The future of food:
What a future we have in store for us all. Great things, flying cars, supermen and women, interstellar travel and wondrous monumental technological innovations. Or, depending on who you listen to, a world that has little life left on it, nuclear winter, or even blazing heat having killed off most of the life. And all a result of human intervention.
Who knows what tomorrow brings.
Woody Allen made a movie with my secret crush Diane Keaton long ago called Sleeper. Nerdish Woody wakes up 200 years in the future, and the world is very different. Cigarettes and chocolate are good for you. And the Orgasmatron is the most popular entertainment around. Well at least to Woody anyway. Time alone where he can think of post pubescent Korean girls.
I want to explore that world a bit more in depth. Given the path that America, and the international corporate system of the manufacturing of food like products have begun to follow. And the technology that has developed to accomplish what just might be, our food future...
I wake up, after having been accidentally frozen in liquid nitrogen in a bizarre calamity that would, well, make anyone laugh. Hey, it's me, a lot of weird crap has happened to me. The year is 2266, I was out of touch for 250 years. The company owners, give me an apology, and register my thumbprint so I can live, at their expense, for a while anyway. I have a young secretary assigned to me to help, at least until I can acclimate to the new world. I am sort of hungry, so we go out and find a diner. There in the front counter space are two huge blobs of quivering fleshy looking mounds. The counter man barks at us, "Hey we got the finest Chicken Little in the city. What you want us to make for you. Or maybe a little Beef Supremo. Just look at healthy they both are, tell me which you want."
My guide tells the man two sandwiches, Chicken Little. The man behind the counter slices off two hunks of the quivering flesh and tosses them behind him onto the hot griddle where they sizzle. We stand at the counter and watch as the sandwiches are made. Once finished, we sit at a booth near the back of the diner.
"What was that?" I ask
"The greatest technological innovation ever! Just think, when scientists were able to genetically create a living piece of flesh, it made it possible to feed a nutrient based solution to the living material, it grows and becomes real living chicken or beef."
"No pork?"
"This diner is Kosher."
That made sense, my people persevere. "So what's this green stuff on the sandwich, it isn't lettuce."
"Well Mr. Marshall, when the corporations assumed control of the world some 200 years ago, Bayer, our Almighty Guardian," and here she bowed her head in a religious sort of gesture, "outlawed all plants except those needed to create our foods we have today. Now days, the only things growing on the planet, outside the few remaining acres of forest preserve in San Francisco, are corn, wheat, soy, cotton, beets and canola. Every single thing that we consume can be artificially manufactured from those basic ingredients. Life is ever more wondrous than ever before."
I know it sounds like an impossibility, but think about it.
This scenario is in fact, the goal of every CEO of every one of the food like substance manufacturing corporations, the CEOs of every agrichemical corporation, and every politician as well. That's because when the takeover happens, the politicos will already have structured a deal with their corporate rulers to ensure they live high on the hog and not have to worry about anything.
Like they do now.
Yep
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