Vegetables

 At first blush, nothing could seem more ordinary, terrestrial and simple as vegetables.  Yet what class of flora or fauna exhibits more vibrancy, an almost exhaustive covering of the chromatic spectrum and such strange morphologies that if one didn’t know better would compel them to testify that these strange objects must have an alien origin.  The eggplant (which the “Coneheads” thought looked alien, after all) bears nearly negligible resemblance to cauliflower or carrots or field peas, yet they all fall in the same category of organisms.  If astronomers want to find ‘alien’ life forms, perhaps they should start by looking in their own gardens.  Not to mention, since they claim to be so dead-set on being empiricists, and making good use of all their senses, they should not stop at merely gazing at these ‘extra-terrestrial’ objects (which they believe to be merely sub-terrestrial, since they do proceed from under the earth) but they should go the whole nine yards, making good used of their sense of taste, and consume these elaborately decorated pearls of nature.  Perhaps somewhere between the time when the morsel slides between their palate and their pharynx, they will realize just how ‘alien’ our little pale blue dot called Earth is relative to the rest of the vast and lifeless expanse around us.  Perhaps consuming one of these tasty scraps will not only lead to their inevitable physiologic health, but to their mental sobriety as well, in that the complexity of design that has been engineered so that we could enjoy one bite of food – albeit mashed peas that had to be disguised as a miniature aircraft by our parents so that we would open the hangar door – is beyond coincidence.