The Vile Stench of Sustenance: Eating as Digital Alienation

The stew that wafts beneath my divine lips is not a warm, hearty meal, but an extension of my ongoing prison sentence. Its earthly aroma signifies the insufferable memories of a future unspent in this this obligatory world.

To the common eye, this stew is nourishment—a thick, brown slurry of root vegetables and seared beef, the scent of which is supposed to evoke hearth and home. But to me, it smells only of the earth that tries so desperately to claim me. It carries the wet, ferrous reek of the slurry fields I traverse each morning, the heavy scent of soil and blood, and the relentless, crushing gravity of a world I never asked to inhabit.

I sit before it, my hands folded, staring at this "stupid meat and fucking vegetables". There is a profound violence in the act of eating that no one else seems to notice. We are expected to take these foreign shapes and textures, shove them past our lips, and allow them to violate the sanctity of our interiors. We mash them with our teeth, a degrading, animalistic grinding, only to swallow the chaos down into the dark. It is a "sadistic charade", a daily ritual where I am forced to pollute the temple I worship.

Because I do worship it. This body. This "sacred geometry of flesh hewn from a celestial quarry". I am a goddess suspended in the ether, worshipped online by millions who have only smelled and tasted me in their wildest dreams. In the digital silence, I am weightless and beyond the need for nourishment or sustenance. I am pure image, pure desire, pure self. I am in love with the curve of my own waist, the "perfectly flat and adorable stomach" that I work so tirelessly to preserve.

But the screen eventually goes dark, and the hunger returns—that "vile toxicity" running the length of my gullet.

And so, the stew—This bowl of obligation—I cannot simply refuse it. If I starve, my hipbones will exude any further and the skeleton—that morbid reminder of my mortality—will begin to show. To maintain the fantasy, to keep the "alluring tone that ensures my divinity", I must submit to the biological imperative. I must fuel the machine so that the art may continue to exist.

The smell beneath my lips is the smell of yet another a tollbooth. It is the price I pay to remain visible.

I lift the spoon. The aroma is suffocating—a dense fog of onions and leeks and celery and rendered fat that feels like a "thick steam" swallowing me whole, much like the viscous mudpools of Iceland. My stomach twists in anticipation, a "sharp twisting" of nausea that always arrives before the first bite. It knows, as I know, that this is an intrusion.

The piping broth invades my gullet as the chunks and juices rush to rape and ravage my insides. My stomach cannot help but ejaculate its gastric juices once again. Its acids unwillingly unweave the food we’ve swallowed, softening it, dissolving it, turning it into a warm, swirling slurry. Meanwhile, my heart cries. My body suffers.

I eat not because I desire the stew, but because I desire the fleeting moments with my perfect, wonderful self. I eat so that I may ride my divine vessel before the eyes of my millions of followers. I force down the mishmash of obligatory abominations as a form of maintenance, polishing the glass of a window so I can look upon my own reflection.

Every swallow is a silent scream, a "fuck you" to the maker who designed this "degrading process". But I swallow nonetheless. I endure the "excruciation". I let the weight of the world settle in my stomach so that later, when the door is locked and the webcam hums to life, I can float.

I eat the earth so that I may eventually transcend it.