Something Else I Cannot Eat

Today I arrived at the conclusion that I can no longer stomach the prison's Salisbury steak. The sight of it — a brownish, oblong, near-gelatinous slab — draping in a lewd curve over the tray's dome of rehydrated potato flake was enough to make me think twice about allowing it anywhere near my mouth. It wasn't even trying to resemble meat, just something meatlike. Only in some parallel nightmare reality, where fourth generation vegans held uncontested control over the world's food supply, might someone look at these patties and suspect they were made of things once living. The only birth they appear to have undergone was through the machine tube that extruded them as uniform ovals onto the chain conveyor whose perfect pattern of equidistant dimples offer the steaks' sole textural element.

Well, okay, if you want to quibble, these steaks do have plenty of bone fragments. One only encounters those, however, if one is inclined to chew. It's generally accepted wisdom that the less time a patty spends in your mouth, the better. For this reason, I contend that few ever actually notice those grains of shattered skeleton. I certainly won't anymore; the next time Salisbury steak appears on the menu, I'm requesting a vegetarian meal. It's hard to mess up beans... mostly.