I’ll tell you what the powerful, kapos and plebeians will eat
A dystopian self-interview on the future of meat. Riccardo Ruggeri's cameo
To talk about "fake meat", instead of the classic Cameo, I invented a self-interview, where RR interviews R. Language and contents are deliberately dystopian, given that the ignoble cancel-woke theories push the West towards a world of widespread mediocrity, which can only be opposed by leaving the screens of pre-censorship, writing in dystopian ways.
RR Thank you for agreeing to respond on a topic that has suddenly become hot: "fake meat", which political correctness requires us to call "cultured meat". I know that, as well as being a scholar of CEO capitalism, you are also a gourmet.
A Yes, but a gourmet of poor cuisine, therefore for the cultured, a gourmet-bzzurro. In a few days I will celebrate my "89" with a lunch for two at Federico Lanteri (Osteria Martini, near Pigna): a dip of only vegetables from his garden in a bagna cauda sauce, then the tonnarelli cacio e pepe, the the most sublime and most difficult Italian dish to cook.
And it couldn't be otherwise. If you were born in the 1930s into a poor family, you must have passed directly from breast milk to minestrone. If you also add the war and post-war years, you would know that bread and minestrone were the food of your entire childhood and adolescence. Unbeknownst to you, you were a certified vegan. You would have discovered, loved and practiced beef, sheep and pork only after the age of eighteen. As it was used for sex back then.
RR And now?
A For years now, I have only eaten it on Saturdays, prepared by myself with a knife, strictly from Fassona or Chianina, with fleur de sel and Taggiasche oil. In Turin, the legendary Monsù Curletti, butcher of the Savoy intelligentsia and of the lawyer Agnelli, close friend of Giovanni Arpino, prepared raw meat with a knife using a particular technique for his client-friends only (I was among them). Every ten strokes he dipped the tip of the knife into a glass of agricultural rum, to cool it, he said. A superb aftertaste emerged.
RR Let's go back to “fake meat”.
A I have to make a premise. Chance allowed me to live for many years in some control rooms, not just Italian ones. It was an extraordinary school of life for my subsequent (craft) studies on the evolution of Western capitalism, American in particular. Like it or not, the true West is now represented, for better or for worse, by one of the two Americas, the one that will emerge in the next elections. That is, either that of the Midwest and the great "Belts", far from the two Oceans, or that of the large cosmopolitan coastal cities. They are two different, opposing cultures: one fake conservative, the other fake progressive, in reality both with increasingly fascist or communist elements. Regarding the topic of "fake meat", from the peasant-worker perspective that is specific to me, my vision is a thousand miles away from the so-called anti-elite conspiracy theory of the right or left.
RR What do you mean?
A Simply that many citizens overestimate their elites, they do not know that in the control rooms the number of suckers is statistically the same as what we find in all other human bureaucratic organizations. Indeed, ordinary citizens are often better off than these elites. Today, power (and money) is concentrating entirely in 1% of the population, called the Ruling Class, while the former middle class of the noble and bourgeois professions is gradually being dismantled (also thanks to AI), transforming the worse in butler-kapò, and thus repositioning the remaining 90% in a bizarre existential Plebs. Before the end of the 21st century, the process will be completed and the mythical Western CEO capitalism will become identical to the Chinese one. They will be fake private monopolies governed by CEO-Oligarchs, who will also be members of the Central Committee of the Single Party (with Jack Ma as the prototype and Bill Gates-Larry Flint to follow). At the top, always and only a dictator. Obviously, there will be no contact between the three social classes, each will move within the confines of the Zoo assigned to them, with personalized behavioral protocols.
RR I don't share his vision of the future, but let's go back to fake meat.
A It is obvious that food will also be specific to each social class, because each will have its own lifestyle, as it was two thousand years ago in Rome, in Athens, in Egypt. In the case of meat, there will be three types. The Ruling Class will only eat Kobe, Wagyu, Chianina, Fassona, and a few other excellences, with an even higher quality than the already high one today. The class of "kapò butlers" will instead eat meat grown in the laboratory , that is, halfway between nature and chemistry. Finally, the Plebs will only have foods and drinks of chemical origin (Soylent model). In this regard, I would like to suggest my rigorously dystopian novel The Third World War by Gordon Comstock which hypothesized, in unsuspecting times, this type of future.
RR So?
A It escapes me why we should focus on a marginal aspect such as fake meat, the announcement of which is nothing more than an arthouse marketer's balloon. If something big doesn't happen (I don't know what, but I hope so anyway) the future of the Plebs is sealed. What the European Ruling Class calls "climate sustainability" will be achieved by the end of the 21st century, not only with technology, but with the modification of the lifestyle of the Plebs, only of the Plebs, eliminating all products (which they say are harmful to the humanity) that today the plebeians can still freely consume, but not tomorrow. Therefore with a numerical reduction of the Plebs themselves, as the legendary Klaus Schwab suggests. The production of goods and services will progressively take place without human roles, thanks to robots and algorithms. Thus the life of the members of the Plebs will last as long as the Social Budget allows it ("budgetary euthanasia"). Take another recent arthouse balloon, the Amazon workers' strike on Black Friday, a mythical day of prevailing consumerism. In reality they are the last romantics of a long-vanished working class; I feel infinite tenderness for them. It's incredible, they go on strike because they haven't understood what is obvious: they have been trained, and poorly paid, to make "automaton moves" that in a few years they will do, better than them, and for 24 hours and 365 days a year, robot-algorithms. And then, frustrated by nothingness, they will await their planned "budgetary euthanasia" on a citizen's sofa. I close with a thought from Jean Baudrillard (Notebooks 1990-95 Theoria Ed, 1999): “…Idiocy is no longer uncultured, on the contrary it is over-informed, it has the same reflected liveliness of artificial intelligence. It is the Xerox degree of imbecility that is confused with the Xerox degree of intelligence”. It's simply the cancel-woke world dreamed of by our fuchsia elites.
RR You, with your mental dystopia, shocked me again. However, if it must be so, so be it.
R Well done! Download the App!
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/carne-sintetica-distopia/ on Sat, 09 Dec 2023 06:20:48 +0000.