I once went on a four day hike through the mountains led by an experienced bushwalker who told us what provisions we’d need, and then told us to take a bag of rice as emergency rations in case we got stranded and ran out of food. I always wondered why it had to be rice until I read an a report from Thailand about an elephant that somehow got into a store of rice and ate seventy kilos of it. All would have been well if the elephant had not then followed up by drinking nearly three hundred litres of water. The result was the rice expanded at an astounding rate and not only filled the elephant’s stomach, but burst it. The creature actually exploded.
It reminds me of those people of whom the Bible says: ‘Their only god is their appetites, and they glory in what they should be ashamed of, and their future is eternal destruction.’