Fragments

...but what was really odd were the crisps -- what the transatlantic crowd call potato chips-- of whcih there are as many varieties and flavors as there are of jelly beans e.g. prawn cocktail, roast chicken, spicy chilli, guacamole, cheese and onion, pickled onion, lamb and mint. At the moment, I am eating a Christmas Turkey and Bacon crisp, that smell and taste redolent of new-opened presents, pine needles, and familial disputes masquerading as holiday banter, were not so much like turkey as like someone´s idea of turkey, as if the real animal flesh had become, by inverse transubstantiation, a vegetable idea, Turkey made Potato, processed for our inward digestion, a metaphysical reversal that would blow Aquinas´socks off. Such is the power of the modern food industry -- able to undo even the mystery of the Eucharist.