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If you eat a book or a newspaper, will it improve your vocabulary
and make you intelligent? Many people don’t think so. But you
should not close the door to that possibility. When it’s a matter
of life or death, you don’t really care that people think you are
an idiot. And if only you can eat your own words, you would gladly
do it.
Newspaper reading is like cigarette smoking,
which is habit forming. Many people, who have developed the habit,
swear it is almost an unbreakable vice. Some people, as part of
their morning habits, read their preferred newspaper as they enjoy
the aroma and taste of their favorite coffee. Other people read
their newspaper in the evening to go with their wine and favorite
music. Maybe it’s time they practice eating their newspaper. It
doesn’t matter that they do it in the morning or evening.
Apparently, there are people who would digest a
newspaper better by eating it rather than reading it. If they could,
these people would cram their stomachs with pages of salacious
gossips. Smacking their lips like cannibals, they would gobble every
tidbit about movie stars and politicians getting entangled in each
other’s arms.
Will our lives improve if our politicians eat
rather than read books or newspapers? Will it be good for us if our
politicians say: “I eat gossip for breakfast, lunch and dinner.“
Well, our politicians may get indigestion for eating gossip. By
eating rather than reading gossip, a politician avoids having a
cluttered mind, and many of them are already too gossipy.
Food manufacturers and publishers should
seriously look at newspapers as a source of sustenance not only for
the mind but also for the body. If our experts could make newsprint
palatable, it will ease the pangs of hunger, especially the poor.
It means that after reading your newspaper, you
don’t put it away. You cut it into pieces and serve it on the
dining table. In the morning, it can taste like fried eggs. In the
evening, it can be like your favorite beef stew.
If people develop a taste for newspapers, it
would be a boon to the newspaper industry. Newspapers will cease
being used as fish wrap in the market. Instead of being used as
toilet paper, they will be ingested as food and properly expelled in
the toilet. The writers and editors will be happy. The words they
labored to put on the page will not end up on the wrong end.
In China, 11 miners who were trapped for five
days underground after the mine’s shaft roof collapsed said they
staved off hunger by eating newspapers and a leather belt.
They staggered out of the iron and gold mine in
a northern Chinese city after a 129-hour ordeal.
“When we were hungry, we picked up and ate
newspapers and a few pages of the a book,” miner Wu Pengyong told
reporter. “Then we were still really hungry. I’ve a leather
belt, so I cut it into pieces and used an empty can to cook it. But
it wouldn’t cook. I divided it half-cooked and gave it out to
everyone.”
The owner of the illegal mine near Chengde in
Hebei province had tried to cover up the event. Rescuers got to work
on the site two days after the collapse. Fortunately, there were no
casualties, thanks to a diet of newspapers. The miners were brought
to a local hospital for treatment, according to a Beijing newspaper.
Doctors tell us to be choosy about our food to
remain healthy. They love to say: “You are what you eat.” The
reference, of course, is to your state of health as determined by
the food you eat.
I suppose that if you eat newspapers, people can
assess your character on the basis of the kind of news that you
prefer to munch. If you love to read and eat crime stories, maybe
you can be called a police character. If you love to read and eat
the editorial columns, special features and in-depth reports you are
a scholar. If you love to just gobble up everything without
discrimination you are a politician.
No need to throw people into underground tunnels
and starve them to force them to eat newspapers. But if some of our
politicians will volunteer to try it, let’s quickly seal all the
exits.
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