Friday, January 21, 2022

They’re in India in the book I’m reading, the color and chaos. I distracted myself thinking about Indian food, a forkful of rice and curry. How many grains sit uneasily upon the tines? Eighty? A hundred? How many grains are produced for human consumption each year? No, how many have ever been produced, to date in the history of agriculture? To be devoured by rich and poor alike across the globe. It’s in the trillions, right? Hundreds of trillions? Or is that number woefully, naively low? Is it some other order of magnitude? I imagined being punished if I got the answer wrong. All mankind punished because of me.