Eating Burgers in Space
A Taste of Home on the Final Frontier
Seriously, if you don’t want to eat a burger in space, don’t bother reading.
McDonald’s had conquered the earth.
Quietly waiting for Elon Musk to successfully establish a colony on Mars, to capitalize on the opportunity of a lifetime:
export human exquisite taste beyond space and corner the market on our soon-to-be second home.
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But let’s have a seat and eat first.
That burger looks so lovely that you now feel some guild about destroying it.. I mean … eating it.
But what is the difference? Eating is destroying.
The biological process of eating is basically living off the dead, and that is something that most of us especially in this technologically advanced time are unconsciously ashamed of.
Ashamed that our ongoing survival relies on the destruction of animals and plants.
It may be one of the reason of the rise in popularity of synthetic food and pills that supplement but sometimes replace altogether a meal.
For some eating pills feels like a clean, sophisticated or civilized way to eat.
Since we tend to consider nature and animals as inferior to us, the idea that we are somehow in continuum with them is perceived by some as demining and must be hidden away.
Some would feel more comfortable eating food not made by cook but by physician instead making the process of eating less vulgar, less animal.
Beauty as a defense mechanism: Paralysis by Analysis
But you don’t want to get fooled by any of this fancy philosophy, do you?
A burger remains a burger.
There is no time to show signs of weakness. While you contemplate its beauty, it will soon be cold which will give you one more excuse not to eat it.
And this burger while being an unanimated object would have won the battle against you, the self conscious intelligent predator against the burger with its deliciated fresh leave of innocent lettuce.
Now that it is cold and almost uneatable what joy could you draw from it?
How about taking a picture of it for your Instagram? That dopamine boost will do just fine.
At least, if you are now unhappy about the outcome of eating a cold burger, let people think you are by showing a powerful image on you accounts.
And here you go, the image of the burger became more important than the burger it self.The symbol more important than the object it represents.
You have confused the map with the territory and now you are starving.
Takeaway
Eating is destroying, it is the inevitable cycle of life and death, and modern society is somewhat detached and ashamed of this natural process.
The rise in popularity of synthetic food highlights a desire to distance ourselves from the natural world.
It expresses discomfort with our place in the natural cycle.
Our obsession with appearance, driven by social media, often overshadows the actual experience.
We prioritize symbols over reality. The digital world almost matters more than the material one that we neglect and degrade at an ever increasing rate.
I am not interested in converting or convincing anyone about anything.
I don’t care about who is right or who is wrong.
The point of these reflections is to give you something to ponder and perhaps see the world of food and consumption in a new light, questioning the unquestionable and shaking up these dusty preconceptions of Western culture.
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