Nature's Bounty

Food is Nature's greatest joke.

I'm sure I've mentioned all of this before, but that's not going to stop me. The only thing that could stop me is a raid by the FDA, but that won't happen, since finding the humor in food is the reason they exist.

The premise of the joke is, as living things, we have to eat food and drink drinks to stay alive. We seriously have no choice.

After the premise of the joke comes its elaborate setup. It goes as follows.

First, no matter how good food tastes, it all comes out as poop. No matter how good drinks taste, they all come out as pee. And, doesn't it seem like for every ounce of food you eat, you foist out two pounds of poop. Is it just me? The amount of waste produced by your body to the amount of food you consume seems to be a 1 to *hurrrb* ratio.

All of that waste from human consumption has to go somewhere, too, and it certainly doesn't just float into the clouds and out of the atmosphere. It stays here, at ground level, rotting the air we breathe for decades. If we're lucky, it's sent to tumble through sewer veins under streets and houses, the very places where we are, at every moment. If we're not lucky, the waste stays in the corners of shopping centers, motel beds, and parking complexes. Either way, it's all disgusting, and it's of our own making because of food. (*Note: developing countries don't have this problem, but that's because they don't have enough food. If we give more food to those who don't have enough, we also rid ourselves of the refuse of the future. Fight the power.)

Again, you, as a person, don't have a choice. You have to eat. This leads to the next part of the joke's setup: you can die from eating. 

You can die from eating.

YOU CAN DIE FROM EATING!!!

Doing the most basic thing to stay alive can kill you. That, in an of itself, is hysterical.

How may eating kill you? Let me count the ways:

• If food gets lodged in your throat, you choke and die.
• If you eat something that was improperly handled or prepared, you get infected or infested with deadly microbes, and you die.
• If you get stabbed by a kitchen knife, you die. "What does that have to do with eating?" you ask. Clearly, the kitchen knife wouldn't exist if there was no such thing as a kitchen.
• If you eat too much of a specific food or nutrient, you get poisoned and die.
• If you are allergic to a food, you die.

If you put your ear up to the screen, you'll look weird. Don't do that.

Legend has it if you go out into a crop early in September, you can actually hear the vegetables whispering and giggling to each other because of the droves of people they intend to kill after the harvest. Vegetables taste bad because they are, in actual fact, evil.

The last part of the joke's setup is hidden behind money and possessions, in that it's all just because of food. The rich are rich because they have access to so much food they have the time and resources to get everything else that isn't food. The poor are poor because all of their time and resources are spent just to get enough food to survive. Either way, the life of a human is, no matter the circumstances, dedicated to finding a way to get food. In the end, it's all about food.

"So, what's the punchline of this supposed joke?" you ask. (Goodness, you ask a lot of questions. Cool it.) I know you're assuming the punchline is that we, as a species, spend all of our time and effort in the pursuit of food in order to stay alive, yet we'll all end up dying anyway. Right?

No. The punchline is much sicker and more disturbing than that. Consider that the food every person will eat is made up of everything that has already died, and within the very soil of our crops and gardens are nutrients that, at least partially, came from dead people. So, the punchline? People die to become food.

Just as Nature intended. ("Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha!" ... ...Nature typed that)