Does Unicorn Meat exist?

 

Thinking is delicious. Imagination is luscious.

 

 

Feel free to stop reading this If you are 100% sure the Unicorn doesn’t exist or has existed, you can stop from here, I appreciated your valuable time for reading the title.

 

I imagine, therefore I am.

No fooling, Unicorn meat exists.

26th November 1991, that was a remarkable day for me. I arrived to this world, all I needed was water, air, food and maybe some love, since that day I started to seek for possibilities with the sense that came along with my body and soul, I would call The Gift.

 

I know my birthday but the day of my death, glad that I have been informed I am not the only one. I was always considered a ”quick learner” before the age of 7, however, shit happens, I became slow-witted, obtuse in learning new knowledge and lacking focus. At the age of 12, the first year of secondary school, I was accepted into a renowned school, the same year, I did not passed the examination, for a while I thought I was a useless human-being in a vulnerable situation for a long time, a short yucky period in my life.

 

Five years later, I found out the reason for my lack of concentration. I imagine a lot, literally too much (from the perspective of some people I know).  I enjoy taking time with my mind. And fascinated by new stuff. The visual art class I was taking at that time helped me a lot to find realization and widen my eyes to possibilities.  Since I have understood this powerful capability: Imagination. It has been unequivocal for me that if I should use The Gift in a proper way. There will come to be a terrific change in my life.

 

During this time, I spent most of my time doing things alone. I shopped alone, went to the cinema alone, visited gallery events alone and ate alone in restaurants. I am an expert at eating out alone, it was weird for me to do it in the beginning, especially when I was a really young girl, people stared at me, the awkward moment always came when I entered the restaurant, when the waiters came to me and asked “Good evening miss, a table for one?” I have to admit that I used to be ashamed of this question; It was all caused by the cognition in my mind linked to these types of questions to the results of “Yes! I am alone with no partners” or “ Ouch! How antisocial am I!”

 

At that time, I totally forgot the main reason why I was in the restaurant instead of doing take-away or getting delivery from a pizza shop. I was there just because I wanted to have a pause in a hectic day. Full of people, conversations and problems, to eat alone is a luxury hobby because I can escape from all these troubles in life, pay attention to the food and stay in my imaginative world. I allow myself to start conversations with my self, never get bored. However don’t get me wrong, I am not against the form of togetherness, after all, I still enjoy having dinner with my friends and family where good conversations happens out loud.

 

After I moved to the Netherlands, I found out that my eat alone’ fetish is even unusual, mostly they put me next to the toilet or uncomfortable corner. There is a response to this phenomenon, EENMAAL, initially created as a two-day pop-up restaurant in Amsterdam. It is an experience for people to show a moment of disconnection, by eating out alone, sitting alone, with only one option of a four-course meal, there is no chance for food envy to creep in.

There is also restaurants of “Eat in the dark” and you could be informed with what you just ate after the meal, In a way to encourage us to give more attention to the food itself.

As I always have imaginations while I eat, the connection of cultures and food is also fascinating for me.  I have a sensitive tongue and taste, temperature and textures are always the factors of whether it is good food or not for me. Based on these rudimentary criteria, I seek for creativity that has to offer to satisfy the spiritual aspect. Food is any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for the body, for me, there is much more that could be offered from food, which is more than using it to fill up the belly. Ferran Adria, head chef at El Bulli, the world-famous restaurant located outside Barcelona.

Here are a few of his aphorisms taken from The Omnivorous Mind by John S. Allen:

 

                            New, creative, and unique are not the same thing.

                           With creativity, it is not what you look for that matters,

                           but what you find.

                           Creativity means changing your mind every day.

                           To be truly creative, a dish must be interesting as well as new.

 

Maybe I am the only one on this planet who is interested to try Unicorn meat, I can imagine some organizations of ethical gourmandists might come and splash some blood with glitter on my face, yelling at me “Hey this is what you want, bitch! ” but it does not matter, I truly mean it because Imagination is luscious and priceless.

 

We all benefit from the artistic creativity of others. We enjoy eating the food of creative chefs, listening to the music of great composers and songwriters, reading the books of perceptive writers, looking at the paintings and sculptures of imaginative visual artists. These types of works were for centuries mainly enjoyed only by elites in large-scale civilizations, but the modern media culture makes creative products available on a historically unprecedented scale. In contrast, over much of the course of human evolution, creativity could be beneficial only at a face-to-face level. In this context, perhaps the most significant contribution of creative individuals over evolutionary time has been when they show us all how to do something in a new way; when it occurs, creativity is not simply passively enjoyed but becomes an integral part of an individual’s life.

 

I have been raised in a less artistic lifestyle compared to people who come from the families of artistic background, however, in my childhood, my mother was an inspiring person. She told me a way to communicate with my great grandmother, I clearly remembered that every year in April, there is a Qingming festival in Hong Kong, which is the day to gather with all the family members and pay a visit to the grave and burns Joss paper or paper offerings, It was for me a mind-blowing experience in the Unicorn-level, people are allowed and encouraged to talk in front the graves with the deceased. The most exciting part comes form the paper offerings,usually made from paper of exquisite condition.

 

The main function of these realistic products is for the living to send love and caring to the world they imagine the deceased is. They believe through the action of burning, that the objects become real and usable in the world after death. The idea of using burning is to ”dematerialize” objects so that they could ”materialize” over there. It is including but not limited to banknotes, houses, cars planes, luxury clothing (with photo-shopped brand name or monogram to prevent being sued by the fashion houses), all kinds of food in a board variety of nationality and a servant (in a human form).

 

                                Food as culture. Food has social meaning and significance beyond its

                               nutritive  function; it is also expressive. Each society determines what is food,

                               what is permissible to eat , and how and when particular things are consumed.

                              Food laws, for example, specify what is intended to be, and can reasonably be

                              expected to be, ingested by humans.

 

The Philosophy of Food, David Kaplan

 

From my point of view of the behaviour of burning paper offerings is not for the deceased but the living, they feel better after they have done it once a year, some people do it to compensate, or out of guilt, for not spending enough time with the deceased when they were alive. What is going on in their imagination was interesting for me, and what determines to chose McDonalds instead of a sushi set?  Do they also believe in calculating calories to prevent over feeding the deceased? If they gifted a plane, logically, they also have to burn an airport to land the plane, maybe also to burn a pilot, passport, flight attendant, or they can simply burn a time machine or teleportation machine for instant transferring.

 

Food is an important part of religious observance and spiritual ritual for many faiths. At the age of 18, my mother converted from Buddhism to Christianity. She stopped to burn paper offerings and started a new lifestyle by attending to the church, she never failed to surprised me with bible stories: “So Jesus said to them, ”Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves.” (From the Gosepl of John) The ritual of communion is regularly celebrated by many Christians. This involves eating bread and drinking wine (or substitutes) to represent the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It has been an unknown feeling for me that they do it in such a creative way, in both good and bad aspects.

 

Embracing the new world with eating Unicorn meat is reachable; with the realization of food, there is a  new powerful weapon. Meanwhile, it is still poetic in the form of imagination. We will go further and open doors to many timeless possibilities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crys Leung a.k.a the founder of Unicorn TV