Eating And Such

Food can almost always be turned into a topic of conversation.  It might be any angle, from world hunger in general to feeding people in need right around the corner.  It can be the quality of food, its costs at the supermarket, or problems of farmers.  It can be proclamations of one’s favorite foods, some recipes on a box, questions about where is a good restaurant or appliances for preparing a certain type of meal.  It can be strange eating habits or strange things eaten in far distant lands.  It can be new things to try.  Regardless, it’s about stuffing a thing or two in the mouth. 

No matter which angle or aspect is brought up, however, there needs to be a little knowledge in the picture.  There’s a common lament one sometimes runs into about city children not knowing that milk comes cows, and similar things.  One fact about food is, there are plenty of adults that aren’t particularly in the know about food stuffs, either, although they like to talk as if they know a few things.  Especially among the elderly (and elderly care) there’s chat about no salt this and low sodium that, or whatever item the dieting has prescribed for some individual. 

So, food is a big deal and time-consuming even just in the eating of things all set to eat, never mind growing the wheat for bread or even picking the apples for a pie.  A recent discussion lambasted fast food restaurants as being a poor way to get nourishment.  It may not be the best possible, but few people can indulge in the best possible all of the time.  At least the fast food has a value to some degree and is readily available usually at a reasonable cost.  If such didn’t fill a need, it wouldn’t exist.  It’s easy to criticize something just on the basis of talk or maybe political expediency. 

There are good hamburgers. 

Unfinished Business

A lot of things are started in this world and never finished.  Most often they are not out in the open for others to see.  If there are people around, like on a job, something left undone will be finished by someone else if the one who started it does leave it undone for some reason or the other, assuming it’s needed in the first place.  It may not be finished off in the way first imagined; but, if needed, it will be done somehow.  “Hidden” things left undone are usually more personal things, like hobby craft materials bought and projects started; then, for reasons that may even have little basis, they get set aside. 

One of the saddest “unfinished” ideas is “unfinished education”; but, no one is much into defining what is a finished education, as if there is some point where the world can look at someone and say, “There.  You’re educated.”  Learning is the activity of a lifetime, certainly in the informal sense and maybe legitimately in the formal sense.  Supposedly one reason there’s not been an avowed push for schools to operate year ‘round is that teachers need to update what they know or are supposed to know.  Summer break is for teachers to learn what is new in their fields if not more so. 

The “unfinished” could often be finished later and one thing that causes it to be left unfinished is that the person has somehow grown beyond that point.  Other reasons might be that a mistake was made in the thing and in order to finish it, part of it has to be undone and redone, and the perceived need or interest that initiated the thing is gone.  Sometimes it turns out to be more time-consuming than originally anticipated.  Regardless, what’s at hand is likely a lost cause not to be thrown away but to sit around like excess baggage and to be recalled, if the moment is clear, with a shade of disgust. 

What might have been doesn’t count.