Friday, June 5, 2009

Around lunch time

Around lunch time, I arrived at another tiny town without a restaurant, or bread, or bananas or anything for sale that a hungry traveller could eat except dry biscuits and Coca-cola.

They're not unpleasant, Maria biscuits, but it takes determination to eat a packet of fifty. Chew, chew, chew. Flood your mouth with coke. Swallow.

And sitting there by the dusty roadside, I thought about the distance this meal, this modern matzos and wine, had travelled. From the bursting metropolis in South Africa with it vast factories manufacturing biscuits by the millions and the thousand workers with huge spoons stirring the fizzing chemical vats where they make Coca-cola. From there, to here, to me, methodically chewing and swallowing.

And I realized that I this was the future, that every meal will be like this, some day, when we live in outer space.