You are delicious. You are absolutely delicious. Whether you're fat or you're lean, muscled or skinny, somewhere out there there's a creature that would find you positively scrumptious. Whether it's a komodo dragon safely tucked away on some island whose name you don't remember, a hungry leopard stalking the savannah, or an anaconda slithering through jungles far away, something out there wants to eat you.

Yes, there are even humans who hunger for your flesh. There are your Dahmers, those carnivorous beings with icy eyes, whose reptilian nature only reveals itself behind closed doors. Maybe you work next to one, and you don't even know it. There are the Congolese rebels who rove through jungles and decimated villages, where the weeping only stops when the sound of gun-fire starts, as the citizens scurry into the woods in fear from the rebels who know how to terrorize a populace better than any on Earth. Consume their flesh, and humans fall to their knees pissing in terror, desiring any other death than to fall victim of that oldest of horrors. For what is the impetus of fear itself? Why does it exist? It exists because somewhere in time, there was a species of animals that was getting eaten, and eventually, they evolved a fear of being eaten. Surely there was no need for fear before that, no need for norepinephrine, or the fight or flight response.

This original fear shows up in a million phrases we've heard before, and shows up as religious symbolism. What does it mean to pass through gates of hell, but to be consumed by death? Then again, what are the pearly gates, other than entering the mouth of a different death? What is heaven but submission to being eaten? Think of a stereotypical creepy old mansion with gates that are towering, unfeeling, and iron. What's at the top of the portcullis, but pointy objects resembling teeth? It is almost as if every gate which is meant to keep out strangers is designed to evoke that oldest fear, the fear of being eaten.

Walk outside on a hot summer evening, and what gnaws on you, but mosquitoes who want to eat you one drop of blood at a time? Attend the funeral of a loved one, and when does the weeping reach its height, but when the casket closes, like some gaping maw of infinity swallowing the person forever? We've built an entire world away from nature, away from the maws of predators, away from people who eat other people, and we're replacing mean-looking portcullis with sturdy locks and electronic burglar alarms, and we have big trucks that drive around spraying chemicals to kill all the mosquitoes, but face it, our world isn't a friendly place to creatures who don't want to be eaten. There's all kinds of things that want to eat you, and whether its a cannibal, mosquitoes, the worms in the ground, or the trees who use your ashes as nutrients, something, eventually, will consume you.

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