THAT IS NOT FOR EATING!

We all eat. We have to, or we’ll die. Some of us eat to live, others of us live to eat, and we all have preferences--even people who self-identify as human garbage disposals. Food brings sentient beings together. A pride of lions will share a wildebeest. Insects will devour the corpse of a dead raven. Koalas congregate in eucalyptus groves.

A bucket full of piranha fish will happily eat your face off if you’re reckless enough to put it in there in the first place.

The act of cooking our food is what separates humans from animals. Somewhere along the line we added fire, and that one little change made us smug. “Look what we can do! We can make the mastodon steak kind of chewy and burnt, and now it’s better.” But fire wasn’t the end of the road by a long shot. Oh no. Then we started messing around with food combinations. Weeds became herbs. We developed a taste for spices. The spice thing was such an incredible discovery that a great deal of trade (not to mention colonization, war, and subjugation of others) was based upon the availability of certain parts of certain plants in certain places for an extended period of recorded human history.

Humans have an ingrained lust for one-upmanship. We can’t help it. We want something better than what our friend has. It’s the ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ mentality. It started with something as simple as, say, black pepper--of course, at one time, black pepper was anything but simple in some parts of the world. Native to India and only successfully grown in tropical climes, black pepper was a sought-after import elsewhere, and being in possession of it in any quantity was a social boon.

***I’m going to sidetrack here for a second and impart to you a delicious little tidbit about raspberries. At one time in England, raspberries were a status symbol because they were expensive to grow and harvest, and raspberry jam was the height of fashion. People who couldn’t afford actual raspberry jam would make jam with whatever red fruit they had on hand, and then they would add little wooden pips made by craftsmen who specialized in making, well, little wooden pips, to simulate the raspberry seeds, thus creating the illusion of the more expensive jam without the cost. (The cost to people’s insides after eating a pile of little wooden pips, however, was something else entirely.)***

ANYway, what I’m getting at is that we use food for many things, one of which is to survive, and one of which is to thumb our noses at our neighbors when we have more or a higher quality of it. ‘More’ is simple. It’s quantity. Quality, on the other hand, is subjective, though that subjectivity is usually filtered through the lens of whosoever sits at the ‘First World-est’ societal peak rather than some sort of average inclusive-of-all-humanity subjectivity.

Money makes the world go around, after all.

Trends in food have always rivaled trends in fashion--you can style your look, why not your lunch? Cake was a big one for a while, and I suppose it still is, really. My YouTube homepage is always full of videos of ‘desserts that look like other things but are actually desserts OMG’. I’m not going to claim there can’t be a great deal of artistry to food, because there absolutely can, and it can be loads of fun to watch it being made. I have nothing against food creativity. The thing that IS really winding me up right now, though?

GOLD LEAF ON FOOD.

Gold. The ultimate status symbol. It makes the timid brave and the covetous foam at the mouth. It adorns all that is beautiful, be it a person, an item, or a building. Or, you know, a toilet, but that was satire...and recently stolen, as a matter of fact.

True story: in my childhood bedroom, my mother stenciled carousel horses between wood trim right the way around the room. The posts upon which the horses were mounted she did in gold leaf. It was a delightful effect.

Not once did I try to eat it.

So why in the name of all things holy are fancypants restaurants and pâtisseries throwing gold leaf on food?! Gold leaf is not for eating!

Seriously. That can’t be good for your insides.* Or your teeth, for that matter! Think about what chewing tinfoil feels like, then add about seven dollar signs to the price tag--both of the thing you’re chewing, and to the resulting dental bill.

I mean, the whole activated charcoal in your Starbucks thing was bad enough, but at least that was based on science. Science that works really well in my fish tank but not so much in a human body--eating or drinking activated charcoal is, on the whole, a terrible idea if you like your insides--but still, I’d rather see people making themselves sick over pseudoscience than purposefully eating the stuff that gilds the dome in the Vatican.

Then again, like the bucket of piranha fish, if you’re willing to do it, on your own head it be.



*My editor assures me: "Actually, gold leaf is chemically inert, so as long as it's pure enough, it will pass right through your system. And it's thin enough that you'd have to be chomping on it night and day before it would affect your teeth. The only effect of eating gold leaf will be to make your poop worth more. :P"
I STILL DON'T CARE. GOLD LEAF IS NOT FOR EATING. KNOCK THAT SHIT OFF.