Patrick O’Connell

Washington, Virginia

I don’t think I’d bother with anything but water. I’d regard it as a great cleansing, to rise above food. Why would I want food on a desert island? To survive? Why would I want to survive on a desert island? I just find being thirsty rather unpleasant. I think I would fast and die. And transcend. Certainly one wouldn’t want to cook, for God’s sake! For myself?! I can’t relate to that.

I think I’d be perfectly content eating raw food, and foraging, or whatever. I think there’s going to be much learned in the next hundred years about why we do what we do to food even though very often it’s unnecessary. Why we cook food, why we replicate tastes from childhood, why we go through the whole process when raw food would be fine. Obviously, it’s doing it for others. It’s doing it to express love and coddling and all of this. But it isn’t something that I would ever feel I needed to do for myself. I’m looking to get beyond it.