Share a pipe in the House of Strange Thoughts!
Background Food
A Modest Business Proposal (March 17th, 2009)
"The whole rise of new adult contemporary music and smooth jazz was a nice surprise."
Kenny G
All great ideas come as a surprise, beyond our comprehension until a visionary brings forth a new possibility. In this case, inspiration came at breakfast. My friend and I were on a crowded patio full of friends and couples chatting, laughing, catching up on gossip. No one paid attention to the musak piping from little speakers mounted on poles. No one paid much attention to the food, either, though it was pretty good.
Eureka! Background music is a big industry. Surely a vast fortune awaits the pioneers who develop background food.
Some of you may object that background food already exists, and cite such products as Miracle Whip and Velveeta. Admittedly, these food stuffs share a certain vapidity that recommends them to our purpose. But when you consider the perfect vacancy of "smooth jazz," you realize that these fine products fall short. If we are to offer true background food to serve in conjunction with background music, the food can't have empty calories -- it must be empty
of
calories, as well as flavor. We must develop emulsions that sooth our mouths and demand nothing of our digestion. A good model might be the edible paste we used in grade school. What we seek here is a Platonic ideal: the form of food without the weighty, distracting substance.
I propose a chain of Smooth Cafes where diners can enjoy each others' company, calmed by airy simulations of music and food. These cafes will probably do best in the suburbs of heartland America, where the Smooth aesthetic is most refined. Customers will buy more and more, never get full, and never gain an ounce. Weight loss is only one of the many benefits our customers will enjoy.
After the Smooth Cafes are well established, we'll expand our market to corporate towers and business parks across the country, serving the needs of a devoted workforce while reducing unproductive break time. We will dispense our product from compact vending machines as workers glide upward toward their cubicles.
That's right ... elevator food!
Klatch of other Strange Thoughts:
2009-08-25 -- The Numinous Shore of Partial Understanding: A Scenic Ride with the Base of Natural Logarithms
2009-02-07 -- A Defense of Massive Conspiracy Theories: ...from one of the few who doubts them all.
2008-07-17 -- Immortality, Part Two: Prisms, Zombies, and Occam's Razor
2008-06-07 -- Immortality, Part One: Identity, Continuity, and the Star Trek Transporter
2008-05-14 -- Tripping out of Trees
2008-05-08 -- Color Octaves: Sight, Sound, and Elegant Recurrence