i eat you eat we all meat (gross sorry)

at cleanup for slow food cafe today, i shared some odd potato pear drink (that had peach garnish on top) with this complete stranger. we were doing dishes and briefly wondered what the soupy thing in the glasses was (it was essentially small talk), so he got some and said you should try some of mine, go ahead and taste it first! it sounds weird upon retelling i guess, but that's precisely what i'm trying to figure out. i remember i was kind of taken aback for a second. why does it seem strange/provoke a feeling of...almost over-familiarity? maybe because sharing food is one of those things that is somewhat like sleeping with someone (rating: PG. i mean, spending time unconscious with someone for example at sleepovers in middle school, with friends in college, etc, when you wake up and you feel weirdly closer to that other person in a way that's indescribable) in that it's Sharing with a capital S.


what am i getting at. i don't really know, i should be writing a lit essay.


food and sleep are both acts of extreme trust i guess, when you think it to the bottom. furthermore, they're both absolute necessities to all humans everywhere so they inhabit a forced overlap between people.


food has so many different sides, it's really fascinating.


socially: facilitates bonding, sharing, whatever happens when people sit down and eat together that is consuming something besides just molecules. like that cat empire lyric, "because sharing a meal is something i wish the world could do." i guess also uneven distribution of food, food deserts, when tied to economics. farmers markets, farmers. slow food. the growing knowledge divide between consumption and production. organic.


biologically/chemically: things like lactose intolerance, glycolysis, the citric acid cycle, digestive enzymes. also, what happens chemically when you cook something--what is really going on in the proteins due to the heat, what happens on the molecular level when you caramelize something for example. what actually HAPPENS?


culturally: different cultures built whole different identities from how they eat, when they eat, what they eat. that also can tie into underlying biological reasons, like how it's not really healthy to drink cold water during a meal and before westernization, chinese meals were never served with cold water. or how you're supposed to refuse food a couple of times before accepting, even if you want it, to have good manners.


economically: food subsidies, what goes into giving us the food that we see at the supermarket. socio-economic stuff, more precisely. why food costs what it does, petroleum driven monocultures, etc. importation, globalization, food aid giving to africa that undermines growing a food economy in the countries there. cash crops, politics.


oh there's politically as well.


i may think too much.


do you ever think about the foods that you'll never get tired of eating? and by think about i mean make a list of.