“You are what you eat,” is an adage I heard a lot as a child, and one that resulted in me being affectionately referred to as Noodle for a blessedly brief spell. It’s one of those adages that seems at least truth-adjacent. Our cells are created and refurbished using the food that we consume, so there is a pretty literal sense in which we are (or become) what we eat. 

Of course, that’s not how anyone means the saying. If I eat broccoli, do I become ontologically more broccoli-like? I am somehow grittier when I eat grits? Sweeter when I eat cookies? To be honest, once you really think it through, it’s not a very useful adage. Happily, I dismissed it as a child. 

If we open it up a bit, though, we might find that the epigram has more meaning than a literal understanding would reveal. We aren’t so much what we eat as we are what we consume. As a person who is currently on a social media hiatus because I can’t stop doomscrolling, I can affirm that the media, ideas, and conversations we consume do become a part of our mental landscape. The discourse communities with which I engage inform my thinking. “We are what we consume” is still too simplified; of course, we synthesize, analyze, and deconstruct ideas from media sources and do not only embody them. But there is a certain resonance to the idea there. 

Enter Kirby and the Forgotten Land. There is a whole philosophical history to the world of Kirby; Kirby, from his Gameboy start, has been consuming things, people, and bits of his world. He, back then, generally spat them back out again or consumed them the way we mere humans do food. Eventually, Kirby began consuming and then taking on the characteristics or powers of those he consumed, truly becoming what he ate. Even when Kirby takes on these characteristics, though, he retains a certain Kirby-ness. The classic Kirby shape and face were still present, but Kirby might don a jaunty cap or develop a hairstyle or hold a weapon of some kind. None of these becomings changed his essential Kirbyness. 

Until 2022 and Mouthful Mode. In Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Kirby still consumes enemies and takes on their abilities, signified by external symbols, like hats or weapons. But Kirby also enters Mouthful Mode, when he consumes something large enough that is no longer Kirby-shaped but takes on the shape, characteristics, and limitations of the items he consumes. For example, Kirby can become a car; he is the shape of the car, he speeds up and runs over things like a car, and he is constrained by ledges or smaller spaces into which cars cannot proceed. Kirby can become a vending machine, spitting out cans and wobbling around, constrained by the number of cans he can hold and by spaces into which vending machines cannot awkwardly wobble. Kirby can become a glider, whooshing through the sky and manuevering through rings but unable to negotiate the ground. In each of these cases, Kirby takes on the shape of the Mouthful Mode object, but he, Kirby, is wrapped around it, encapsulating it, and consuming but not synthesizing it. 

What then is Kirby?

What then is Kirby? Kirby is round. But no, Mouthful Mode defies that. Kirby can be any shape. Kirby is pink. Though, of course, in Smash brothers, he can be a pantheon of colors and originally he wasn’t a color at all. The consistent component of Kirby, the extant quality of Kirby is really his mouth. Kirby is a mouth, Kirby is the very idea of consumption. 

I could go on a whole tangent here about capitalism, but I’m not going to do that. At the end of the day, Kirby isn’t about capitalism (and you know it pains me to note it). Sometimes, Kirby collects coins, and in Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Kirby is rescuing incarcerated Waddle Dees, and that all seems super-relevant to capitalism. 

No, Kirby reminds me that I think Kirby is about capitalism because that’s the kind of thinking I consume. This week, I’ve read a number of pieces on prison abolition and capital and even took a peek at Marx’s Capital. Of course I think Kirby is about capitalism. Kirby is a brilliant, funny, compelling game that children and adults can enjoy, but ultimately Kirby is saying that all of the things you consume, they make you what you are. Beware the problematic faves, beware the devil’s advocate, the counterpoints– you become them, too. You are a mouth who becomes that which you consume. 

Consuming Kirby though? That’s different. Consumption without synthesis of consumption itself– the center here cannot hold. Things fall apart. Meaning is impossible. Scientists this week revealed pictures of the black hole at the center of the galaxy, and, guess what?, it’s Kirby-shaped. All that quantum physics we can’t quite sort, that’s Kirby. 

2022, babies. It’s Mouthful Mode.