Cannibals on this isle

I have to start this story by letting you know that I am a cannibal.

Admittedly, this isn’t the best precedent to set. My only defense is that I live at a time and in a place where most people are, for lack of food and no lack of hunger.

Verily, this world is built on that hierarchy. Every morsel of food that nourishes the body is precious and sacred as it’s that body that will soon nourish other bodies to some degree or another. Regrettably, this means that those on the outset of this hierarchy are usually those who end up on the banquet table. Young men and women with optimism and hopes of changing this world are usually the first under the knife.

The object of humor is that one must learn to cook, both meat and meager sustenance that the earth still provides us, however barren it’s become. It is usually for utility’s sake that we cook, but when one is talented enough, they are permitted to live, with their culinary talent as tribute. Regrettably, this is short lived as tastes change and nobody ever really benefits but the kitchen’s owners and the diners in wait of the main course. Even the most versatile and inspired chefs only oft get recognized by their flavor rather than their flair. Dreary as the ends usually are, this does not dissuade the upstarts from trying.

On that note, I must admit that I am one of those chefs. Fearing the day may come when the fruits of my labor are the dressing for the feast that I’ll become, what I really only prolong.

This does not exclude me from the participation of the eating of flesh. Hierarchy and hunger is God in the world I live in. In whatever measure, I must admit that I participate in the involuntary, albeit immoral, whims of my human, or subhuman, ache. Saving my soul is the reason for this confession, and seeing as I’ll probably end up on the plate soon, I figure it wouldn’t hurt in telling.

People have been waiting for this to happen, whether we’d like to admit it or not. Levying taxes on meat and produce, lying about the true breadth of the agricultural blight until there was nothing on the shelves, learning to cook with bugs or whatever we could, and lastly learning to accept the eating of the youth given up or the weak that society gave up on or forgot about. Administrations that once protected the people, whose job it was to protect the people who provided for them, started to permit cannibalistic behaviors of those above against those below. Those that already had plenty took even more, maybe even taking all that was left. For reasons not needing explanation, those with talents and skill sets and provisions for society at large, those in the middle, started to hide their talents, really to hide themselves from the vicious and bloodthirsty world. Only those who saw opportunity at face value, those without foresight of what was coming for them had they entered the field, the chefs, stepped up and embraced the challenge, in hopes that being surrounded by food would provide them with scraps. Regrettably, this was the case for some, not most, and it was much more the case that those already fat got fed and eventually ate the ones feeding them. My one and only hope in writing this, hoping it finds anyone who can glean a moral from ramblings, or those who would cook in hopes to eat and not be eaten, is that you realize that you are one good plate away from glory and one good plate away from ending up on that same plate.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.