Blog 22: Bobby The Chef

They had been watching earth for a while. An excuse was sought to visit the strange humans. Humanity was primitive and violent but fascinating.
Bobby was a chef. He’d been in charge of providing nutrition for the observation crew. Bobby had written several published cookery books since he’d been posted there. He had an arrogance famed far and wide and boasted that his food could convince any female to copulate with him. He’d watched the crew for years, watched them watching the humans. He’d spent a long time himself watching the humans. He was a fan of their cookery programs. The cookery program as an idea had never taken off amongst Bobby’s species. He wanted to invent the cookery show for his people. He stole the show during documentaries about the earthly observation station.
The observation station had long been equipped with the means to visit earth but permission for first contact had been pending for decades. The crew of the station had accepted that they were as close as they would ever be to humanity within their lifetime. Bobby was less placid. A fan of the earthly cooking shows he was, a fan of the chefs he was not.
On earth one of those chefs was recording his weekly show with a studio audience to absorb the aromas of his work. He was a proud man, proud of how quickly he could bring together a meal that anyone would enjoy, proud of his restaurant empire, proud of his own television show. In the midst of preparing the worlds best roast dinner he stopped to explain the steps he’d taken to the audience and the three cameras that watched him from different angles.
Next to him appeared a large, ruddy faced man who picked up his conversation mid sentence and began to contradict everything he would have said. Bobby was furious and joyous at the same time. After all the moaning and promises he had made first contact with earth. The human saw Bobby flicker and morph and return, he was in shock. Bobby continued to finish the recipe with a vastly different range of ingredients in less time than the human chef had taken to introduce himself at the start of the show.
The human chef stood gormless as the alien announced to the audience that their idol was entirely flawed. He left out too many flavours from the mix and lost the potential of each dish to Bobby’s fury. Bobby’s correction barely made it past the walls of the chef’s bewilderment. The chef was busy trying to decide on the form of the alien. His appearance would seem human for moments at a time and flicker between a fog of colour and an abstract form of life. The chef was long used to defending his work against auditory slander and eventually the aliens corrections triggered his instinct to crush opposition. He tasted the finished work of the alien and spat on the ground next to him.
Bobby’s fury climaxed as he threw the human’s kitchen implements across the floor. His reply to the humans insult shut the human back within confusion. Bobby realised his mistake, he had seen his passion for food in humanity. He had seen ingredients like his and assumed a similar path to their refinement. The destination for human flavour was different from the destination to which he delivered the crew of the observation station.
He departed immediately leaving the chef still in shock. The chef would leave his career behind in search of answers. He would write open ended books never to be published and engage in vast communication webs with conspiracy theorists worldwide. He would fall from fame through perceived madness into quiet muttering.
Bobby would survive ridicule and castigation, remaining the chef at the observation station while the humans explained away his appearance as a prank. When their two species met again Bobby would be absent although his recipes would be represented amongst the food of their people taken as offerings to the humans.