Food (a little too deep)
Every so often, I think about food, what it is, how it is, why it is. When I do, I sometimes get lost in it, and it makes me feel like maybe, just maybe, food is kinda gross. And I think this thought process is unhealthy, so I try to rationalise it. What am I doing with my food?.
What are you doing with yours?
Every so often I think a little too deeply about food, and I find myself disgusted.
It looks beautiful on a plate -- sometimes -- and the flavours bring us joy.
But at the end of the process
it's mashed into goop,
melted into slurry, and
sapped of moisture and nutrients until
it's just a bunch of weird brown lumps.
We are machines that turn beauty into crap for the sake
of a few minutes
of a few hours
of a few days
of energy that we can then invest in other things.
We invest that energy
into work
into life
into family
into friends
into everything that isn't food, only to return to the altar of the calorie.
One of a few certainties.
We need sleep. We need air. We need water.
We need food.
We are inefficient machines that produce waste from the wonder we feed ourselves.
The least we could do, I think, is use a little bit of that energy
we steal
we claim
we crave
to turn around and create something.
To create anything.
To bring into being something beautiful.
Not by virtue of its outward properties,
but by its (semi)permanence, grasping at life a little longer.
Or, barring that, to create something even more transient,
ephemeral by nature, but transcendant by experience.
Don't we owe it to the art we consume?
Don't we owe it to the value we destroy?
Sometimes I think a bit too closely about food,
And I question just what it is I'm doing in life.