Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Go get your tickets/your seats, snacks and beverages/ while we get wicked all in your brains cracks and crevices
I have always loved my food. On a good deal of social policy questions, you'll find me trimming between liberal and slightly more austere leftish positions. On food, I am an unashamed libertarian. You kind of get that militant if at age 12 you are got up in front of your whole school to collect the junior home economics prize.
The most disturbing image for me in 1984 was not the Rat/face interfacing, but Orwell's description of the 'regulation lunch';
"-- a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet...He [Winston] began swallowing spoonfuls of the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat."
I find the issue of Smart Foods, therefore, a difficult one to get the head round. Harnessing the awesome might of food technology (they can do cheese in an aerosol now? Amazing!) to boost one's nutrition has to be a good thing. Even better than this, personalising foodstuffs! How good is that? “I am feeling bored, what will cheer me up? Hmm, supper designed soley for me alone? Yeah, of course you can have some, but just so you know it was designed for me and thus won't be doing you as much good as it will be doing me”. You can’t really argue with that can you?
I have to tip my hat to the ability of global capitalism to bend things in favour of the gourmand every now and then.
And yet I find something deeply troubling in the mercenary way food is lowered to that of mere fuel in the smart food equation. No pleasure, no aesthetics, no fun; just nutrition. Honest to goodness pro-EU as I am, I can't help but blush at all those attempts to debar good honest Europeans from indulging in anti-social cheese and unhealthy and dangerous charcuterie. Taken to its extreme, I fear the kind of food this rationale leaves you with is the 1984 stew; sanitised, inoffensive, nutritious, and dull.
Mind you, I am still loving Snackspot.
