What I wish is, the minced beef cutlet can jump out of a definition of food that will be ate, it is an agency at meanwhile. An agency that links me to my friends.
Food, especially delicious food is a big common subject of a talk in the world so the minced beef cutlet can be the agency to help me to start the talking with friends. If I want to have a conversation with somebody then I can ask him or her that would you like to have a try of this minced beef cutlet? If they answer yes, congratulations! This is a good beginning. After they try the cutlet they will comment on it, then follow the comment to go further talking. If they answer no thanks, don’t worry, I can still keep to ask that what are you going to eat. Of course they would answer me if they don’t hate me or think I am annoying.
Moreover, this cutlet can be an agency between me and my friends to exchange culture. The minced beef cutlet is from the north part of China, it can be a representative of Chinese food, at least, to my friends. For Melbourne, avocado can be chose to be the representative of food. There is no avocado in the cutlet so why don’t we just mix the beef and avocado to make new taste that only sell in Melbourne, Australia. The improved cutlet, we can give it a new name that is the minced beef and avocado cutlet, is an agency that present the mixing culture under the multicultural Melbourne.
From the point of view of teleology, the minced beef cutlet exist for human being’s existence. Personally, I buy the minced beef cutlet because I am hungry, it exists to offer me more energy. For the store, they make and sell it for business benefits. Socially, this minced beef cutlet is a part of contribution of multicultural Melbourne. However, from the point of view of object-oriented ontology, as the author Ian Bogost says in his book, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What it’s like to be a thing, “we need not discount human beings to adopt an object-oriented position —- after all, we ourselves are of the world’s as much as musket buckshot and gypsum and space shuttles. But we can no longer claim that our existence is special as existence.” We all are objects, including living beings and non-living beings, existing equally in this world. The relationships between the minced beef cutlet and other objects are more than the people can figure out.