From Ursula Le Guin's "Mazes"

Having moved to Portland recently I have found that one of my favorite authors, Ursula K. Le Guin, lives here. So I am re-reading everything I ever read of hers, as well as other authors who write from the perspective of the Pacific Northwest. Haven't posted in a while, yes, I know. In quite serious transition and I haven't yet made it fully here. Yet I would like to share this bit from Le Guin's short story about animal testing, Mazes, about a rat being used to run tests by a human who it cannot seem to make connection with, despite the rat's highly sophisticated language. 

This is a remarkably apt metaphor for people today confronted with sprayed and processed and de-natured food...

"The alien's cruelty is refined, yet irrational. If it intended all along to starve me, why not simply withhold food? But instead of that it gave me plenty of food, mountains of food, all the greenbud leaves I could possibly want. Only they were not fresh. They had been picked; they were dead; the element that makes them digestible to us was gone, and one might as well eat gravel. Yet there they were, with all the scent and shape of greenbud, irresistible to my craving appetite. Not at first, of course. I told myself, I am not a child, to eat picked leaves! But the belly gets the better of the mind. After a while it seemed better to be chewing something, anything, that might still the pain and craving in the gut. So I ate, and ate, and starved. It is a relief, to be so weak I cannot eat."