Gastro-Religion and Why Salmonella is Not My Friend

Apologies for my recent lapse in Spooning. I have been in the midst of one rather phantasmagoric salmonella plunge, as well as a bliss binge (though I expect only a handful to comprehend that reference).

Some thoughts. Why are food poisoning dreams so certifiably deranged? Do neurotoxins trigger some primordial partition of the brain, causing my otherwise insignificant memories to spill over into my sheets? Several times I woke up in a sweat last night, thinking, "God, what ever happened to that guy?" Individuals I hadn't thought of in well over a decade suddenly ascended to the surface of my cavernous mind pool attempting to feign some greater meaning. Yet there is none. Believe me, I tried to psychoanalyze this one out. But even in my withered, debilitated and ripe-for-bullshit state, I could not find any associative significance.

So it got me thinking more about food poisoning, as well as religion, which of course, I am consistently trying to debunk.

Long before civilization's understanding of hygienic food preparation practices, food-borne illnesses must have been as common as "divine inspirations". As an analytical species, we have, I think, attributed too much signification to the delusional fucked-up states that we've at times found ourselves in after gulping down a half-a-dozen Sydney Rock oysters?

"Ah... Guys. God said that if we want to stop defecating from every orifice, we Jews gotta stop eating shellfish!" Mix that in with a couple of fancy hallucinations, add some historical Hebrew references et voila, you have yourself a sermon. When the mechanics of the body don't work the way they're supposed to, we question the material world and answer with transcendental explanations.

So, perhaps we can compound monotheistic religion to a series of gastro-medico-fantastical trial and errors. After all, if something's bad for you, then God purported it to be so. He made the sky blue, the Earth round and the cows look like our grandmothers. "Mooo, don't eat me. I'm your cousin."

We could go further to suggest even, that a culture which has refined its culinary practices to the point of being able to cook and consume anything and everything, is far superior than a culture that, say, has a nonsensical taboo on specific ingredients, such as pork or beef.

And so, enter the Chinese! Bird's nest, turtle blood, whale sperm, yam... an all-encompassing diet for an all encompassing economy. As China rises, the rest of the world will go hungry.