexual pleasure.

In the first issue of Food + Sex, Vice contributor Hamilton Morris (with an awesome name like that, he ought to start his own country club), takes bugging out to a whole new level in his short essay entitled "Tripping Balls on the Magic Penis", in which a hallucinogenic mushroom enjoys congress with the "splendid vagina" in his chest, an organ conjured by massive gobbled quantities of the same mushrooms. One side to make you smaller, and all that. As the fungus penetrates, the narrator too dives deeper, into himself -- chewing up the past in build-up to an orgasm of consciousness -- fantasy, memories, shit he's read, or seen in a movie, or thought about before, on another occasion when he was also supremely decked on boomers:

Fifty years of history began to rush through the thread matrices of the air: the Amazonian jungle, a blood-splattered mushroom in San Antonio, malignant brain tumors, and Baha chicken sandwiches.

Food + Sex is Mark Andrew Gravel's brand-new magazine. The initial thesis -- in short, how desire affects the ways we perceive, create, and consume food -- is bound to expand in myriad directions. Hopefully, over the course of the next few issues, we'll see it unfold like the tender petals of a sweet, drippy bulb of beguiling mystery.