Salt. Salting and drying and preservation in alcohol or vinegar have all been used to preserve food into the winter season prior to the advent of hot canning or freezing. Salt was also used to preserve Egyptian pharoahs, as was drying and so we see a strange connection between preserving food past the growing season, and preserving humans past their growing season.
The difference between traditional preservation of food and preservation of a human corpse is utility. The food will one day be eaten and thus its energy will be imparted back into the ecosystem. The preservation of a human being is an attempt to cheat decomposition, to stop time and to render humans immune to the laws of all other living things.
A simple law. All things that live do so by obtaining nutrients, and practically all of them other than green plants do so by eating. And everything that lives is, in turn, food for other living things.
When we preserve food we are not denying this truth. When we preserve our corpses we are attempting to pretend that we do not decay, that the worms do not have the right to feast upon us as they feast upon everyone else. We attempting to pretend that death does not exist.
Although one technology, food preservation, may have inspired the other; food preservation is a technology borne of a need to work with the facts of decomposition, whereas the preservation of a corpse is an act of war declared against biological law.
We are attempting to defy all of creation with our preservation of bodies after death. When I die, I wish my body to feed worms and flies and the living black earth itself with its microbes and bacteria. I wish to be the earth that my descendants walk and play upon. I wish to be the world in which unborn elders make their home.
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