Top Chef

I recently added the ‘Sadist Next Door’ to my blog roll. It’s written by Mistress Crimson, a professional dominatrix from Chicago. She has a number of interesting posts, but one that really caught my eye was about food. She quotes Anthony Bourdain on eating as an act of submission.

It is about giving up all vestiges of control, about entrusting fate entirely to someone else. It is about turning off the mean, manipulative, calculating and shrewd person inside of you and slipping heedlessly into a new experience as if it were a warm bath. It is about shutting down the radar and letting good things happen. Let it happen to you.

Antony Bourdain, from his book ‘The Nasty Bits’

As both a huge food fan and a submissive I can completely relate to this. Some of the best meals of my life have been when I’ve simply entrusted myself to the chef and let him completely direct the flow of the meal. On the flip side, I also get very frustrated when I’m eating with people who keep trying to grab control from the chef and mess around with elements of the meal. I guess that’s the dining equivalent of topping from the bottom.

Of course as in any D/s relationship, you have to be sure the dominant knows what he or she is doing. A masochist’s delight in suffering doesn’t translate to the food domain quite as well as a submissive tendency does!