Food and Geometry

A scene in the most recent remake of the movie: The Day the Earth Stood Still stands out in my mind. Keanu Reeves plays Klathu, who is charged with destroying life on the planet, because us humans are destroying it. So, to keep us from destroying earth, Klathu will deploy that famous robot to destroy earth so we don't. This is not making sense.

After Klathu emerges from his ship and some panicky soldier shoots him, resulting in a trip to the hospital, where he recovers despite whatever a doctor does to him, Klathu easily escapes the hospital and finds himself in the Newark, NJ train station. The last time I was in the Newark train station, I also felt a fleeting urge to destroy the earth, just so that station would disappear. However, I didn't have the resources Klathu had, so, the earth survived the day I was in Newark Penn Station. Klathu is hungry, so he zaps a vending machine and coaxes a tuna salad on Wonder Bread sandwich out of it. Kathu opens the cellophane wrapper and pulls out a perfect right triangle of tuna salad sandwich. Wonder Bread is almost a perfect square, and, when you cut it on the diagonal, you get two triangles of sandwich.

Let me describe that triangle of tuna salad sandwich: to you geometry geeks, it's a right triangle, meaning that one of the angles is a right- or 90-degree angle. The other two angles are very sharp and pointy. Keanu (Klathu) put the sharp angle in his mouth, bit it off, and started chewing.

"Man!" I said to myself, "That looks good! I feel like I should find a vending machine in Newark Penn Station that has diagonally-cut, tuna salad on Wonder Bread and take a bite out of it, just like Keanu." Then the sensible voice in my head began to rain on my parade, you know the one, it's annoying and you don't listen to it anyway, said: "Hey, you don't like tuna salad and you wouldn't go near Wonder Bread. So, what's the deal?"

Then it occurred to me: so much of the food we buy, especially the manufactured food, comes in perfect geometric shapes. Cookies are perfectly round or oval, candy bars are some variation of a perfect geometric shape. Even potato chips can come in perfect shapes. I don't know what it is, but, there is something very inviting about eating perfect geometric shapes. I know everytime I see a perfectly-formed Chips Ahoy, a Snickers bar as a perfect rectagular solid, or those Milano Cookies as perfect ovally things, I want one. I want to bite into it. I want to look at that first bite into my perfect snack and, as I'm chewing, I will stare feeling pretty happy with myself that I made my mark, I've staked my claim. Nobody will touch any morsel with my bite mark in it.

What is it about food in perfect geometric shapes that attracts us? Why do we have an almost uncontrollable urge to destroy that symmetry with our teeth? Pringles Potato Chips don't taste very good. They taste like chemicals to me, which is the only way you can drug a potato enough to conform those three-dimensional parabolic shapes. It's possible the only reason anybody eats those chips is because you get to trash something perfect with your teeth.

I think there is something primordial about these urges. They come from our distant past. Consider a dog, which, some believe, occupy a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder than humans. Give them anything with a perfect shape and all they can do is rip it to shreds. Come to think of it, dogs seems to want to trash any shape they can get their teeth around, until they all look the same, all chewed up, soggy, no-shape blob sitting in the backyard someplace.

Do an experiment. Go to the convenience store and buy a few items having perfect geometric shapes. Sit at the dining-room table and open each one of them. Wait 10 minutes. If there is any food left on the table, congrats! You are an evolved person. If there is no food left on the table, immediately evacuate your home and tell Bowser to make room for you in the dog house.