Tip the Bellhop with a Bar of Gold: The Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi installed, in its lobby, an ATM-like machine that sells 10-gram bars of gold. “Five kilograms of pure edible gold is used per year for decoration, mainly on deserts,” the hotel adds of itself. In the Middle East and the Subcontinent, eating thin flakes of gold is considered good for the heart — obviously a practice only of the rich — though the human body cannot digest gold.
There’s something almost poetic about eating bars of solid gold, something so hyperbolic that you wouldn’t believe it if you came across it in a story or, for that matter, a poem. It seems an easy metaphor for consumption, but it’s so excessive that it almost defies any logic of consumption at all, as if someone wore a minuscule pellet of plutonium in a necklace or a ring…
