Pieces of meat are now placed under close surveillance. Be careful who leaves without asking for his rest with a bloody piece under his arm: at the security gates, the alarm will start to howl. These modern guard dogs, these microchip sniffers, are more and more numerous in tracking down thieves.
This is not science fiction. Several supermarkets in Europe are indeed trying to mitigate, through heightened surveillance measures, shoplifting in the butcher and delicatessen sectors. From Athens to London, via Paris and Berlin, cases of meat theft are increasing.
When food prices skyrocket, every grocery bill is greeted with a headache. It’s hard to imagine affording a piece of tomahawk beef, “without added hormones”, at $60 a kilo. At the butcher, the inaccessible Wagyu beef, $160 a kilo, reminds you of the limits of democratic equality.
Food inflation is on average between 10% and 25% in one year, depending on the country, report those who follow the crazy race of grocery carts. Obviously, wages have not followed. The bulk of humanity is impoverished.
At the same time, in one of the most privileged parts of the planet, people are wondering, in the midst of their chic life projected on glossy paper, if the grille of the Rolls-Royce, the oversized yacht and the gold watch will still be enough to proclaim, to the face of the world, the exacerbated feeling of their superiority.
From now on, the luxury industry constitutes the goodwill of some of the greatest fortunes of the world. While the bulk of the population is eating the wool on the back, yes-men praise the lifestyle of the ultra-rich, extolling, among other things, “masculine elegance”. The homogeneity of sartorial appearances, created by the consumer society in the post-war period, is an egalitarian illusion that this return to chic promises to clarify.
What are these people fighting against who claim, without laughing, their right to elegance, as if the fact of carrying a pocket handkerchief constituted a resistance to the real excesses of our time? What are their declarations of love to the nation worth, those who work at all times to condone the iniquities that undermine it from within?
The important thing for them has always been to demonstrate, at all costs, the feeling of their superiority. What does it matter to these people that their elegance is historically confused with the old clothes of finance capital. This elegance of a very particular kind, set up as a new norm by those who make a fortune from excess, constitutes another attempt to justify economic inequality by symbolic domination.
Since its origins, the costume of the businessman has imposed itself as that of beings who have the means to be unemployed. It is not a garment to wear out in the workshop, but to command others to wear. Pierre Falardeau, in The time of the jestersspoke rightly of a “beautiful collection of insignificant chromes, medalists, ties, vulgar and coarse with their chic costumes and their expensive jewels”.
The spokespersons of the social ultra-right are working, by all means, to endorse social inequalities in the newspapers, on television, on the radio. Well seated on their steak, they remind us, in the name of the greatness of a civilization of which they believe themselves the paragons, of their right to have a feast, among friends, with a few calf’s heads. In front of the others, they work to play butchers, cutting out the tongues of those who dare to challenge them.
Speaking of large hams, is the one that ordinary mortals eat in Canada on the eve of being better controlled? In France, the National Food Safety Agency confirmed last summer the link between cancer and the consumption of nitrites in processed meats. Nitrite salts, nitrate salts, or both are added to many meats to improve color, texture, and flavor, as well as to control microbial growth. In Europe, the permitted rate, now considered too high, is 150 mg per kilo of meat. The French State is asking the agri-food sector to reduce these levels by 20 to 25%. Several authorities recommend a total ban. Meanwhile, in Canada, the permitted use of these substances is 200 mg/kg…
Excessive meat consumption is a strong feature of the neoconservative model of society. We are encouraged to eat it, even though we know it causes all kinds of problems, up and down the food chain. This consumption has conditioned troubling behavior, both among those who no longer have the means to eat it and who find themselves stealing it, and among those who bite society from all sides, playing the big beasts. This paints, without question, the portrait of a sick society, condemned to watch even the price of lettuce climb.
I watched yesterday the premiere of Survivor Quebec. This imitation adventure, broadcast with a lot of commercials, presents people from here who are taught, among other things, the art of identifying edible plants in the Philippines. Very practical for learning to eat differently here on earth…
Entertainment, by definition, is a diversion. Can we help noticing that it mimics a model of society that we are already stuffed with? Be your own goal! Fight against each other! To hell with living together! In this quest where reigns every man for himself, the winner is the last to survive, in the middle of a plastic island, with money coming out of his ears. Is this not a representation of the model of society in which we sink?