The unsurpassed master of such analysis was Claude Lévi-Strauss, for whom food also serves as 'food for thought'. The three main modes of food preparation (raw, baked, boiled) function as a semiotic triangle: we use them to symbolize the basic opposition of ('raw') nature and ('baked') culture, as well as the mediation between the two opposites (in the procedure of boiling). There is a memorable scene Luis Buñuel's Phantom of Freedom in which relations between eating and excreting are inverted: people sit at their toilets around the table, pleasantly talking, and when they want to eat, they silently ask the housekeeper: 'Where is that place, you know?' and sneak away to a small room in the back. As a supplement to Lévi-Strauss, one is thus tempted to propose that shit can also serve as 'food for thought': the three basic types of toilet design in the West form a kind of excremental counterpoint to the Lévi-Straussian triangle of cooking.

In a traditional German toilet, the hole in which shit disappears after we flush water is way up front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff at and inspect for traces of any illness; in the typical French toilet the hole is far to the back, so that shit may appear as soon as possible; finally, the American toilet presents a kind of synthesis, a mediation between these two opposed poles — the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. No wonder that, in the famous discussion of different European toilets at the beginning of her half-forgotten Fear of Flying, Erica Jong mockingly claims that 'German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.' It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to the unpleasant excrement that comes from within our body is clearly discernible in it.

— How To Read Lacan by Slavoj Žižek.

The Plague of Fantasies - Slavoj Žižek