"What You Eat"

A very valuable idea exists beneath the harsh and unforgiving characteristics of the actual story called "What You Eat." More and more, the majority of our population places no real value in food, in what it means to eat, to truly understand the connection to what we consume. We take life, harvest it, to sustain our own. Fast food chains and microwaveable meals have brought us further and further from the reality of eating food that we were once connected to. 

I grew up on the Southeastern shoreline of Connecticut in a household with a mother who went into the kitchen each night and cooked a meal from scratch for the entire family. My earliest memories consist of her rubbing the herbs and vegetables we had grown in our own garden between her fingers, smelling them, holding them out for me to taste and touch. Each evening she went to the patches and came back with tomatoes, cucumbers, basil, and peas which she rinsed with loving care. Artisan pizzas, grilled chicken, turkey burgers formed with our own hands, salads assembled from the fragile plants that grew outside our screen door sailed out of that tiny kitchen for all the years I lived at home. I never considered it when I was young, yet now I realize how much I value the knowledge of exactly what goes into our food, where it came from, and the pride and pleasure we can take in its preparation, as my mother showed us from our earliest years.

Although the story "What You Eat" is not quite so pleasant and nurturing, the same idea exists underneath it. The father teaches his young son that life has a value to it--killing another living creature is done because it is time to use its life so that you can continue living. Killing for sport is wicked, it does nothing for anyone, it teaches us nothing about the order of life, what it means to live and die. The father in the story has a cruel yet to-the-point method for teaching his young son what it means to use life in the right way. He shows him that killing things is directly connected to what you eat, that our most basic and defined animal instinct, to eat, is simple and clear-cut. No slaughterhouses, and no fast-food restaurants needed.