Once upon a time, in a world not entirely unlike our own, though perhaps with a little more absurdity baked in, there was a grand theater of manufacturers who treated the whole business of making things like a cosmic joke at the expense of the human body.

Imagine a place where the alchemists of junk food didn’t just shrug off the harm their concoctions caused, but actually found a kind of grim amusement in the whole affair. They were, after all, in the business of selling you not just a product, but a little fantasy: a fantasy that a bag of chips that could last until the next millennium was somehow a perfectly reasonable thing to munch on.

In this peculiar marketplace, the wizards of additives tossed in chemicals not because they were harmless or even because they were necessary, but because the appearance of freshness sold better than the reality of it. It didn’t matter that the chemical was a well-known little devil in the toxicology circles; as long as it could legally waltz its way into the U.S. food supply, it found a home in that suspiciously shiny snack on the shelf.

Of course, this is all part of the theater of commerce. In one country, you get the deluxe poisoned edition of your favorite junk food, while across the ocean, the same company cheerfully leaves out the nastiest bits because the law there demands it. The absurdity isn’t just that this double standard exists; it’s that the people making the stuff sleep perfectly fine at night, confident that they’re just giving the masses what they want, or at least what they’ve been cleverly nudged into wanting.

The packaging is coated with a little extra something to make sure your cupcake slips out of the mold like a greased eel, and a bit of that coating inevitably finds its way into you. After a while, the people making the stuff might even start to hold their customers in a quiet contempt. After all, who keeps eating this stuff but someone foolish enough to trust the smiling label over their own common sense?

In this carnival of irresponsibility, there are no neat resolutions. The market keeps churning out new curiosities, and the consumers keep nibbling away, often without ever quite realizing they’re part of a grand experiment in edible illusions. It’s a wild state of affairs, and while a few wise souls might dodge the traps, the show goes on, the shelves stay stocked, and the manufacturers whistle a merry tune of plausible deniability. In the end, it’s all just another chapter in the long, strange tale of human nature and the curious things we do to each other in the name of a quick buck.