A Strange Day on Planet Earth

After a fraught week, I was resuscitated via drinking a salted margarita and watching the third season of Chef’s Table.  It takes itself rather seriously but I don’t mind, as I also take it seriously and am inclined to cry at the climaxes of its so-serious cinematography.

I am left thinking: Perhaps we should never have appealed to the hearts of the capitalists, but their stomachs.  For surely, if they had any normal lust for food, we could never have gotten here?

There will be no layered honey cakes without honey, and no honey without bees, and no bees if we continue to dump pesticides about like dishwater.  There could be no perfect kimchi without cabbage, which is inclined to taste better when grown—as Jeong Kwan does—next to a forest, in amity with the billions of neighbor insects.  And nothing at all without fecund soil, the soil that is being stripped so quickly the U.N. estimates we have only sixty harvests left.

So they don’t care for women, or men who aren’t rich, or winged species and the sister bacteria encasing it all.  But if only, if only, they cared enough about food, perhaps we might have been spared this sixth mass extinction?

Yes, if Scott Pruitt and Charles Koch were sufficiently glutonous, I can’t believe they would be conspiring to kill the soil and the trees and all the rest of us.

If only for a love of honey.

Image: modified still from Chef’s Table, created by David Gelb for Netflix