Eat first, then read
Do you ever think about what it's like to... consume?
To eat food. We dress it up as best as we can. We shove it into shiny wrappers with colorful logos, we take pictures and post it for the world to see, we worry about plating. We make it beautiful.
But it's difficult to think about what's happening and really see it that way. We cut, sever, tear with metal tools. We shove the mass into our wet maws and gnash with grinding shards of bone until it loses all substance and form, and swallow it in a wad of spit. It's pushed deep into us by an undulating hose of muscles until it arrives in a contracting bag of acid. It's torn apart on a molecular level and it's very essence is pumped through our blood vessels where it becomes a part of us. It powers our bodies and becomes a part of our very souls.
But there's even more to it than that. Food is matter passed around through eons. Long grass bakes under a primordial sun, it's eaten by an ancient herbivore, in turn devoured by a stream of carnivores that pass this ancient energy along the cycle. They each die in turn, dissolving into the soil of the Earth where it becomes fungus, plants, insects. Lots and lots of insects. And they get eaten. And whatever ate them gets eaten. And that thing biodegrades and turns into plants and gets eaten again. Then bugs again. And somewhere down the line there's plating, and sensible garnish, and wine pairing, and we look at this picture perfect cycle of death and consumption that goes back to a time before time was time.
And somehow, we convince ourselves we're the end of the line.
This comic is about soup.
