Unlike what his sign said, Chris wasn’t that hungry after all, but this penchant for wasting food and everything else is very indicative of our culture. Coming from Vietnam to the States as an 11-year-old, I was immediately struck by how much food was wasted each day in the school cafeteria. Quite casually, my classmates would toss away even unopened cartons of orange juice or milk. Later, a girlfriend would laugh when she saw me struggling to finish my dinner, “You don’t have to eat it all, you know!” She thought it was cute. To this day, I won’t throw away anything that may have a milligram of nutrient on it, and that includes fast food ketchup packet. It’s not just that I will eat absolutely everything I’ve paid for, but that a bunch of people have gone through a tremendous amount of trouble and coordination to make and deliver, for example, this roll of bread, red onion, string bean or slice of (sorta) cheese to (sorta) nourish me, so I won’t insult them by throwing even a speck of it into the trash can, though those ravioli surely deserved to be flung from the top of the Sears Tower. Among the minor quirks of an empire in decline is its gross celebration of gluttony, hence our huge restaurant portions and thousands of eating contests, with some of these revolting spectacles even shown on television. We also have celebrity chefs, just like the Romans in decadence, but before this American Century, however, before this epoch of oil-fueled prosperity and endless war, people were also fascinated by the spectacle of not eating. They would pay to see Starving Artists and Living Skeletons. Soon enough, though, these types will reappear in ballooning numbers among us, and we won’t even need tickets to gawk. Too feeble to mount even an escrache, we deserve nothing less.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 11:13:32 +0000
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