The guy is “the chef”. He is clean, polite. His whites are always immaculate as his food. His kitchen is antiseptic as a hospital. He is a good person, he got strong believes. He likes to post a lot, even more than cooking. His favorite word is “sustainability”. He wants to preserve the environment, his food is inspired by nature. He is worried about a fish disappearing from the sea. He makes sure to state he took that fish off the menu long time ago. He is not guilty. He thinks customers will prefer eating his noble thoughts about the fish, instead of the fish itself. He sees the little elite of customers, who can afford to eat his food, as the whole world.

For the chef Nature is clean as his kitchen. It is a garden full of beautiful flowers, the flowers he uses to garnish his dishes, instead of taking them to his home, or even better to his wife.
Nature is beautiful and innocent and humans are ugly and bad. All his followers agree with that. He cares a lot about animal welfare, fishes line caught and plants grown organically. But he doesn’t like human beings. He follows the greatest achievement of our Time: making sure everyone agree that we “humans” are not good, so that we have a solid excuse to not get too close to each other. “We are destroying our planet” he loves to say “If we keep living like that there won’t be anymore fishes in the sea. In what kind of place will we grow our children? Shall we have children at all??”

The chef’s talking bores me to death. I feel the extreme lightness of his statements, a lightness that resembles the meaningless. The same feeling that I have for the whole new market of sustainable, organic and local mass of bullshit sold everywhere.

I see Nature as quite the opposite: an immensely powerful place, very able to defend itself. Nature is not a happy Disneyland garden. It is violence at its core, a magma on fire. It is ugly animals, fur, mud, dirt, bacteria, excrements, fires, waves. Animals are opportunists. They don’t give a shit about us or anything. Nature is not a nice place to be, that’s why humans got together and invented civilization and all civilizations were made greater by the better and deeper use they made of resources. From the invention of fire to nowadays technologies. A full sustainable word will probably mean stagnation, the end of civilization, a return to a scary middle age. It would mean for our chef no more I-phone, instagram pictures, combi oven and all that stuff he loves so much.

The ego of our chef is so big and arrogant, he really think he could destroy Nature. He is more arrogant than God. But he doesn’t know God because he lost contact with Him and with Nature long time ago. So he hasn’t realized that it is far more probable that they (God or Nature) will kill us. He has never look into the Sea to see that, or climb over a Mountain, or walk through a desert.

I think we live in this Garden of Eden and we take the apple because this is our nature and what makes us humans. Are we bad? Maybe. We are what we are, simply.

Sometimes I would love a chef, or anyone really, talking about humans instead of fishes. Talking about the intense struggle for surviving most of people face every day all over the world and which might be far more important than the welfare of our chickens.

I hope as everyone else that we will live in a better world and maybe it does get a tiny better everyday, or maybe I should say: a bit less horrible.

But food doesn’t only mean environment, it means first and most importantly love, sharing and culture, and culture is us. It is us eating around a Sunday’s barbeque, at the table of our wedding, or on a lonely bench of Subway, in a sleepy suburban highway.

I would love “the chef” talking sometimes about his culture, his memories, his identity. Asking: Is it the fish disappearing?

Or is us?