The real reason we cannot eat in SL

No eating in Second Life! Not really! No drinking either, no coffee, no beer. Ok there are animations, even of the famous whiskey bottle you are getting from all your friends: after sipping a bit, a lot, you will fall down! There are bars in SL, there are restaurants. Drinking champagne in Paris of around 1900! You can buy whole courses and eat them, forks and knives included. But it is all…….a bit dry? A far reminiscent of real food, of real pleasure drinking coffee or tea with friends, eating chocolates, or a cake.
No eating means no hunger. And this thought is more positive: a world without hunger! How many crimes are not committed because of hunger? It can even hardly be called a crime, stealing when you are hungry. Myths are built around it, Robin Hood! Stealing from the rich, to give to the poor!
No crimes of this sort in Second Life. No stealing either, not of this kind.
No eating because the avatar doesn’t need food? No real stomach! (No real brains either by the way…). No not at all: this is not the real reason.
The real reason we cannot eat in Second Life is hidden in the deep structure of this virtual world: the permissions! In Second Life every object has a creator and an owner. These might be the same, but when a creator sells his creations, the owner changes. Creator and owner can always be found by right clicking on something, then choosing ‘more’. A menu opens which indicates creator and owner.
Not only the objects you see in SL have a creator and an owner, also the sounds, the animations, the textures and the scripts, hidden inside the objects. When constructing something, you want to sell, or give away you must be careful to get the setting of all the permissions right.
For every part these permissions must be set, especially if you want somebody else to be able to work with your stuff. If you buy something, there are a few possibilities:
“no copy”, this means you have only one “copy” of the item, when rezzed, it disappears from your inventory - “copy” means you can rezz it, take it back and you already have two copies.
“no transfer”, you cannot sell this, nor give it away, only rezz it, or delete it.
“no modify”, you cannot rescale it, you cannot remove a script.
Ok, so an object and all its part have permissions set or not, influencing the process of transferring and being transferred. A bit dry this stuff isn’t it?
We now return to the eating: what is eating in real life: buying, preparing, eating, enjoying, munching, digesting…a shear infinite process of changing ownership mixing and remixing things, when you think about it from the world of Second Life!
Should real food and all its parts have all those permissions on them, we, real people would be starving before being able to eat the tiniest bit of a pizza. We would suffocate before being able to get a breath of fresh air!
So reality, or call it God, has thought this over and decided that there are no permissions or absolute ownership in real life. It would simple block the whole process of living, of changing, of processing, of evolution.
We now know the real reason we don’t eat in Second Life, the permissions! And we know why absolute ownership in real life is not possible: it would not permit ….life!