Biscuit

BISCUIT 

Appetite is never just about hunger; it is a script written long before a child takes their first bite. It is the quiet arithmetic of power, the silent language of class. It dictates who eats well and who merely eats, who dines in abundance and who measures each morsel like a transaction.

 One afternoon, in a government office, I saw the entire structure of society laid bare—not through policy documents or official decrees, but through biscuits, at the gate, the watchman sat hunched on a splintered wooden stool, tearing into a dry loaf of bread. Some tea in a worn-out steel cup, no butter—only dry crumbs falling onto the cold cement floor, that meal was not a matter of choice but of necessity, or maybe not but a calculated survival, the cheapest way to quieten an empty stomach. Inside, in the cramped corners of the office, the peon stirred his tea with care, dipping a single Parle-G biscuit into the cup, holding it in just long enough for it to soften but not dissolve. There was precision in his movements, as if he had learned to extend the life of hunger, to make a single biscuit last beyond its worth, his tea looked sweet, not by luxury, but by design.

As I stepped further in, behind thick wooden doors, past the barriers of designation and salary slabs, sat the officer, reclining in his chair. On his polished desk lay a fine porcelain, colorful cup, delicate in a way that suggested it had never been washed by his own hands, between his fingers, he balanced a Lotus Biscoff biscuit, its cinnamon scent perfumed the air as he took slow, deliberate bites. There was no rush, no instinct to preserve. Hunger had never been a fear to him, only an occasional craving to be indulged.

And so, in the smallest of gestures, the entire order of things was revealed. The gatekeeper’s bread, the peon’s Parle-G, the officer’s Biscoff—this was not a difference of taste but of permission. Who decides which child wakes up to a bowl of warm cereal and who must settle for plain tea? Who dictates that one eats from cold, dented steel while another dines off gleaming bone china? These are not random inequalities. These are decisions made long before the meal is served. The market does not simply provide—it selects, it allocates, it enforces. Hunger is not a failure of resources but a function of distribution, a design meant to keep the wheels of labor turning.

Appetite, in this world, is a privilege rationed by power, and those who hold the bread never ask who bakes it.