Pun Salad

You get hungry every day — and feeling hungry hurts. If you’re hungry enough, it’s hard to work, much less enjoy life. If you stay hungry for too long, you collapse. And then you die.

But don’t despair. Food, the remedy for hunger, doesn’t merely exist. It is almost always nearby, and is amazingly cheap. A single 16-ounce box of pasta has a full day’s worth of calories, and you can get it for about a dollar. One dollar to not feel hungry. One dollar for a day’s worth of energy. One dollar a day to keep living day after day. The value of your food is overwhelming — yet the cost is a rounding error.

And once you appreciate this miracle of sustenance, endless streams of similarly miraculous facts come into focus. Water is usually free of charge, even though water is even more vital for comfort and survival than food. Air is almost always gratis, even though you’ll be dead in minutes without it. Your closest relatives and friends may matter more to you than your own life, yet you’ve probably never faced even a 1% risk of death on their behalf.