Pleasure Pigs

By Ginger Brooks Takahashi

Walker Publishing Filed to Learning · Part of Radical Play

Photo by A.L. Steiner. Image courtesy of the author.

“The small but long brown beast reaches from play

Through play

                                    to play 

                                                            play not as relaxation

Or practice or escape but all there is”

-from The Life of the Otter, Thom Gunn

In my 20s, my friends and I playfully referred to ourselves as Pleasure Pigs. We had been reading Samuel Delany’s books—Hogg, The Motion of Light in Water, and The Mad Man—in which he centered his corporeal fascinations about how we connect to others’ bodies and fluids, layered onto the landscape of New York public spaces through sexual encounters. I connect pleasure to sensory engagement—to be guided by one’s pleasure, uncovering relationships to materiality, to flavors, to place. Pleasure-centered research? A form of productivity or engagement that exists outside of capitalism. Pleasure outside of a product, or the reification of pleasure. Pleasure as defined not by others, but by intuition and curiosities.

I remember my friend Cyrus Saint Amand Poliakoff, who was an art student at Cooper Union at the time, making a performance with nuka, or rice bran, used in Japanese cuisine for making a pickling bed. Cyrus bought the nuka in bulk and prepared a giant damp bed, burying himself in it—the funky, earthy scent transferring from the nukadoku to his skin. I remember him telling me about the way his fingers smelled after mixing and playing with it, and the telling turned me on.

I grew up foraging with my family. In parks or other public places where that wasn’t the norm, I was very aware of my family’s racial and cultural difference. I was often embarrassed about collecting ancestral food like ginkgo nuts when I hardly ever saw anyone else doing the same. One of my fondest foraging memories is wandering around in a logging area alone—my family scattered in the forest all looking for warabi or fiddleheads—and I encountered someone’s abandoned porn magazines. It was this ur-foraging moment where I felt totally alone yet safe in the forest, while also encountering my own sexuality.

In my late 30s, I moved away from New York to Pittsburgh, where plants became my friends. I was curious about gardening and delved deeper into foraging. I joined the Western Pennsylvania Mushroom Club and learned that fungi live in relationship to specific trees. So I started learning how to identify trees, and, taking inspiration from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, I started to see trees as kin. Now, it is how I move through the world. I am always curiously looking up at trees and looking down at the ground to see what might be fruiting.

When I was in Miami last winter, I used crowdsourced information from the Falling Fruit app to locate a Chikoo fruit tree in South Beach. Chikoo, also called Sapodilla, is a tropical fruit popular in India and Mexico. Sadly, they weren’t ripe yet. But I did indulge in super-ripe star fruit falling off a tree in a driveway and found some feral grapefruit at an abandoned golf course. When I returned home, I salt cured the grapefruit and made a pickle inspired by Nimbu ka Achar, an Indian lime pickle. And then recently, when I found a large amount of Chicken of the Woods mushrooms, I blended that grapefruit achar to make a paste, using it to preserve those roasted mushrooms. This kind of playfulness with flavors and culinary traditions was something I resisted at first as a younger person; I was afraid to mess up a traditional recipe or get something wrong. But this playfulness allows for a deeper exploration into flavor and association. It allows for bringing in combinations of ingredients that might exist together here now, due to migration, importation, or colonialism.

So let’s get connected to where we are, paying attention to the trees and plants that proliferate in our midst and keep playing with flavors and processes, while honoring the folk traditions that came before us. Keep passing on this delight in our surroundings—play—that centers the self and our urges, whether fleeting or persistent.▪︎ 

Below is we begin with water, a recipe for Wyrt Blod Gruyt, a recipe for making St John's Wort beer by the author that was originally published in UNWILLING: EXERCISES INMELANCHOLY by the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery.

we begin with water,

where will you get yours?

is it readily available from your tap

what is its taste?

where I am, lead is

present in our water, so I filter it

will you take a bucket

to your well or stream

or is it rain               water you’ve collected behind your house

historically, beer brewing is a method for purifying water

making it drinkable

bring your water to boil

sweeten with sorghum, malt syrup or sugar

one pound per gallon of water

consider the plant that produces your sweetener

corn, barley, sugarcane

each will direct your ale’s flavor

add your herb intentions

St John’s Wort and Yarrow, one pound each

Saint Joan of Arc’s Wort,¹ Hypericum perforatum

the bloody hypericin producing yellow flowers

these flowering tops (including leaves and stems)

usually picked fresh from the wyrt² yard at summer solstice,

beer made at night

once the air has cooled

simmer for thirty minutes, then strain herbs

as your wort³ cools add more flowering tops of yarrow

to capture the aromatics of Achillea millefolium

a bittering agent like hops

from Scandinavian folk tradition, ale with yarrow

jordbumle “earth hop” intensifies the effect of alcohol

the Dakota, Roman, and Old English names for this herb⁴

are associated with war and battle wounds

dried powdered yarrow to staunch bleeding

antibacterial, antimicrobial, and antiseptic

also beneficial in preserving ales

all herbs can change consciousness,

awareness, understanding, and sense of self

St John’s Wort, classified as

antidepressant, antiviral, antibacterial

for living through sunless times 

and moving grief and anger

allow the wort to cool to your blood temperature                add yeast

selecting intuitively or through experimentation

if using dry yeast, combine first with warm water

and then add to your vessel

attach your airlock and watch the yeast come alive

after bubbling subsides

it is time to bottle your beer

seven to ten days

depending on your room temperature

gather and clean (sterilize) your bottles caps funnel tools

in each bottle, one quarter teaspoon of sugar

more if the bottles are bigger

fill with your ale

and cap

let the yeasts consume the sugar

building carbonation

and                              wait

crack your first bottle at the end of summer

chill and open on a rock

in the middle of a river

pass around to your friends to sip

and look up at the sky with your toes

and butts in the water

open your second bottle on a cold winter day

after snow has fallen for days and the ground is cold hard and

you desire the heat of summer

deep                       saint john’s wort warming red                                  may

envelope you or

turn on an internal heat lamp

Ginger Brooks Takahashi is a transdisciplinary artist and educator. Her performance, installation, and site responsive works examine our relationships to the mediums that connect us. These public projects are platforms for intimate interaction, an extension of feminist and queer praxis. Ginger’s work in foodways, foraging, and other folk traditions inform her practice of being rooted in place. Recently she created Drip, Seep, Run, a permanent public artwork for Schenley Park in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She received her BA from Oberlin College, 1999; and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, 2007.