A Gormandist Manifesto

Consumerism, as we know—though it produces heaps upon heaps of twisted metal, battery acid, banana peels, bones, and fecal matter—only gets its eager mandibles on the paltry goodies that it deems attractive. We proudly confess our affinity for rusty old novelty items with their orange and blue motifs and misspelled slogans for defunct enterprises, but we dirty our hands at the junk shop only with that same delicious orange powder that sticks to our fingers after a bag of Cheetos and a Bartles & James Blue Hawaiian. And we all know that despite the delightful melange of happy colors and rays of sunshine that beam forth from the supermarket aisles, there really ain’t much to choose from.

I therefore inaugurate with this statement New Gormandism. Our ninety percent submerged iceberg brains can handle only so much culinary aptitude in that measly bit of floating grey matter, thus we finish our peas in anticipation of the pudding. The peas are often soggy, bland and kind of mushy but they’re not that bad. The pudding is good—sweet and creamy around our tongues like underwater embryonic memories. New Gormandism proposes that we supress the feeble and ill-founded preferences of our fungiform papillae and in the spirit of Gargamelle, who, when great with Gargantua, ate immense quantities of godebillios—the fat tripes of fat oxen—take into our gullets everything that our gullets will take.

As Gormandists we are the new foragers, yet this time we forget our contest with those sluggish Cro-Magnons; indeed we play hacky-sack with them and other non-competitive sports, invite them to tea. We shall raise our glasses of milk thistle extract and Murray’s Pomade in a toast to consumption: “here’s to the body: full o’ shit with nuthin’ to do about it!” We eat indiscriminately and thus begin to walk a little bit closer to the ground. We fill ourselves with coal dust and flower petals just to see what happens and then forget about it. We stand among the old, glass Coke bottles and perfume flasks, our purpose simply to contain, waiting to be picked up by the oblivious junk collector hungry for Cheetos only to float from his fingers like a bunch of inflated pig stomachs at hog-killing time. What we put in our mouths will never suit us, nor should it, for we are mere vessels, our aim to make true among the urban waste factories spitting out all the good stuff that everything has its place.

Our bodies will merge with gasoline rainbows and discarded Christmas trees because we are what we eat. Should Gormandists remain faithful to the tenets of their practice, they will achieve unlimited transubstantiative powers. They shall remember the time when they gazed at a bag of Cheetos, longing for both the awesome speed of that biotope feline and Chester’s dandy indifference, now wielding all of those powers and more. We shall all become Chesters and vacuum-sealed bags that crinkle like the thunder that crashes over the Serengeti.