Complete Burger Theory

I hit the University of Texas to meet America’s best philosopher, Professor H. Burglar. As I walk through the campus, I’m excited to meet one of the celebrity philosopher heroes of our generation. Famous for his YouTube lectures on the field of philosophy, psychology and sociology, the professor was thought to be one of the leading thought leaders of, not just the decade, but the millennium. I enter his office. He is wearing his signature black and white striped suit, Panama hat and medical eye mask, Burglar leans against a window looking down at the university forecourt, reading from a book of poetry by Walt Whitman.

“Tell me about your theory.” I say. He looks over at me, flashes his trademark smile and snaps the book shut. He beckons me to take a seat, I oblige, and then the eminent professor begins to explain to me the greatest idea that American philosophy had ever seen. Burger theory.

“Where do the concepts of things come from? If we are to believe Saussure, the concept is generated by the object. It is the ideas that an object, for example a burger, could be defined by different strata’s of reality. There is the absolute reality that exists beyond human perception. There is what we call reality, made of colours, shapes, sounds, smells, taste and so on, things we can perceive. There is then the other strata of reality, that arguably, is not reality at all. It is the idea behind each of those sensory inputs, as well as extra ideas that are more difficult to perceive directly, but are useful in terms of understanding the other strata’s of reality that exist beyond the realm of the reality of ideas. On each plane of reality, objects exist on each dimension simultaneously. There is the absolute reality of the burger, a collection of separate things that have come together. We must not confuse absolute reality with the reality we experience. Absolute reality should not be considered through human senses, culture or conceptualisation. Take for instance, colour. At this level of reality, everything is simultaneously every other colour besides what we can see. The same is true of time, everything happens simultaneously and it is only the time we perceive in the current moment to be the present. At this level of reality, everything exists at all points of time simultaneously besides what we can experience. It is through reducing absolute reality that we comprehend it.

Things that exist at the level of absolute reality exist in ours, like a shadow thrown from a burger. It leaves a trace in our reality that we can see or eat or talk about. In every second of every hour of every day, a human asks another if they want a burger. This constant stream of questioning ripples through the entire population of humanity, if you were to connect each person asking the question with a line and looked at from above it would seem like a pulsating web that covers the planet. With this way of talking about burgers, we have entered the reality of thought, envisioning something that doesn't exist yet both relates to our reality as well as developing our understanding of it. The secret twist is that there is no such thing as our reality. There is only absolute reality and the reality of thought. The two realities interact, and as people we mostly seem to exist in our reality, unaware of the extreme conceptual construction we have built around ourselves and how we perceive absolute reality. By taking strong enough doses of psychedelics, this is obvious, and the psychedelics often act to slow down or close off interactions between neurons. We lack the faculties to experience absolute reality through social constructs, linguistics, semiotics and the limits of human biology. Just as an insect wouldn't be able to conceive a burger, a human is unable to conceive of the absolute reality of a burger. We are chained to the walls of a cave, completely naked and sweating, unable to escape the biocultural destiny that prevents us from understanding the absolute truth of the universe and beyond. 

This doesn't matter though. It's actually okay to exist within our reality and the boundaries of the mind. Both the insect and myself might never know the absolute reality of the burger, but both of us can still eat it. Would knowing the absolute truth of the burger enable us to enter a dimension of knowledge that we are unable to conceive of, despite how hard we tried? Maybe. But we must ask ourselves, if an ant was given the ability of human intellect, then what happens? We don't even know what to do with it, after tens of thousands of years of humanity's greatest thinkers, artists, scientists and philosophers, the best we can come up with is "nobody knows". And this is good. Absolute reality is whatever, where we really shine is the reality of our own invention, the reality of thought. There is no burger without us. The collective minds of humanity are connected to each other, billions of people around the world, at different points in time, eating burgers, creating an entire dimension of reality between themselves as the best way of navigating the infinity of time and space. It is remarkable that the invention of agriculture, the domestication of livestock, the development of skills, the unbroken chain of parent and child that reaches backward through time, through species, a single dynasty that led to the first hominid, the explosion of human civilization, the milling of wheat, the baking of bread, the butchery of cattle, the mining of metal, the construction of kitchens, all of this coming together, all at once and there in your hands is a burger and you bite into it. Each bite is but one amongst a choir of millions around Earth singing the triumph of life out to the universe.

There is one flaw in this celebration of our dominion over the reality of thought. As we have made it up, it is easily manipulated. The lens in which we experience absolute reality can vary wildly from culture to culture, person to person. It is the shape it is based on what people think, and people are wrong all the time. They'll hear a single comment somebody made once and base their whole reality around it. A person can read a sentence that can drive them to murder. By relying entirely on the reality of thought, humanity is subject to its own imagination. It would be willing to destroy its own environment out of spite. People can listen to words combined in a certain way that it can make them criminally insane. There is always the potential for the creator to be destroyed by their creation, and as the ultimate creator for a plane of existence, we easily become lost and suffer amongst the architecture of our minds.

This is the importance of burger theory. There's another twist. The reality we thought didn't exist earlier actually does exist, and is actually integral that all mentioned realities are connected. Our reality is real. It is the meat in the middle of the bread of absolute and thought reality. A burger without the patty isn't a burger, it's just two pieces of bread, or a kind of sandwich. The burger can be defined - a disc of edible matter - yet it is flexible, it can change, yet remains itself. The burger cannot be a steak or a chicken leg or a salmon, it has to be a burger patty in order for the combination of burger, bread, and possibly garnish, for it to be considered a burger. Even a patty with a single slice of bread is not a burger. It would be an open sandwich or perhaps a kind of British pie. This is how we can unify both structuralism and post-structuralism. Each element is required for the holistic realisation that each of these dimensions rely on each other to exist. The same can be said for the separate models of reality discussed earlier in burger theory, they can exist separately, but ultimately are combined in such a way that they can't be separated. 

This is true of many things.” He says. I nod.

“Yep.”

The Great American Roadtrip

The Great American Roadtrip was one of many contemporary legends. The freedom of the open road, mile after mile of asphalt that crisscrossed the continent like bicep scars. A place where dreams came true, love blossomed and teens would come of age into fully grown adult human citizens. Across the decades, the highways were romanticised from films like Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise and Vanishing Point, setting the scene for a hip new generation to burn rubber and find themselves in a country that had sacrificed itself to the automobile. For an American, going on a road trip was a pilgrimage with no destination. It was their own form of opera, a cultural expression built around oil, speed and individualism. It was as American as it got, so much so, to remove the road trip from its societal memory would be to deny the very essence of what it meant to be American.

 

You didn't need to leave your car to get food, be entertained, go to work or even sleep. Since the 1940s, government officials have designed cities around the automobile than the human being. They envisaged the car as a kind of mech that would transport a human pilot through the urban environment, with sidewalks and parks being replaced with multilane highways and car lots. The issue of verticality would be solved by a simple ramp system, with plans later on that cars would enter entire sections of road that would go up and down as an elevator, but instead designers realised they could just keep piling roads on top of each other. Mile after mile of interstate was suspended in the air on concrete columns that mingled with power lines and chimneys that formed the outer crust of industrial areas. You could sleep, work, live and die in your car. The car was the ultimate expression of human ingenuity. The car is among the pantheon of the gods of the United States, along with money, guns and short form video content. Long live the American automobile!

 

The wavey film footage clicks, the image is still, lines of static appear along the top of the frame. The vintage film was being projected at a Drive-Thru Multiplex Cinema, though for some reason the projectionist had simulated as if the film was from an 80s Betamax by editing it in Adobe After Effects, although the film was more stylistically similar to the futurism of the 1950s. Was the projectionist smoking crack?

"Hey man, that's an anachronism! What gives?" I yell from the open door of my Hyundai. I try to leave the outdoor cinema, but reverse into the car behind me so that the driver starts beeping and yelling. I wave at them, then drive the car forward and into the back of another car. Its alarm starts going off as I keep driving the car back and forth and bumping into the cars around me. Somebody knocks on my window.

"It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something." They say.

"Okay." I say, shrugging. "Is that J. G. Ballard?"

"Its the opening lines to one of my favourite video essays."

"Try reading a book once in a while, you might learn something. Fucking dork." I say, ramming the car into the one in front of me again. I begin shouting, rocking back and forth in the drivers seat, trying to push the car by pressing the accelerator all the way down so that the tyres start spinning and smoking and I’m shouting until I can’t breathe. I reach around into the backseat, finding a small cannister of gas with a mask attached, pressing it onto my face and taking some deep breaths. I had to calm down. Was I experiencing road roid rage? Or had I spent too much time in the Hyundai Sonata? I hit the open road to find out.

 

I’m speeding. I’m undertaking, accelerating between gaps, into incoming traffic, crushing signs and other bullshit beneath my wheels. Ever since the United States had removed the speed limit on the highway, the average driving experience between cities passed by quickly. It seemed a lot of other drivers hadn't quite caught on yet, instead honking their horns at me like they were mindless geese, but I knew the law. I kept flipping people off, shouting at them from inside my car. It was a shame the windows didn't roll down, as I'd be spitting on their cars as I drove past. I truly began to feel like I was one of the locals, honouring their regional customs and trying my best to not look like a tourist. And I think I was pulling it off. I drive the car diagonally across six lanes of traffic and cut in line at a drive-thru.

 

I was at Inside & Out Diner: The Burger King of McDonald. They specialised in inverted fast food, which I paid for with Klarna from my shitcoin wallet. One of the gimmicks of the franchise was that all the staff spoke backwards, though due to this training being delivered in microtransactions, the staff group had split between two ideologies. One thought that speaking backwards meant every letter would be rearranged back to front, so "Welcome to Inside Out." would become "Tuo edisni ot emoclew." These were known as orthodox backwarders. The other system was more simpler, simply rearranging the words back to front "Out inside to welcome." would be how the Reform backwarders operated. Unfortunately, I was met with an Orthodox backwarder on the intercom.

"Esaelp redro ruoy ekat I nac?”

"Huh?" I yelled, lighting a cigarette.

"Esaelp redro ruoy ekat I nac?”

"Gimme the classic Stacker with an extra portion of burgers." I say from behind the glass.

I then drive as fast as I can to the order window, get my phone out and start filming myself having a tantrum.

"What the fuck, I just ordered my food and it’s not been cut up and fed to me. What the actual fuck is going on?" I start shouting. I then flip the phone round and start filming the staff.

"Have you seen this shit? I'm being deadass right now. Get me my fucking food! I want my food!" I keep yelling. The food arrives, I have to open my door to collect it, then I speed away, nearly hitting a family of children leaving the diner as simple pedestrians. I park up in the car lot and look at the sorry excuse for a meal. The burger is a piece of bread sandwiched between two pieces of beef. The fries are sticks of salt with crushed up potato starch sprinkled over the top. The drink is mostly coke with just a single ice cube in it. I eat thousands of calories, chainsmoke cigarettes and listening to the radio turned up so loud its just a mechanical roar. Afterwards I sit amongst the detritus of greasy paper, trying to meditate but was unable to centre myself for some reason. There was something on my mind that made it hard to focus. I slide the car seat backwards, running over a burger I had dropped earlier so that it squirts in two, interior roadkill diagrams. I watch street fight videos on my phone and drift off to a dreamless sleep.

I wake hours later. It was night time, I was a few miles west of Jacksonville. I drove along the empty road and a car approaches me. The headlights were too bright. I held my hand up to try and block it, but the light was so bright I could see it glow through my hand. Thousands of megawatts were being pumped into the road like a flood of candlelight. I pulled a laser pen from my top pocket and started shining it in the other drivers eyes, though it seemed to have no effect. Thats when I realised the driver was dead. His car autonomously drove itself across Florida, pulling itself up into electric vehicle recharging stations, self-driving itself like a hearse through endless rush hour traffic, lonely nights speeding across the interstate as crickets and frogs sang in the background. Judging by the decomposition of the driver, it had been doing this for several months, if not years. As our cars passed each other, I could swear that the driver turned to look at me. In the backseat was Armitage Shanks. I gagged in fear, almost crashing the car against the rail separating the roads. I came to a stop, skidding and turning 180 degrees and burst into tears.

Banquet

The biggest problem facing the Western world is that people are eating too much food. The anti-famine is upon us, the plague of locusts in reverse, the soft undulating curves of the obese as they vibrate in electric litters, watching videos of starving children as salted corn snacks are eagerly pushed between rotting teeth, bundles of food wrapping set onto landfill sites like plastic bouquets onto a mass grave. On one end of the spectrum is the human cow, on the other is the neurotic living skeleton. Before the Industrial Revolution an egg was an egg, now it is a complex net of protein, carbohydrates, fatty acids and acidic fats symbolised by an egg.

The calorie intake for a city contains enough energy to power a rocket on its way to the moon. There is such an abundance of food it has become a natural resource, like sunlight or mud. On television we watch middle-aged chefs dance around huge kitchens, spritzing cheeks of veal with saffron to be fed to minor celebrities. We eat better than any king in the entirety of human civilization. The sublimation of sexual energy into creating food. Cooking is foreplay, eating is fucking, digestion as a form of pregnancy. The foods that are taboo are not based on their components but how healthy they are deemed to be. It is less important that a pig was slaughtered and more about how it is presented; a sausage McMuffin or a sliver of flesh served with a sage and black olive fondant? There is a violence in food preparation, its tools are somewhere between medieval torture instruments and modern medical devices. It is a process heavily reminiscent of death, for we eat the dead (animal or vegetable).

There are those that feed like birds, eating is no longer a way to feel fulfilled but a process of absence. They are drawn towards zero, like orbiting the event horizon of a black hole, often their lives revolve around nothingness and attaining this zen-like state is the entirety of their existence. There are those that feed like hogs, eating is no longer a way to feel fulfilled but a process of stuffing. They receive pleasure from the sweet foods, the childish foods, the foods of apes. They cannot receive pleasure in any other way except for the brief moment on the tongue; they masticate to fill a hole in their stomach that exists in the mind. Their lives also revolve around nothingness, though rather than becoming lost in the void they would rather replace it and have everything fall into them.

000
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Those between these two extremes are themselves haunted by the prospect of balance. This is where complex diets come in, rituals passed down by modern gastropriests that one should follow to attain weightlessness. A paleo, gluten-free, organically farmed, locally sourced diet is perceived as one of many possibilities, to be joined with Atkins, Ketogenic, CRAM and other ways in which people who don't know how to eat look towards for inspiration. If anybody was to eat these certain foods then they will all end up looking the same. Diets are a fascist concept.

You may be reading this and wonder what it is that I eat? Well I shall tell you. Every one hundred steps I pick up the nearest thing and eat it. Leaves, gum, boomerangs, sandwiches, insects, dogs, cars, buildings, jewels, anything. By not considering at all what I eat besides following this basic rule, my diet is much more varied than that of the average person. Less a Food Pyramid and more a Food Hanging Gardens Of Babylon. Of course, there is no correct way to eat food, just to eat when hungry and remember vegetables.


Stillleben mit Fleischkorb, Frans Snyder

How To Smell

What are the smells currently around you? Unless foul it was likely you didn't even notice them in the first place. Yet breathe in slowly, through the nose. What are the things that give off a smell nearby? Perhaps a cup of tea, an ashtray or a dog. Better yet you may be reading this out in nature and have the luxury of chlorophyll and wind. But you might be asking yourself 'am I smelling enough?' and the answer is 'probably not'. An entire perspective, up there with touch, sight and hearing, yet having a good nose isn't taught in schools and rarely discussed in public. I have been experimenting with my nose recently and thought I would share the findings with you.

First of all, how does smell work? Well, how does vision work? Light is shone onto objects and then bounced back at different frequencies picked up by the rods and cones in the eyeball. It is similar for smelling. Smells are bounced off objects and hit you in the nose. Here special cells called sniffodoruns detect any irregularities in the pure scent of nothing (from which all smells are made) then send messages to the brain which translates this information into smells. On the smell spectrum we have sweet, sour, dirt, water, musk and grass. All smells have varying elements from each of these six primary scents and no other smells outside this spectrum can be smelt by the human nose, although it is thought some animals can detect Ultrabitter and Infrasweet.

When you breathe through your nose it is important to do it slowly. Too quickly and the increasing air will push the odours away from the sniffodoruns and give the sensation of coldness. Although I do recommend breathing in quickly once to properly feel where your sense of smell is actually located. You should feel a sensation at the front of both nostrils (even though you are only breathing through one) that runs up your nose and into the middle of your head. You can use your tongue to triangulate where the true sniffodoruns are whilst with tracing a finger up and down the dorsal ridge of your nose. Close your eyes and focus on this point, imagining the sniffodoruns detecting the delicate yet complex fragrances all around you. Can you identify each unique smell inside the symphony of odours? If you are unsure what something is, perhaps moving around the room would be helpful. At first a sense of smell can be quite weak and require close proximity in order to fully smell something, although like the ear of a musician, the nose can be trained and improve over time to be more sensitive.

The next step is to smell your hands. Go on, give 'em a sniff why don't you! What is it you can smell? Do you know why? If there is anybody else nearby, ask to smell their hands. You might be pleasantly surprised to find their hands will smell totally different than yours. Perhaps you're able to identify if they smoke or not, what they've had to eat, if they use soap and what brand, all sorts can be learned from smelling the hands of a person. Next is to smell them all over in order to properly process their scent. It can help if you look at them whilst you do this and they talk to you, in order to fully build up an interperspective feel of a person. In a more subtle way you can take to the streets, smelling joggers as they run past you.

One should be careful with their sense of olfaction. Not only do you have to protect it by not smoking or insufflating drugs, but you may smell some things previously unimagined yet more horrifying than any vision or noise. And like all senses, will begin to fade with age and steadily decline into nothingness, which is all the more reason to begin training now. Have you ever smelt pregnancy? How about smelling a sunrise? Many avenues reveal themselves whilst focusing on an underrated perception.

Legalisation

In front of us were row after row of cannabis plant lit by yellow lights, casting harsh shadows onto the concrete floor. We are underground. Alvin Theodore turns to me and wipes at his brown moustache.
"What do you think?" he says, voice wavering in excitement. I turn back to the 'sea of green' and breathe in.
"Smells like...food."
"That's the trichomes." he utters before leading me through a gap in the field. Alvin Theodore is a business man, I could tell by his cheap suit and the way the skin sat on his face, like an ultra-real mask, all deep-pored and hairy up the nose. He looked like a wax work animated wet. We enter another room, this one contains seedlings on three rows of shelves. Botanists walk through the columns, administering a liquid vitamin solution into the growth matter.
"When they bred dogs for a certain kind of temperament, they noticed some physical features were shared with behaviour, like if a dog was good with people it might have had floppy ears. Or a curled tail. That kind of thing. With these plants we aren't really looking for a psychological behaviour but physical traits. But what if the exterior form is intrinsically linked in some way to the interior?"
"So what you're saying is that plants have a personality, like big leaves means...this plant is good to be around? Like...this plant is fucking sound."
"More or less. It took them about fifty years to breed a little terrier from a true dog, call it forty generations huh? Think how many generations you can have with plants. They reach reproductive maturity much earlier and can have potentially hundreds of children. Not only that, we can clone them. I think this is why we've seen such a significant increase in THC levels over the last fifty years or so. If you look at the buds we have now compared to your grandpa's weed, ours looks a lot more...Lovecraftian." he says, climbing a staircase. We're in his office, decorated in formica and residue. He makes a pot of coffee.
"Tell me about your cannabinols. Would you say what you have been growing was 'kush'? Or more similar to the variety of super skunk flooding the country from Amsterdam." I enquire nonchalantly, accepting the cup from Alvin.
"I'm running a business model that fits the high class stoner, providing the highest quality product on the market. I have a degree in Evolution from Oxford, I've travelled to the states to see how they do it. Recreational cannabis is going to be a huge cash crop, bigger than...wheat."
"Wheat?"
"Celiac's on the increase. Why not replace wheat with weed?" he said. I nodded encouragingly. I always enjoyed meeting a person willing to maximise their concept to it's fullest potential. It wasn't just a product with a single purpose, it was a multi-faceted money spinner that could enter various revenue streams. Food, clothes, medicine, building material, the potential was endless.
"It comes down to the waste product. Think about wood pulp, animal fats, plastic chips. We recycle all of these in pretty much everything, but we're going to have such an excess in marijuana related waste matter we can have weed in everything."

I left the meeting feeling puzzled. Was drugs okay now? I visited a juice bar to find out. Hundreds of these have popped up over the country, not selling alcohol but various juices that simply tasted nice. I ordered a virgin cranberry mojito and sat outside, digging the vibelicious music pouring out of the woofers, waiting to talk to someone. It didn't take long for a woman to ask me for a light. I passed her a box of matches I'd kept for such an occasion and watched her quietly, trying to smell her from across the table. I introduced myself and asked why she was smoking cannabis.
"It feels good, you know? I like it. Do you smoke?" she says, offering me the glass pipe stuffed with a well cornered bowl of Norwegian Haze. I breathe in the thick smoke and shut my eyes. I quoted Descartes: "I think, therefore I am."
We then get into a conversation about the fancy drinks that they had at the bar before I moved onto a more complex conversation.
"Why do you take drugs? Do you have no control over your life?"
"What do you mean?"
"Does your need to escape reality have anything to do with problems you experienced as a child?"
"Well, not really. I mean, I had a good childhood."
"I suppose you're imaginative?"
"Yes."
"Imagination is a defence mechanism for those that struggle with their own ego."
"That's ridiculous." she says, laughing.
"Let me tell you about a man who imagined the whole world was an orange. He tried to peel the whole world until they trapped him in a dungeon. Now was that because he was on drugs or was it all in his imagination?"
"I'm going inside." she says, leaving me alone. I think about the man who had tried to peel the world. What would happen if he had been successful? I look up and down the street, thankful for small favours. I think back on my experiences so far, still undecided if smoking weed was a morally safe decision. I needed to try for myself by visiting the Institute of Scientific Research in Durham.

I am strapped onto a bed, scientists move around me, though I'm unable to see them properly as a bright light shines overhead. There's so many electrodes attached to my scalp it looks like an orange plastic ponytail, my thoughts being played back to me as a wavering sine tone. A doctor administers 100 milligrams of pure cannabis via eye drops.
"Blink please." he says. I can feel the liquid drip down my temples.
"How long will it take for the weed to activate in my system?"
"Approximately four minutes." he says. I can feel hands touching at my arm and the sting of a needle.
"What are you doing?"
"Administering a saline drip in case you lose consciousness. Try to relax." says the doctor. I wait, watching the light. After a few minutes I mention I don't feel anything, so more eye drops are administered to me. There is somebody talking in the background, I think I recognise the voice.
"Who else is in the room?" I ask. There isn't a response for a while and I can't move my head.
"Myself and the nurse." says the doctor eventually.
"I think I am beginning to feel the...eye drops having an effect."
"How do you feel? Speak clearly into the microphone." he says, I can feel the foam top brushing against my lips.
"I am beginning to feel like Bob Marley." I say.
"Do you have the munchies?" he asks.
"Yes...yes, I think I can feel an increase in appetite. And a dry mouth, is that normal?" I ask. The doctor laughs.
"Just try to relax, we are moving onto the next stage of the procedure." he says.
"Okay." I say. The bed begins to tilt so I can see the whole room. In front of me are about fifty snakes inside a glass box.
"What are they there for?" I ask.
"This is an experiment." says the doctor, walking forward and smashing the box with a baseball bat before running out of the room.

The Insect Eaters

A chart showing rising food prices. Statistics on global warming. Words such as 'overpopulation', 'taste risk' and 'megavalue' flashed by on the powerpoint presentation. Somebody was talking in the background, though I couldn't quite hear him due to the incessant buzzing coming from a hollow glass cube containing wasps. The presentation finishes.

"Any questions?" says Michael Smith, founder of Snacksects. I put up my hand slowly. I am the only person in the audience besides an apiculturist and his daughter, though both have fallen asleep.

"So, what was that presentation about again?" I say, finally taking out my dictaphone.
"Essentially we believe that due to the current food predictions, done by scientists, we will inevitably have to eat insects in order to feed the world. Well, they already eat them around the world anyway. We at Snacksects wish to bring insect eating to the West through a mixture of marketing strategies, rebranding insects as a potential food item and presenting these food items in an aesthetically pleasing way." he said.
"Okay. But if that's the case, why don't people just keep insects at home? It must be easier than gardening." I said, with no real idea how difficult either gardening or insect farming actually is. Michael Smith laughs a hearty laugh, shakes his head then leans against the podium.
"Anybody can farm insects, true. But then they can grow their own vegetables, keep cattle and so on. Why don't they? Because it takes up too much time essentially. Why go to the trouble of buying a greenhouse, maintaining it, buying soil, seeds and so on when you can go to the shop and buy whatever you want? Not only that, we have identified the best way to make consumers desire to eat insects."
"By making them into burgers?" I said, remembering a few pictures from earlier.
"That is one revenue stream, correct. We also have a range of oven chips made from maggots, dry-roasted beetles, chocolate coated ants and so on. Some people don't like to eat cuts of meat as it reminds them too much that it came from an animal. So we have decided that by processing the base product to such an extent that it is unrecognisable, people will eat it." he says. I nod and begin to wonder about the possibility that insects would be widely consumed in the west. Perhaps the horse meat scandal was part of a media conspiracy in order for people to be unsure about beef. It would only take a few youtube videos in order to change public opinion entirely. They had their work cut out after the many reality shows having contestants eating live insects as part of a task, though this is as ridiculous as trying to eat a live pig or a live lamb.

Into the presentation room a plate of highly processed ant cubes are brought out, each covered in a layer of salt and vinegar flavourings, preservatives, wheat extract and sugar. I accept one and put it in my pocket for later, I wondered what would happen if it was dropped off a motorway bridge onto a car windscreen below.