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Food for Thought


In the global cafeteria, civilization has perverted hunger into ambient appetites. Society now values the way food is served more than how much it is craved. The preparation and arrangement of food is now more consequential than how it tastes. The atmosphere must now represent the cuisine; and the current setting reflects what selections are available.

In sophisticated cultures, food must feed the senses and satisfy the mind before it can nourish the body. But a starving man doesn't care who serves the food, or how it is displayed, just as long as there's enough food on his plate ... so he won't have to eat the world just to make a meal. A soirée on the Eve of Destruction, or a picnic in the Wasteland is no food for thought.

The Neo-Puritan critics complain that Americans have sacrificed their precious freedoms for the material comforts of excess food and surplus leisure, for obscene wealth and pathetic self-indulgence. The proper question is not what must be sacrificed to recover that vaunted freedom?, but rather why does anyone presume that libertine is not a form of liberty?

In the choice between a smorgasbord and a salad, Neo-Puritan critics want to impose the austere ideal of an anemic morsel sitting alone in an empty cornucopia, of a malnourished appreciation of food as art ... however, gluttonous Americans have chosen the paradigm of the candy store. Freedom gives them the privilege of eating themselves into an unhappy boredom, an unhealthy decadence, an unfulfilled potential. Liberty gives them the right to be wasteful, dissatisfied, and insensitive. America has dogmatically insisted upon having its cake and eating it too! America has the right to be wrong! Despite Neo-Puritan complaints, freedom is the opportunity to wreck what is functional, to ruin what can be fixed, to destroy what can be improved. Americans advertise such extravagance as an inalienable right in their ever-distending litany of profligacy. It's the ugly American, the ambassador of profiteering, who panders this practice of gorging on swill as a universal benefit of democracy to the marginalized peoples of the world, the ones who are dazzled by America's tawdry glitter. That's why wisdom too is not free.






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