44 Questions to Ask While Bingeing

After Benji Hart

1. How many hands have touched this food?
2. What were their intentions?
3. How vast is the range?
4. What makes them hands at all?
5. How many seeds survived their birth for this?
6. Did you count yourself?
7. From sprout to pluck, how many breaths old was the oldest?
8. What’s become of its homeland?
9. How many breaths will it add to yours?
10. Or is this a thing that takes?
11. Which things were born dead for this?
12. Did you count yourself?
13. Which born free?
14. Which born food?
15. Is there a state in-between?
16. How old was the well of that answer?
17. If governments and their signed scrolls are Plato’s cave wall shadows, where is the real sun?
18. What’s become of its homeland?
19. How many generations removed from the land are you?
20. What floor takes its place?
21. What is it built on top of?
22. Are the people who tended that place still alive?
23. Are there any living descendants?
24. Is their language still spoken on earth?
25. If you heard it, would your feet twitch?
26. Or does dead mean gone?
27. How many gone things in your place?
28. Did you count yourself?
29. What does your body and the day it makes cost?
30. What is its price, in gone things?
31. Is this sustainable? Better—regenerative?
32. Or will this make you the most gone thing alive?
33. Is god or the human the cave wall shadow?
34. Who says the shadow is nothing at all?
35. Are you still eating?
36. Who?
37. What for?
38. What have you grown in its place?
39. How much is enough?
40. Is enough a place or a count?
41. Is there a state in-between?
42. Or does enough mean gone?
43. Did you enough yourself?
44. In the language of the oldest gone thing, how do you say devour?