What are you eating right now? What did you eat last? Are you really going to eat that? We eat to live and some of us live to eat. In her new book cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt explores food (and its consequences) in a range of funny, beautifully painted cartoon essays and anthropomorphic comic strips. The result contains crab legs, crab people, the best consistency of eggs, farting, toilet habits and .the cuteness of otters. It is a lot of fun. For Graphic Content she tells us about her best and worst food experiences and toilet scenes in literature.
What has been your favourite ever experience with food?
My family went on a trip to Japan in 2007 - my first time there - and we stayed at a Ryokan hotel in a mountain village and had so many elaborate meals. We drank too much sake and ate tiny, entire fishes, and tried to guess what all the different mountain vegetables were. I tried fermented soybeans for the first time, a very unusual flavour if you aren't used to it. I love eating with my family, they're so smart and have an absurd sense of humour.
And what’s been the worst?
I had a strong aversion to caramel corn for decades because of a carsickness-induced barfing incident when I was six years old. Ditto with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which I barfed up when I got the flu at horse camp. Food aversion is so sad. It isn't (always) the food's fault!
What’s your favourite toilet scene in literature or films?
I usually hate toilet scenes in films and find them really traumatic. I can barely watch that scene in Bridesmaids where they all get diarrhoea! Same with Trainspotting. I love whenever David Foster Wallace brings up toilet humour in his writing, it's always unexpected and extremely funny. It never feels cheap when he does it.
Are there any animals that should never be anthropomorphised?
Crabs are risky, but never say never.
Have you ever considered becoming a vegetarian?
I used to be, but am not currently. I eat a lot of vegan and vegetarian meals at home, but I'm not strict at the moment.
What can you do with cartoons that you can’t do in any other medium?
This is a tough question for me because I don't enjoy thinking of comics/cartoons from any sort of formal standpoint. It's one of the few things I don't like to overthink.
In the simplest sense: I like telling stories and pairing images with words, and comics are a very straightforward way of doing this. But I've also used many other mediums, and I've experimented with a lot of different styles of making comics (having no panels, writing illustrated essays, etc, etc).
Hot Dog Taste Test by Lisa Hanawalt is published by Drawn & Quarterly, priced £16.99.
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