Just exactly what is that stuff in the bottom of the chest freezer, is what inquiring minds want to know. I say, be careful what you ask. There is some knowledge mankind was just not meant to have.Did we ever actually buy this stuff? In a grocery store? With the intention of eating it?
Some objects are identifiable as frozen chickens, or if not chicken, at least a bird, or a bird-like animal: archeopteryx or dodo. Other things seem to be leftover mastodon haunch or saber-tooth loin. And when did we buy all these frozen dinners? "Ready in Minutes" the packaging promises. "Just Heat'n'Serve." We must've been expecting nuclear war or zombie invasion because nothing short of apocalypse could induce me to dig into these delicacies.
Also, there is something that may be frozen split-pea soup. Nancy makes wonderful split-pea soup, but, let us admit it, even in its freshest state, it looks like swamp algae. Frozen, it looks like frozen swamp algae.
I believe much of the "food" at the bottom of the chest freezer was never purchased or prepared. It just appeared there spontaneously, the way frogs do from Nile mud. There must be a power in chest freezers to generate frozen food out of nothing, corollary to the power of clothes-driers to vanish our socks. No doubt Stephen Hawking has explained this somewhere in his theories about black holes.
In John Carpenter's The Thing, a remake of the 1950's The Thing from Another World, based on John Campbell's story, Who Goes There? scientists in the Antarctic find and thaw out a frozen alien. The alien has the power to metamorphose into anything it chooses, and soon is killing and devouring the luckless scientists. There's a lesson here for all of us.
Be careful what you thaw.
