Hospital Food

Wow, I had such a crazy dream last night. It was like a combination of Fight Club and Shaun of the Dead. People around me were getting into this fad called the "Zombie Diet." It involved finding discarded parts of humans from hospitals and eating them. I thought it was disgusting, but everyone said it was super healthy and would be the way all people ate in the future.

The whole thing really bothered me, so I tried to just ignore it as yet another aspect of my own culture that I would never understand but that hopefully would go away soon or at least leave my little subculture of one alone. But more and more people started getting involved in "ZD" and trying to convince me it was a good idea.

Eventually I ended up in some creepy old forgotten hospital basement with a bunch of zombified looking "dieters." Their eyes were all sunken in, and they had a crazed look to them. I guess human flesh was addictive, because they were all anticipating their next fix. It was like a dark, mouldy parking garage/morgue full of Smigels from Lord of the Rings. On the concrete floor, there was a detached arm around which they were all gathered.

One person in the middle was announcing to everyone else that he'd realized it could be dangerous to eat raw human flesh that was possibly diseased and anyway had been sitting around unrefrigerated for some time. This relatively ingenious hypothesis for some reason provoked mixed reactions. Some of the Gollums seemed to feel that the danger of ingesting who knows what manner of horrible bacteria was what made this diet exciting enough to stick with, as opposed to, say, the Canada Food Guide's conservative recommendations (yawn).

While folks were grumbling and debating, the guy pulled out an electric fork he had invented. He said it would cook the "meat" they were all hungering for, one bite at a time, thereby rendering their nutritional proclivities safer, if hardly any less nightmarish. He demonstrated by skewering a loose piece of the bare male arm on the floor. Holding up the fork — which looked a lot like the carving fork my dad always used on the Christmas turkey — he pressed a button, whereupon the flesh began to sizzle and brown quite quickly.

I thought it was a pretty good invention, if one could temporarily forget the despicability of its purpose. But someone else in the crowd was too impatient for such refinement. One of the more sunken-eyed ZD'ers lunged forward and grabbed the hunk of half-cooked elbow off the fork, stuffing it greedily into his mouth. That display was too much for the rest of the hungry crowd, who roared forward en masse to start ripping whatever they could get off of the rest of the arm with their teeth, like a pack of hyenas around a rotting zebra.

And then I woke up to this Satie piece coming from my alarm clock. Put me in a very weird mood for the rest of the morning.