Why Can’t Ross Drink the FAT?!

In the video, the woman named Rachel is upset about the man named Ross. Ross wants Rachel to forgive him. When deciding what he can do to show how apologetic he is, their friends suggest that he should drink the fat in the glass on the table to prove his deep sincerity. Everyone acts as if it were a crazy and extremely difficult mission to do. Ross, in the end, does not drink the fat because Rachel knows it is too much for him and she is very content and moved as long as Ross has the willingness to do such a crazy thing for her. What makes the fat undrinkable? Is there anything inherently inedible about the fat? Probably not. In fact, most people can’t live without consuming it. I can’t imagine a world without the fat when I just would like to have a bowl of fried rice or chicken tenders. However, there are preexisting orders on what’s an appropriate way to eat something and what’s not. When we consume the fat with food that goes with it, it’s completely fine; the fat even makes the food more desirable. But when we eat the fat alone, it’s an action out of place which makes it a disorder, just like Mary Douglas’s construct of dirt in her work Purity and Danger. For example, when a newly-made piece of cake is in a dish on the table, no one would ever say that it’s dirty. But if we accidentally have some of the cake on our clothes, suddenly it becomes something dirty. No hygienic difference is seen here. What we believe as dirty or pure, edible or inedible, are often times influenced by cultural and social construct. In Douglas’s words, “there is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder” (1966).

Reference

Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London and New York: Routledge.