We need to eat in order to live, to stay alive. Food provides us with the bio-chemicals we call nutrition to fuel our mechanism, keep us going.

But food has a life of its own, a shelf life. It doesn’t last forever. Meat, fruit, vegetables, when they sit around too long, change color, sag, we poke the mass mash and say, “It’s had it.” It’s dead food.

The government, in its infinite wisdom (note the tone of irony here, which, though I support the idea of [good] government, realize, especially recently, the cynical mismatch of “government” and “wisdom”) has passed laws to protect the health of the body politic, and requires consumables to announce their “expiration date.”

That’s the date at which they expire. To expire is to die. They become dead food. The warning is that if we consume them after that date, we run the risk of contagion and they will share their death with us. We will join them in death and die.

The government, pretending to be all-knowing, realizes this, but also knows (cynicism again) that we, humans, apparently like to gamble, take risks. We look at the expiration date, at which point the “food” is offered at a lower price, we take a chance, run the risk, “One day late, it’s probably still good, and dates are arbitrary.”

After a week, all bets are off, and the (former) food is thrown into the trash, written off as a business loss. It is collected, trucked to the trash heap of recyclables, where it decays and decomposes in an effort to save the environment and forestall global warming which will kill us all.

We juggle platitudes. “Everything dies.” “We begin dying before we’re born.” “Everything new is old again.” “He has a hungry look.” “Food for the soul;” when the soul is sick, they die together.

And the government doesn’t care. All those right-thinking human-feeling people, over-ridden by a minority in power, for example, when the latest pandemic killed a million Americans because the government refused to act, that government is guilty of murder, mass murder.

That government has killed the humanity in human beings, feeds upon the carcasses of the poor, cannot understand or accept their own death, that gold will not save them.

We pay the government to do its job. It doesn’t do the job, but keeps the money.

We live on borrowed time.

Meanwhile, I go to the market to buy living food, read the labels, check the date.