Man's fruit of labor

Prompt: Write a scene or story that includes a meal or snack made from a banned food substance. Why is the food banned?

Source

It's weird, does it always taste this way?

...it depends. On how the day has been...like... you know. Some days it's sweeter, salty, bitter, spicy, you know how it is.

At least the texture's good, I know there's some really gross food from abroad, and like sure they like it and who am I to judge but the texture's really messed up, some of them are so slimy, doesn't feel appetizing at all, I find it hard to understand how people can eat that.

Yeah, it can be like that too, sometimes, slimy, smelly, like the fruit they eat in Southeast Asian, durian fruit it's called I think. Restaurants and hotels will ban pets and durian fruit because to some people it smells like literal death. And the texture's slimy as well.

Eggplants, and okra, ohh, fried I don't mind, but otherwise they're so goddamn slimy, like they're trying to escape from your mouth, I don't like at all.

Yeah, these are slimy too, depending on how mature they are. The ones we're eating right now you can see they're more mature so the taste is a bit...regular...and the texture has some push. The rawer ones can get smelly and slimy but some people enjoy the experience of...eating that, hahaha, so this is one thing there's something for everybody.

You don't find... all of this weird?

At first I did. But it's just the novelty of it, you get used to it and these things are normalized. Imagine how wild it must have felt, or feel I guess to cultures that don't eat meat. You literally take another living being, breathing running seeing feeling, cut it, drain it of all the blood feelings and emotions and kill it for good, and you consume its carcass. Like wild animals. When you think of it that way we're no different from animals. But people got used to it and it wasn't a big deal. Except now people are moving away from that because...you know what, it is quite animalistic and we as human beings are better than that, which is why we're...here. This is the fruit of man's hard work, the culmination of all these years of technology, agriculture and food science. Who'd have thought we'd be consuming exotic things as these even a decade ago?

Does the ethics of these things bother you?

Meat? Yeah, why not just go bite the tiger and take a bite out of its ears, or suck milk off of the cow's teats while we're at it. It's messed up. These things, not so much.

Never? I mean, we're consuming... you know...

It's a renewable resource, alright, and nobody's being hurt. And think about the implications of what we're doing. Even two decades away, it was unclear if we could physically instantiate these things. And here we are.

But what about the...you know...donors.

Do you feel bad about going to the coffee shop? How about getting an Amazon delivery? It's just like that. Adult people -- or sometimes barely adult folks -- know what they're getting into, and being rewarded financially for the act, and often enjoy the feelings they get from it, what's wrong with it.

I dunno man. Eating literal emotions of other people is weird to me. Like I'm so glad I'm not eating horniness, yuccck.