When you eat from this fruit then whenever you put your hand on a product, a commodity, an article, then, at the moment of your touch, how this commodity came into your hands becomes plainly evident to you. Now there is no more mystification of labor, no more of a world in which the object arrives by magic — scrubbed, clean, no past, all of its history washed away.

That passage inspired a wiki called “Kunkelfruit” dedicated to “let you know what you buy”. 27 products and services were accordingly demystified before the site went moribund, though not dark.

Of course, Kunk was riffing off good old Section I Chapter 4 of Das Kapital, in which our hero explains just why it is you don’t know what you buy, or where it comes from. (Short answer: Capitalism!)

I suppose understanding commodities is not exactly the same as “cibopathy” and maybe both are grandchildren of the walk out of Plato’s cave. I wish the ancients had given more consideration to face-chewing.

Mostly I wish comics were cheaper.