Food: the Fallen Angel

by Madeleine Kando

I like to eat. I like to drink. I also like to not eat. Not eating is what we do most of the day, but to the people who make a living at selling food that is potentially dead time. They would like it if we spent more of that dead time eating. I watch programs about the ‘food industry’ and how they supposedly have got us all by the balls. They stuff their products with taste enhancing chemicals that would make an old leather shoe taste good.

They add bright colors, sweet smelling aromas, soft texture (who wants to have to chew their food!) and many addictive substances. How can you blame them? That’s what they do: they want us to spend more time eating and work less hard doing it.

But eating what exactly? Food in my opinion is something that you have prepared, not something that you find in a package. That to me, is pretend-food. Pseudo-food. Play-food. In fact, there is a whole trend called ‘edible crafts’. It is very popular amongst pre-school teachers, using food to create art projects.

Imagine for a moment that the food you buy these days would be air. Air comes in different flavors: you have hospital air, sub-way air, mountain air, pine forest air, latrine air..

Luckily our capacity to discriminate between the foul air of a latrine and the air we breathe on a mountain top is still intact. We would not put up with our environment being filled with latrine air. We would leave and live somewhere else. We would organize protest marches, design air filters… anything to revert back to the original ‘normal air’. 

What I am saying is this: what happened to our ability to distinguish between food and pretend-food? Yes, it’s true. Sugar, corn starch, caffeine, msg.. they are all addictive. But so are succulent pears, camembert, ripe melons.. (You might call me crazy, bu I myself, am addicted to sesame seeds and sweet rice, I kid you not).

Nobody forces us to buy coke, oreo cookies, lucky charms.. It would be a lot cheaper if we took more personal responsibility for what we put in our mouth. But that would not be good for the ‘anti-food industry’ industry. The experts who make a living at telling us what not to eat.

Food has become our enemy. It used to be our guardian angel. It protected us against death. Now the angel has tumbled down, has been trampled on, its white wings broken, dirty, unable to lift itself out of the gutter. And looking down on this fallen angel, with a smirk on their faces are fear, gluttony and ignorance. leave comment here