I remember when a meal was an invitation for people to sit around a table and converse about politics, the NY Times bestseller list, what is happening at the galleries.
Now even openings in an art gallery serve the purpose of uniting people in order for them to engage in discussions about various culinary delights. Chefs are the new Picassos and Einsteins in our society. And they get written about in mainstream media and televised daily. A painting is just background to their stardom, hung on a far off wall, with cameras focussed closely on the spiced turnips and purple kales bathed in wine.
Food is the new religion of our times. We worship by salivating, smelling, tasting or denying it. We make it so pretty that we don't even need a vase with flowers on our dining room tables any longer. We have focussed all our aesthetic urges on that one act of mashing our gums around morsels of delightful sensations. Some people might even say they get a feeling akin to an orgasm when partaking of some exquisite tasty nibble.
We have become not only a greedy nation but a gluttonous one. And to over compensate for our new addiction we have hit the gyms hard. Keeping up stressful and more than necessary exercise regimes, just so that we can maintain our addiction of eating, gorging even.
We even immortalize the food with food selfies.
Our new goal is to maintain our status with our neighbours and close friends of being the king of the Foodies on the block, so that when we meet them, over food of course it is to proudly proclaim our recent discoveries in foodland.
The whole thing makes me want to vomit quite frankly, to opt out of the whole process, but of course that is not possible without my demise. So I eat only what I need to keep on living so I can continue to be disturbed by the world and it's trends, politics and other inane fashions.
And I create art to be backgrounds for The Stars of Our Era, namely Cooks!