Tomorrow, with the Three Kings' Day meal, in this country we say enough to the binge eating, the excesses, the gastronomic delirium and the unbuttoning of first buttons that characterize the Christmas party season. It is the lack of control, in fact, that gives meaning to the very word party: breaking the rules, even if it is for a defined and controlled time. The party is the necessary state of exception that the system allows to ensure its own survival, the window of air that allows its members to breathe so as not to be swallowed up by monotony—devour in excess so as not to be devoured! —, to be able to return to order later. This decompression is healthy not only so that the structure that supports our routines does not crumble, but for ourselves: the parenthesis within normality can be a time to reflect on whether the life that awaits us, once that routine is restored, beyond the party, it's the life we want.
These days of despiporre have not been missing from their annual event the news alerting the population about the dangers of eating shrimp heads in excess, this being the time when most of their annual consumption is concentrated. Neither do the guides with precise indications of acceptable portions and quantities of roscón or Polvorones per person, nor the methods to compensate for caloric overload with physical exercise, with the aim of not gaining weight. There have also been warnings about the excess of animal protein in every dish at Christmas, where sausages, meat and fish are abundant, and vegetables are scarce, which translates into an enormous environmental impact.
At the same time, columns and reports appear about the importance of eliminating guilt from Christmas meals, of not judging the neighbor's plate or body; and articles by reputable psychologists advising to avoid comments that refer to diets or compensatory behaviors after the holidays, due to the rise of eating disorders, and for the good of everyone's mental health.
Tonight the Three Wise Men come and hundreds of thousands of kilos of candy will rain down on the children of the entire country. As expected, there are also alerts here about what sugar consumption represents for individual, public, and planetary health: cavities, diabetes, and thousands of individual packages that, in the best of cases, end up in the trash, and that they are not only an environmental problem due to the resources that are consumed during the manufacture of those colored papers and plastics, but also due to the gases emitted by their combustion in landfills.
I have a proposal that could solve all these problems at once: tonight, let's eat the children.
Before jumping out of your chair and calling the authorities, stop for a moment and reflect. The measure would end the intake of sugar in the bud, not only by providing a food alternative to candy, but by making part of the main bulk of its mass of regular consumers disappear.
Furthermore, the introduction of this type of meat on the menu would displace a part of meat consumption that usually falls on other species, such as beef, pork or chicken, whose uncontrolled consumption has been shown to be harmful to the environment; and it would be logical to expect that it would also displace the consumption of shrimp, which are the queens of the holidays because we see little of them the rest of the year. If the ban on eating children is lifted only once a year, the festive factor of that gastronomic option wins by a landslide over seafood.
The good news doesn't end here: A recent study on the nutritional value of human meat It shows that, compared to other animals, humans do not have a particularly high calorie content. One dead mammoth can feed 25 hungry Neanderthals for a month, but eating one human only provides one-third of the daily calorie intake recommended by nutritionists. According to estimates by the scientific community, wild boars and beavers, for example, contain approximately 4,000 calories per kilo of meat, compared to a measly 1,400 calories per kilo for a modern human.
It is assumed, furthermore, that a portion of the offspring eaten every Twelfth Night would eliminate from the base a few of the adults who have the habit of criticizing other people's dishes and bodies. Let us keep in mind that those adults, at some point in the past, were children. As a final culmination of my argument, I add that children, as a general rule, come without plastic packaging.
A couple of days ago I finished reading What if we rethink cannibalism?, published by Libros del Zorro Rojo, where its author, Albert Pijuan, outlines a feasible idea and a viable commercial plan to restore harmony on the planet. It is inspired by the indignant attack that Jonathan Swift published in 1729, coinciding with the first day of the school calendar, under the title of A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of the Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to Their Public. The text is a plea against the poverty of the Irish under the yoke of the English government. Theirs was a proposal to make the children of the poor useful to the country, selling them as food to the rich. Today it is a reference in the world of satirical texts.
Have a fabulous Three Kings Night. Let them bring you lots of gifts. Gorge yourself on all the roscón you want or consider. Let's have the party in peace and remember that, ultimately, it is also a matter of health to let the party be a party.
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