Scribbles: You Are What You Eat
Scribbles: You Are What You Eat
He sits there, glaring at the paper in front of him with fire in his eye as if
the paper were his sworn enemy. The paper fights him back with grave silence.
The fight has lasted for hours since he got up this morning. He has racked his
brains yet he can’t seem to come up with anything, not even a single word. He
had them all night, all the wild thoughts, but they seem to have just gone into
thin air since he fetched his pen. “I may have gotten up on the wrong side of
the bed,” he murmurs to himself and finally decides to give up.
But how can he. The forum he’s in charge of hasn’t seen a single new piece
in a solid week straight, the increasing click-rates notwithstanding. It’s not
what it’s supposed to be like. The forum dies when nobody’s writing; he can’
t be better aware of that, and this is what a forum master is for – it’s like
an online sheriff keeping an eye on his territory twenty-four hours a day. This
is what he does, well, supposedly. Answering questions, cheering up people who
look down in the mouth, and once in a while when the forum falls into a slump,
standing up to take the bull by the horn – and bring up a new topic so that the
forum will survive this suffocating sluggishness. Wincing at the horrible notion that people leave his kingdom disappointed, he concludes that he has turned up the last sheet of paper and he has to think, think harder – He doesn’t look
forward to being seen a dog in the manger, anyway.
It’s no picnic doing the literature kind of job with an aching stomach, though. He’s had the tummy ache the whole night, and this anxiety to refresh the forum obviously has done nothing to ease the pains up. “Damn, must be the vegetables eaten last night,” he swears. Suddenly his eyes open wider, and look alight. Serious or not, it’s food poisoning. And they put the freshly-pesticided
vegetables on the shelf, ready to sell to anyone to kindly give them a lesson about eating healthfully. That’s it; that’s the topic, he says. It doesn’t sound as noble and awesome as environmental protection, but it indeed is everybody
’s business. There’re people who proudly mark themselves as vegans by never eating any meat or using animal products, but what people do not eat vegetables.
Gloating over the new idea, he can almost visualize a heated discussion going on the forum.
He heaves a sigh of relief. Then he decides to go the whole hog and dig a little deeper. People eat to live on. It’s only amazing that people now seem to
have no difficulty surviving this crazy era when anything and everything can be
used for food ingredients, additives, preservatives and seasonings. Compared to
vital chemicals with potentials to generate cancers that people use to “spice
things up”, you thank God for only having a few nights’ stomachache. But you
are still nowhere near “safety”. You have no idea what they put in that beef
noodles, your favorite spicy breakfast; milk made of sheer sugar has posed a giant threat to new-born babies; newspaper headlines warn that they feed pigs with
Clenbuterol, or whatever professional abracadabra it is, to make pigs grow more
lean meat; those fresh-and- inviting-looking beans you find in the supermarket might have been dyed, or chemically processed! Yes, you still well remember the
scandal that they allegedly mixed meat with cardboard pieces to introduce a new
taste of what is considered the most traditional Chinese food, steamed buns. People go around town telling each other that the final investigation results show
that it is only a fraud, something an eager-beaver reporter, desiring for quick
fame, makes up to create a sensation. Despite the nationwide relief, the concern about food security isn't alleviated a bit; it marches right in another way instead.
It never sounds scarier to say that you are what you eat.... Oops…wait till I
return from the restroom....
Pan.
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轻松英语