Professor Hobo – college, students, professors, & cats

I’m going to be blunt here–I need my food pellet. My cats never beat around the bush when it comes to food, and why should I? I need my dehydrated, condensed, food-product-pill supplement and I need it now! Surely science fiction hasn’t misled me, again?

Watch a few films about the future and you’ll notice the disturbing trend that all of our food has been replaced by virtual reality, Soylent Green, Taco Bell, or condensed food pellets (and I’m not entirely sure a few of those don’t overlap). Why is this? Why do we get to a stage in the future that we decide that chewing is just too much effort and decide we’ll go the pill route instead? This is to say nothing of the out datedness of a pill to begin with! Surely by the future we’ll have a patch, or maybe a once a month pill? You know the drug companies already have some marketing monkeys working on the ads for this. “Eat when it’s convenient for you. If eating lasts for more than four hours, please consult a physician.”

While I adore the act of eating, I do find all the intensity we focus towards it to be slightly distressing. There is an entire 24-hour network dedicated to food. Technically, we only eat to survive. Why is there no 24-hour breathing network? You know you’d tune in for Gill Week.

I think maybe it’s time we acknowledge food for what it is–one more thing to distract us from the stark realization that our daily existence has been made into a celebration of the most base survival instincts. We run races, build large homes, and eat like a high school football team on game night because we don’t have to worry about the basic issues of outrunning lions, finding shelter from the elements, and noshing on berries. We are trivial because we can be, and if not, what else could we be?