Everything hurts all the time.
I’m more than halfway through an 18-week training regimen for October’s Chicago Marathon. It’s the second time I put myself through this, so the progression of pain is familiar: My right hamstring whimpers at the slightest tension. The left hip flexor strain that enfeebled me a few weeks ago lingers like a bad dream. The ghost of last year’s shin splint haunts me mile by mile. And phantom daggers periodically pierce my cracked and calloused orc feet without warning.
So I’m spending a lot of time in the bathtub, trying to freeze or heat my muscles and joints into some state of functionality, alternately with blue ice packs bobbing in the frigid water, or heaping scoops of eucalyptus Epsom salt dissolving in the scalding schvitz.
I’m also eating a lot of carbs, which the human body converts to glucose that burns like rocket fuel during long runs.
I’m always hungry. So one of the few physically enjoyable outcomes of this torture is the freedom to eat as much pasta as I want, whenever I want—wherever I want—with no consequences like, say, weight gain or diabetes.
One evening, alone at home, the ache, exhaustion, and ravenous hunger awoke something primal. Rather than risk either one of them going cold, I chose to sink into the tub with a heaping bowl of bucatini with pesto.
There were consequences.
As I shoveled parmesan-dusted pasta into my face, dopamine flooded my brain, and I fell into a trance. In full limbic hijack, I couldn’t see or feel anything but pure consumptive reward. I couldn’t hear the back door opening either.
The person I live with, who usually keeps my most degenerate impulses in check, came home earlier than expected and caught me, with the steam rising around my head and a twirl of noodles forked halfway toward my open gob.
“I’m really worried about the person you’re going to become if I die first—some kind of bathtub eater. My god, that’s so fucking gross.”
I left it unsaid that this was a clear violation of a preexisting house rule: Don’t Yuck Someone Else’s Yum.
But is it fucking gross? This harmless hedonistic practice that goes back millennia to the very dawn of humanity?
“I’m really worried about the person you’re going to become if I die first—some kind of bathtub eater. My god, that’s so fucking gross.”
Eight years ago, paleontologists described the fossil of a 530-million-year-old microscopic sea creature they concluded was humanity’s oldest ancestor. The “bag-like” Saccorhytus resided on the seafloor where, according to the journal Nature, it ate by engulfing food particles with its oversize mouth, not unlike the way responsible grown adults evolved to eat pasta in the bathtub.
Just because we eventually grew flippers and galumphed out of the sea didn’t mean we stopped eating in the water.
These days, the aquatic ape theory, which holds that our human ancestors branched off from the great apes when they learned to hunt shellfish, is mostly discredited as pseudoscience. But consider when our very first experiences with nourishment occur: They’re well before we even become viable fetuses, when we’re mere embryos implanted in the dark comfort of the maternal womb. Surrounded by amniotic fluid—which is composed mostly of water—we first absorb electrolytes through our developing tissues. And then as the fetus develops, proteins, lipids, and, yes, carbohydrates come into the stew (four critical things you need to consume when training for a marathon, by the way). Who doesn’t long to dive back into that nurturing sanctum from time to time?
It’s been pointed out to me that fetuses pass urine back into the amniotic sac, and occasionally they poop into it too, which can cause serious medical problems when labor day rolls around.
The authors of the Saccorhytus study also suggest that the critter might not have had an anus and that it excreted its waste back out through that big, gaping mouth (not too far off the mark from your favorite scampish fetus). It kind of subverts the old chestnut that one shouldn’t shit where one eats. Let the record show that I do not endorse peeing or pooping in the bath—especially when eating.
The record also shows that in 2021, Nature dialed back its assessment about the Saccorhytus–human connection. Instead, they think the big bag-mouth might actually be an Ecdysozoa, a group of invertebrates that include arthropods and nematodes. Nevertheless, they still can’t find a butt on Saccorhytus. Putting that aside, humanity’s first known ancestors were fish that definitely shat where they ate.
But speaking of poop, high and low culture is full of precedent, if not permission, for eating in water. Think of Bill Murray’s idiot genius Carl Spackler in Caddyshack (1980), sanitizing the evacuated and drained Bushwood Country Club swimming pool after a rogue “doodie” was spotted bobbing in the clear, chlorinated water. Sweeping the bottom in a hazmat suit, he discovers the suspect log and holds it aloft. “There it is,” he shouts, taking a whiff. “It’s no problem,” he says, then takes a lusty chomp out of the offending Baby Ruth candy bar.
Some references, especially the older ones, seem kind of judgy.
There’s the Greek mythological character of Tantalus, who stole ambrosia from the gods. Or maybe he tried to feed them his dismembered son. The record’s unclear. As punishment, he was sent to Hades and forced to stand chin-deep in a pool whose waters receded whenever he bent to drink, right under a fruit tree with its branches just out of reach. On the other hand, the seeming inverse of this, the ancient Roman-Celtic carny game that caught on during Samhain and evolved into Halloween’s bobbing for apples, was initially all about scoring (i.e., making a baby) with a future mate.
Then there’s the middle panel of Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, which, among other temptations, features a polycule of hot, naked young things in a pond nibbling on a giant floating blackberry, implying they’ll pay dearly for the pleasure in the afterlife.
Modern myths are a little more ambiguous. The “enormously fat” glutton Augustus Gloop from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory chugs from the chocolate river only to tumble in and get sucked up through a tube leading to the fudge room, which squeezes him down to waiflike dimensions.
A few years later, Roger Daltrey was wallowing in a tub full of cold baked beans, a few dribbling down his chin, on the cover of 1967’s The Who Sell Out. That had to feel nice.
In the 2023 film Saltburn, the dubious come-on “I’d drink your bathwater” was weaponized when Barry Keoghan’s plebeian Oliver spies on Jacob Elordi’s blue-blooded Felix pleasuring himself in the tub, then proceeds to slurp up the brew as it circles the drain. In my initial defense of water-born eating, I also failed to remind the self-appointed bathtub Taliban at home that when this film first came out, they thought that scene was “dripping hot.”
No one bats an eye at a glass of whiskey or wine in the tub. A shower beer is perfectly acceptable in polite society. The Reddit subthread R/showerorange seems wholesome too, devoted to the “enlightenment” of people eating refreshing citrus in the shower, the collateral stickiness washed cleanly down the drain. It features mostly oranges, but also yuzu and Buddha’s hand. And some go rogue with Skittles, cookies, Haysmith’s Seville orange and Persian lime gin, and deep-fried chicken wings.
That latter group seems better suited for the 4,700-member subthread with hundreds of photos of people bathing and enjoying everything from saucy ribs to deviled ham on toast, to (lots of) pasta, often with their bare feet splayed under the faucet in the background. Some photos are quite civilized, especially when folks take the time to support their food above the bathwater, like a pair of baguettes serving as the cross-tub tray for Babybel cheese and a copy of Sissela Bok’s Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science.
At first, this seems like the most pure, shame-free, id-enabling expression of bathtub eating I’ve come across since discovering its pleasures on my own, especially since some posters block lurking foot fetishists by wearing socks or Crocs in the water. (That kink has its own subreddits.)
Then again, a lot of it is stunty: a raft of Cap’n Crunch free-floating in the tepid water; raw turkeys as bath slippers in a tubful of potential salmonella; clumps of Duke’s mayo coagulating in warm water.
In fact, that last one comes from the subreddit’s top 1 percent poster, who just seems like a performative menace.
Come to think of it, most of r/bathfoods is pretty fucking gross. But I don’t like to yuck other people’s yum.
I do like to lock the bathroom door now, though.
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