The Life and Times of the Food Chain

 

The best analogy for our political classes in the West (it must be the best, because I thought of it) is that they’re a chain of tatty old restaurants called Chez des Anges Idéologues.

The chain has a monopoly supply of ingredients. They’re not the ingredients that the bon viveurs want, but that’s what’s on the menu. Its owners – Gun Bank Lobby Enterprises – have passed a law saying any restaurateur can compete, but they must be able to show the State that they have $40,000 upfront just to open, and a budget of $40,000,000 for publicity. Further, they must employ chefs approved by….oddly enough, the monopoly restaurant chain. This is to stop any possibility of delicate diner stomachs being poisoned by new and untried recipes, which is a laudable precaution and obviously highly desirable.

In order to maximise profits and keep food producers desperate for business, none of the restaurants in the monopoly serve fresh food. The menu screams “All freshly served today!” but the ingredients were pulled out of the earth, a can or the fridge quite some time ago, and have been reheated under slighty different descriptions several times.

The menu on offer, with very few exceptions, has remained unchanged since 1908. This, the owners quite rightly point out, reflects its enduring popularity. And also the endurance of the customers. Particularly old ideas include A manifesto of Strogonoff meats, cooked in genuine Antifa microwaves of LoveNotHate by feminist sisters and served on a bed of roses by ageing veterans of the class struggle; Our very own Eton Mess, hand-trampled by Shires donkeys, accompanied by economically truthful cucumber sandwiches and tossed in a drivel of trickle-down urine; and not forgetting that recurrent favourite, LibDum spaghetinni alla Surgio da Vinci, presented on a platter of Verhofstadt sprouts and topped with a generous spoon of Campbell’s soup.

An especially well-loved tradition at Chez des Anges Idéologues is to order a course, be served a completely different dish, and then be thrown out when you argue. Another is to complain that the Berliner FührerDiktat Schnitzel is undercooked, and then see how many times you can send it back before the waiter suggests a cancellation of your order. And finally, to tell the maitre d’ you don’t like anything on the menu, and then be charged double for eating nothing.

Depending on which global market space Chez des Anges Idéologues occupies, every four years, five years or three months, the diners are given the democratic right to vote for the best recipe, a process overseen by the waiters, chefs and proprietors who remain above the fray of elections in order to ensure fairness. If the result is tied, things revert to the way they were, and then some time later the clients are given another go at not being wrong.

Occasionally, a new restaurant concept is launched, receives spectacular word-of-mouth reviews, but then mysteriously gets a flurry of complaints from the mass media cuisine “experts”, and winds up being investigated by the Gun Bank Lobby Enterprises subsidiary, Poisonfinder General Incorporated. Such has been the fate in recent years of, for example, the chains Trump à la Russe and Tea Party in the US, in Britain the plain food brand Farrago, and in France the Poulets Jaunes. To date, prosecutions of these new rivals have met with only limited success; but such has caused many loyal Idéologues frequenters to think twice about the health dangers involved in patronising eateries where the food available might be infected with listeria, or even hysteria.

This is particularly true of the British niche dessert chain Robinson’s Jam, which folded following a nasty incident involving Halal riots and passive policing.

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Protecting the human-to-amoeba food chain (and the water that keeps it going) is the only ecological cause at present that gets my unqualified support. Protecting the food chain of the political class is a recipe for stagnation, and the dead end of Homo sapiens.

I leave you tonight with the news that every politician in every “mainstream” political Party in Britain is warning about dangers: the dangers of Farage as a stepping stone to Nazism, the dangers of WTO Brexit, the dangers of a Second Referendum and not having a Second Referendum, the dangers of Conservatives electing a Leaver Prime Minister, and really – when you look at this massive spectrum of fear – the dangers of doing anything that might be a break with the past….a recent past that has been anything but distinguished.

It’s all very sad. But when there’s nothing funny in any of it, the only course of action is to make it laughable.