Karma

I was eleven, maybe twelve, and fasting with my father in high summer. I was sitting on a floor cushion in front of the TV in mid afternoon, watching with the kind of attention children often do. The summer holiday left long, time expanding in relation to my grumbling stomach when a charity ad flashed on the screen. Please, give to the children. They have no food. Their water is drying out. They have none left for their crops. And I watched. A dusty horizon, close shots of watering eyes, bloated bellies with twig limbs, a fly crawling across a face. I looked at it differently than I had ever looked at anything before. For the first time their suffering was not foreign to me. I was hungry too. And I counted on my hands how many hours I'd fasted and counted how many hours three weeks occupied. A fraction of their time I'd spend hungry. I was far, far from starving. The growling stomach, the dry mouth, the pain I couldn't quite place — a drop in the ocean of not knowing not even where, but when your next meal is coming. Waiting. A game of patience caught between relief and death.

That was the first time I understood what starving meant. Not the word. The thing the word was pointing at.

I believe in reincarnation in certain circumstances. Not as a wheel everyone is on, but as a kindness — when a soul comes here to learn a particular lesson and doesn't, the divine offers more than a second chance. The lessons aren't subject to time or culture because I believe there are a few things that stay true across lifetimes. Some things are universal. And gratitude is one of them.

When was the last time you went a full day without eating, without choosing to? You'll remember the pain is unlike any other. The body screams in a tone the mind can't override, and for some people that scream goes on for weeks, or months. For some, years. Some count themselves lucky for half a bowl of rice. And here, in France, a third of the bread baked each day ends up in the bin. We live in such excess that even fast food has become the food of the poor. Food has become ultra commodified. Though not cheap.

The food critic goes further still. Eating in places of opulent luxury, the finest ingredients passed through hands that make edible art — and they still complain. The ultimate shame is to send it back. But the shame is never on the chef — it is on the critic.

This is a world the starving cannot dream of, because it is too absurd to dream. A specific blindness, a specific aveugleness that only a nation of plenty could conjure. It is not the real world. It is squarely the worst of what art critical can be. Waste.

Which brings me to the catfish.

Catfish have over a hundred thousand taste buds, distributed across the whole length of their bodies. We have a few hundred, gathered on the tongue, and from those we built a five-family taxonomy of flavour and a whole literature around it — an internal library of what's what. Imagine what could be built from a hundred thousand. Now imagine spending them on algae and slime. At the bed of a river.

I think the wasteful food critic — and worse, the food critic who has known hunger and become wasteful anyway — is destined to come back as a catfish. Every gift they had, multiplied. Nothing left worth being precious about. The lesson the critic was here to learn is gratitude.

I still wish the food critic plenty to eat in their next life. Just, if you're reading this, don't be surprised if you find yourself slurping slime.

Please enjoy.

A critic who flayed with his pen,

Was reborn as a catfish, and then —

With each scale a new tongue,

From his gills to his bung —

Still rates every turd out of ten.