You’re not eating.  You see some food – a bowl of soup, a slice of pizza, a scoop of ice cream.  Then you get hungry.

Normal enough.

This week, I ask of you, YOMYOMF community:

Come on.  Don’t lie.  Admit it.  We’ve all been to some bakery that sells cakes and those bakeries have their display models adorned with everything from Dora the Explorer to Iron Man.

And for the briefest moment, that urge flashes in your brain to reach out and touch it, to get a bit of icing on your finger and give that cake a test taste.  Because your stomach deems it so.

Then you realize it, either because common sense just bitch-slapped some sense into you or because you actually went ahead and felt the coarse plastic texture of the cake’s whipped border.

Yup, it was fake.  But did it make a difference to me?  No.

I still got hungry like a motherfucker.  But it doesn’t stop there.

Sometimes, the fake food doesn’t even have to be tangible.  I remember as a child reading a Curious George book, the one in which he visits an ice cream parlor, and wanting ice cream more than I ever had before.

There was something about the perfect roundness and smoothness portrayed in the pictures that was impossible for the reality to live up to.

It gets worse when it’s actual animation.  When I first saw The Princess and the Frog, it was difficult for me to get swept up in the romance and the music because early one in the film, they showed some beignets.

Look – I know you’re trying to tell a story, Disney, but if you want me to pay attention, don’t fucking use animated powdered sugar in your movie.  It was about thirty minutes into the movie before I realized I had been drooling involuntarily.  God damn beignets.

The last instance that made an impression on me was watching the Wallace and Gromit movie A Matter of Loaf and Death. Appropriately enough, the titular twosome are bakers in this one and so the opening involves a lot of breadmaking.

Watching the dough rise inside the bread pans made me want to get some fresh Pan de Sal (baller Filipino bread, for the uninitiated) from the local bakery.

The funny thing is that while yes, my immediate desire for these foods would be sated, the act of satiating it could not compare to the silent promise made by the images in these books and movies.  Art makes food look good and me, hungry.

Me hungry – haha.  I sound like a caveman.