Waiter, There Are Bitter Tears Of Regret In My Martini

Talk about giving new meaning to a Dirty Martini.

Experimental food artists Bompas & Parr are hosting a sold out Bitter Tears workshop in London in which they will extract and then pasteurize the tears of participants. Ummm, why, you might ask? To put them in bespoke bitters to give to oddball loved ones, of course.

Call it the Extreme Locavore movement. Or extreme authenticity. If we are disconnected from the provenance of what we ingest, here’s one remedy.

Bodily fluid art isn’t new. In 2006, Danish smell artist Sissel Tolaas microencapsulated the sweat of men with anxiety disorder in paint for a scratch and sniff exhibit called “The Fear of Smell, The Smell of Fear.” In 2007, Parisian punk perfumers Etat Libre D’Orange created a perfume that smelled like blood, sweat, adrenaline, tears, and semen called Secretions Magnifiques. And in 2012, artist Martynka Wawrzyniak’s exhibit “Smell Me” included “perfumes” made out of extractions of her hair, sweat — and yes, tears — which people could smell when they stepped into a specially-made spray chamber.

But drinking someone else’s tears? Pasteurized or not? Along with breast milk ice cream, bread a woman recently made from her yeast infection and Rogue’s beer made with beard yeast, these abject comestibles violate food taboos that were probably put in place for health reasons. If pasteurization removes those reasons, the cultural/psychological barrier is all there is.

“Body food” is any interesting example of what we call Waste Positive and Life Logic, which is a trend in which people leverage the interconnected ecosystems of life. As we become less superstitious about and more interested in our Microbiome (microorganisms that live around us) and doing things like having fecal transplants to restore the proper flora in our guts, the taboos around body food are going to fall away.