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The three of us were sitting on a rooftop, each with our own lunch. The contents of mine and Cian's had both been decided by our mothers based on a range of choices provided them by a lifestyle pattern designer to ensure a perfect balance of nutritional control and modest tastes—so as not to overexcite our youthful minds with shameful flavors.
All our mothers had to do was make the food.
The flavors we needed were determined by a specially trained lifestyle pattern designer who could read our bodies' preferences and predilections. The designer then ordered all the necessary ingredients online, coordinating with our household management software to make sure our diets stayed within budget.
The various facets of our lives were being divided into smaller and smaller sections. Outsourcing, outsourcing, outsourcing. When I was very small, I had the feeling that things weren't quite so scattered. I was pretty sure I remembered my mom fretting about my age and height and weight and body fat percentage when I was around five years old. She would read charts, size me up, and come up with her own lunch recipes.
Miach's lunch was nothing like ours. The recipes were incredibly simple, and more than two-thirds of her rather large lunch box would be filled with white rice and a big reddish-black lump in the middle of it that I think was probably an umeboshi pickled plum.
"Naoya Shiga used to say that the Japanese lost the war because they ate white rice," Miach said, her cheeks full of white rice laced with sesame salt. A single grain of rice was stuck to her cheek.
"What war?"
"The Second World War. It was a fight between the two nations of America and Japan."
"But didn't both of them get divided up by the admedistrations?"
"Right, but this was back when America was still a country. Before the Maelstrom."
"Um, Miach, that's great, but you have rice on your face," Cian broke in, giggling.
"Oh." Miach found it with her index finger and plucked it off.
"Why do you eat so much all the time, Miach?"
"Because I like to eat. And if I don't eat this much, my head doesn't work right."
I looked between my lunch and Miach's. "You don't have many things besides rice in there. It's mostly all rice. And your lunch box is huge too."
"Yet I'm skinny. Funny, isn't it? The brown adipose tissue on my back did a number on my metabolism. I burn everything and none of the food gets to my brain. That's why I have to shove so much of it in. If there was a speed-eating contest, I bet I'd win it."
"What's that?"
"These contests where people would try to see who could eat the most the fastest. The media channels used to show things like that, before the Maelstrom. It's all shockingly unhealthy. The kind of thing those people in morality sessions love to bad-mouth."
It sounded pretty horrible. I didn't see how there could be any pleasure in damaging your stomach and intestines by eating so much. I sat down on the rooftop, looking down on city streets devoid of any shapes or colors that might prove too stimulating. "So, what do you tell your mom or dad what you want to eat for lunch?"
YOU ARE READING
Harmony
Science FictionIn a perfect world, there is no escape In the future, Utopia has finally been achieved thanks to medical nanotechnology and a powerful ethic of social welfare and mutual consideration. This perfect world isn't that perfect though, and three young g...
