More food for thought

Continuing the festive theme of hypocrisy and contradiction, the global production and consumption of food is one of the biggest ethical issues of our time, and it’s an interesting reflection of the multiple realities which most of us inhabit that we can be simultaneously aware of those issues, whilst still being in thrall to celebrity chefs wiffling urgently about shards of butterfly wing on truffle-encrusted piglet nipples, in an operatic cookery contest which makes not the slightest reference to sustainability, seasonality, or even nutrition.

Arguably, such television programmes (MasterChef and its ilk) are more to do with the “human interest” of watching kitchen gladiators slugging it out in their chosen arena than they are to do with a serious attempt to change our eating habits. In other words, decadence as entertainment, vicariously accessible to us all, not just to the privileged few.

Declining civilisations have often been characterised by extreme decadence, whether as a symptom or a cause, but this is maybe the first time it has been so channelled and broadcast through a toxic combination of the cynical & manipulative mass media and the rapacious & relentless commodification of every aspect of our lives. 

The positive side is that future historians should have an easier time seeing where it all went wrong.

Yo ho ho

As we probably all know, Xmas was originally a Germanic pagan festival, Yule, long before being appropriated by the Christian church. The original purpose was to celebrate the winter solstice – the turning point of the year - after which the days slowly lengthen again. 

Even in those early days the celebrations revolved around eating way more than necessary, and drinking a lot of alcohol, albeit at a time when such practices were the exception rather than the norm.

With the decline of the Church, the parasitic Christian overlay has clearly become as tokenistic as the Dickensian myth of the “White Christmas” so, more recently, the festival has been further appropriated, and commodified, by the machinery of capitalism, creating a grotesque & cloyingly sentimental orgy of consumption which epitomises the unsustainable fallacy of market economics. 

As the holiday approaches, if you haven’t already done so, I would urge you to read Monbiot’s excellent essay on the destructive nature of materialism, and any of the several recent exposés of the reality behind Amazon’s global empire of easy consumerism (ref) (ref).