“I don’t see any gear to hunt or fish with,” I remarked, thinking that hunting or fishing were usually the favourite activities of men.

“Why do you consider hunting to be a form of entertainment? Do you really believe that killing an animal will give you joy?” Meen asked me immediately, and he seemed very serious about that question. I felt I should not have brought up this topic.

“Well, I’m not sure. I only made that reference to inform you how things are in my world,” I answered.

“We never hunt here, never at all,” Meen said decisively, but his tone softened.

“The reason why we don’t hunt is that before we do anything that intrudes into the habitats of animals, we would consider if the value of our action is really worth pursuing,” he explained.

“What about your food? Where do you get your meat from if you don’t hunt?” I asked.

“Actually, I should ask why do you eat meat?” Meen replied.

“Uh …” I hesitated because I didn’t know the answer.

“Here on this planet, we don’t eat any meat, only predators or worms do. When an animal dies, it becomes a corpse and will start to rot and smell,” he interrupted.

“When I see people on Earth eat meat, I really ask myself: how can you do that?” Meen continued.

“You’ve been to my world, haven’t you?” I asked, wondering how he knew.

“Most of us have never been there, except those who have been assigned to undertake a critical mission. If you ask me how I know about your world, the answer is: We all know through our mind.”

“So, you know us, but we don’t know anything about you, right?” I tried to understand.

“That’s correct,” Meen confirmed.

“How old are you now?” he asked, as if recalling something.

“Well, I’m going to be 33 next month.”

“And how old do you think you will become?”

“I think between 70 and 80.”

“Not 100 or more?”

“If anyone lives that long, he or she will be on the news,” I told him.

“Guess how old I am now?” Meen encouraged me with a smile.

“Umm … from your look, I think you are not older than 20. Let’s say 18 or 19?” I reckoned that he would be much younger than me.

“Wrong. I’m now 259,000 years old,” he replied with a smile.

“What! You have to be joking!” I was shocked by his reply.

“And even then, I’m considered to be in my teens now. The average age of people on this planet is 10 to the power of 140 years, or more, if they want to,” Meen said in a matter-of-fact tone.

“Wow! How many is that in years then?”

“It is 10, followed by another 140 zeros. Actually, we have eternal lives; people here live forever, and they never die. Put simply, we are immortal,” he replied.

“Let me explain. You know that eating meat has a negative effect on human’s genetic structure, right? This effect has been transmitted from generation to generation, gradually shortening the life span of your people,” Meen tried to explain slowly.

He then gave me a lengthy explanation, which I didn’t understand fully. What I did understand was that the structure of meat protein – which our body can only absorb very little of – is a secondary energy accumulated from the plants that animals eat. The deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, of the meat distorts our human DNA and does not nourish our body. It affects the growth of our cells and impairs the cell’s self-repairing code. All in all, it shortens the lifespan of humans. According to Meen, the average human on Earth would only have a lifespan of around 40 to 50 years on average in the next few hundred years to come.

“How old is Napa?” I asked.

“She’s about 5,000 years younger than me, around 254,200 years old,” Meen said in the same serious tone, which convinced me that he wasn’t joking.

“I find that hard to believe,” I admitted.

“Dinner is ready,” Napa’s voice broke in.

I turned to her while she was bringing the food tray in and thought to myself if Napa could really be over 200,000 years old.

“In fact, it’s not strange at all for us here,” she replied to my thought.

Napa brought out a big tray of fruits first, followed by a large bowl with several different grains that were gently cooked with finely grounded aromatic herbs, similar to the spices that the Japanese sprinkle on rice. It smelled wonderfully rich. The third dish was fresh vegetables with a kind of salad dressing. And the last one was a soup served in a small cup, which looked very rich as well. Napa then placed spoons and chopsticks in front of us.

“You use chopsticks?” I asked with surprise.

“Throughout the history, we’ve been using chopsticks for millions and millions of years,” Meen explained.

“Come on, let’s eat,” Napa said, gesturing to the food.

I glanced at Meen to see how he ate to make sure I follow the etiquette in this world. Meen started with the soup, so I followed his example. The moment I tasted it I could feel all the different flavours coming together – savoury, sweet, buttery, and slightly tangy. In combination with the fragrant herbs, the soup was very delicious. I wolfed down my soup quickly, and Meen did the same.

After that, Meen asked me to try the grains that had been cooked altogether and mixed in the big bowl. He scooped some into the bowl in which his soup had been served and used the chopsticks nimbly as the Chinese do. This all-grain dish didn’t need anything else to go with it as it was already so tasty, full-flavoured, and richly fragrant. The texture of the different grains was amazingly good. With each bite, I felt the taste of sticky saltiness as well as crunchy sweetness. At times, it tasted wonderfully soft and spongy.

“The way you cooked these grains made them so tender and delicious,” I complimented Napa, sincerely impressed.

“I didn’t cook them. These grains have all their inherent unique tastes when they were grown on trees. All I did was collect them and put them in a container,” she answered.

“Really? It tasted as if they were delicately cooked. Are these grains easily available?” I asked.

“Absolutely. Actually, in your world, there used to be grains like these which could be picked in the morning, and by evening, they would have grown back again. You didn’t even have to crack the hard shells. They were soft and spongy like you see now, like they were from the very beginning before they were picked,” Napa explained.

“That’s strange,” I said, before spooning more of the grains into my mouth and contemplating whether it would be polite to go for several more helpings.

“You see,” said Meen, pointing at the food in front of us, “there are so many things that we can eat, and all these offer a whole variety of different flavours and qualities too. Of fruits alone, there are thousands of different kinds. There are also grains and vegetables that we can eat, including their leaves, shoots, roots, and stems. We can enjoy them for their taste and also for their medicinal and healing properties. The Creator allows us to eat them all,” explained Meen.

“Allows us to eat … what do you mean?” I asked, not quite understanding what he meant.

“This food is reserved for humans only,” he said.

“Hmm …” I frowned, not fully getting it.