An ex-student of mine posted the following picture, with the caption 'Life is easy':

I wanted to point out the privilege in an obtusely pedantic fashion but I figured I'd save it for here instead. # Life is indeed easy, for you... The work hours that went into that simple bowl of simple is phenomenal. Pretty mindblowing, to me. Think about it.

The Fork

Forks were first used around 400AD as far as we know, and it was far longer until it joined the knife and spoon as an eating utensil. In the case of an ancient Venetian princess who made use of such a tool, it was said with disdain:

[S]uch was the luxury of her habits … [that] she deigned not to touch her food with her fingers, but would command her eunuchs to cut it up into small pieces, which she would impale on a certain golden instrument with two prongs and thus carry to her mouth.

St. Peter Damlan was offended by her snobbery and was nothing short of glad when she died of the plague - clearly a punishment from God for using such a vain item. The pronged nature of the fork gave it a pretty bad rep and was highly condemned in general.

In the middle ages, it was seen, of course, as the devil's pitchfork and so most people tended to eat from a scoop-shaped piece of stale bread. The fork was not only condemned but mocked.

in 1605, Carolin Young told of an old allegory about an island of hermaphrodites who ate with forks. Their personalities generally mocked, they struggled with the utensil and managed to spill more food than they could eat.

Sexism was soon to follow with a culture insisting that forks were too girly, with sailors in the early 1900's still refusing to use them.

On the whole, those who used forks were the wealthy and elite, with the poor sticking to scoop-shaped things and their own fingers. So yeah, life is easy now for you, elite fork users. Just be sure to check your privilege.

Domestication

Think how much work actually goes into making that fork, the bowl, the food itself. Thousands of years of genetic modification and domestication of pigs to make that bacon (I'm assuming that's what it is).

Pigs were domesticated as long as 9,000 years ago from pretty fearsome wild boar, and it was hardly an easy process. Many generations went into making these animals tamer, juicier, weightier, and they often interbred with their still-wild counterparts, making it an even more frustrating and grueling process.

Pigs now, of course, are much more tasty, and far more enslaved:

Public Domain

With about 121 million pigs eaten per year in the US, and over 400 million in China, the death toll for that little sliver of bacon is quite pricey, but it doesn't even end there.

The process from a baby pig to a slab on your plate is monumental. You can read in detail the entire process here, but in short:

• Artificially inseminate a pig
• Drown them in antibiotics so disease in their disease-ridden living quarters is held at bay
• When grown about 5 years, slaughterhouse
• Process the gargantuan amount of feces (2-5x more than a human, per pig)

That last point is a real and ongoing issue, from contaminated drinking water and health issues to properly values plummeting from the bad smells.

Here in Shanghai, somewhat famously, there was The Great Die-off of pigs down the Huangpu River, where 16,000 rotting pigs were found floating downstream from some unknown distant farms who presumably dumped them for unknown, ominous reasons - possibly death-by-porcine circovirus..

This is a river where about 1/5th of people get their drinking water from. Source Source

Now, China is battling a major swine flu outbreak, causing mass losses in pig population and an 8% rise in pork prices as well as devastating financial loss for the farmers themselves, as the whole herd typically has to be slaughtered and dumped, as well as the whole population of pigs in the 3km surrounding area of any infected population. Every single region and province in China is now affected by this.

Life is... ahem

And I didn't even touch upon the manufacturing processes of stainless steel, agriculture of vegetables, transportation and its carbon footprint, and so on.

Yeah, life is easy, as long as you don't stare at your dinner plates too long.

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Pig Domestication | Pork manufacturing process | The Shanghai Great Die-off | Swine flu outbreak

Latter two images source seemingly from Chinese State-run Media, so I'm calling fair-use on this one.