“Would you actually be willing to give it up?”

(Bad Rod Serling impression): Picture, if you will, a world in which sawdust is declared edible. A company devises a way to make sawdust faster than anyone else. It doesn’t make planks, joists, doweling or anything useful — just sawdust. The company starts marketing sawdust as a healthy, delicious food ingredient.

In this hypothetical reality, every major food company starts putting sawdust into all its products, rebranding as “sawdust first” enterprises. Sawdust is everywhere, in everything.

At first, you try to choke it down because everyone else is telling you how great sawdust is, but you quickly give up. You drop your usual brands and go looking for sawdust-free alternatives. You make your own no-sawdust food from scratch.

Sawdust starts to replace other ingredients altogether. Additional sawmills are built to create more of the stuff. Electricity and water are diverted away from domestic consumption to run all the sawmills. Sawdust companies attract massive investments, even though the sawdust costs more to make than anyone is willing to pay. Sawdust shares skyrocket. There’s talk of a sawdust bubble.

People get sick from eating sawdust. Some die. Children develop nutritional deficiencies because they’re eating so much sawdust. The mills keep running, day and night.

Right from the start, there are people who oppose the sawdust incursion. Gradually, people who were once eager sawdust consumers start to acknowledge that sawdust is a pretty terrible ingredient. As the years pass, more and more people demand limits on sawdust; they float bans on sawdust in baby-food and school dinners. Communities try to block new sawmills from being built. The swell of anti-sawdust sentiment builds.

And someone, in all seriousness, sits down and writes: “Yeah, but what if they really did ban sawdust? What would you even eat?”