maybe we should just eat the rich instead

on capitalism, ultra-processed foods and billionaires

my father once told me a story about a woman ahead of him in the queue at sainsbury’s.

the conveyor belt in front of her was packed with frozen food and cheap convenient meals; the sort that come in boxes with somewhat appetising (but also kinda nauseating) photographs disguising the colourless slop inside. ready meals. pizzas. chicken nuggets. fish fingers. a few loaves of industrial bread shoved in between. it was a big shop; an accumulation of food that can simply be heated in the microwave for a few minutes then tipped onto a plate.

at the very end, just before the divider, sat a packet of rennie — a heartburn relief product.

he laughed at the irony of it when he told me, though only for a second. then his voice sank in realisation.

it wasn’t because there was anything worthy of ridicule about the woman. quite the opposite. she had done exactly what this society trains people to do.

she had bought the cheapest food that would fill her trolley and keep her family fed, and alongside it, the small chalky tablets that might queten the uproar of bodily symptoms after the fact.

the meal → the sickness → the relief

all paid for in the same transaction.

i have thought about that image every single day since. it haunts me.

people are paid too little in an economy that costs far too much. rent, heating, transport, childcare, electricity, food. by the time dinner enters the picture, many people are already making decisions from a position of depletion.

the body is faltering, the mind is exhausted, the bank account is drained. under those conditions, cheap food does not feel like indulgence. it becomes compliance to reality.

food corporations learnt long ago that hunger is only the beginning. the real money sits in engineered appetite.

a fresh meal cooked at home can disappoint you (trust me, i would know!)

too much salt can ruin an entire dish of pasta.

or if you’re anything like me, accidentally adding too much worcestershire sauce to a stroganoff can make you wince.

but a frozen pizza would never be so volatile.

it has already been engineered to pass pleasantly over the tongue, even long after a year of being purchased, and still, leave behind the craving for another.

this is bliss point. it’s the calibrated level of sugar, salt and fat that produces maximum palatability, along with textures and formulations designed to keep foods highly crave-able and if consumed enough, addictive.

then people call it choice.

they speak as though everyone is standing in the supermarket with equal freedom, pausing thoughtfully between fresh salmon fillets and frozen slabs of battered chicken, deciding what kind of person to be.

people arrogantly call it discipline, priorities and education, as though the working class have somehow failed to receive the memo that vegetables are good for them.

news flash: a person can know what would nourish them and still be unable to buy it in sufficient quantity, cook it often enough, store it properly, or choose it over something cheaper that will feed more mouths for longer.

the meal → the sickness → the relief

ultra-processed food comes with a haul of symptoms: heartburn, indigestion, constipation, headaches, weight gain, high blood pressure, poor sleep, inflammation. keep people inside that pattern for long enough, and the consequences become far more serious.

then another company owned by billionaires steps in with little boxes and bottles of medicines and tablets to take the edge off. but, not to cure. never to cure. to cure would mean losing you as a customer, and that would be far too disruptive to their meticulous business model.

there is money to be made from causing the wound and even more money to be made from dressing it.

ordinary people are being asked to perform nutritional virtue under conditions that make it punishingly difficult, while billionaires profit from every stage of the decline.

it reminds me of a bloodless version of the hunger games: people clawing at one another because the blame has to go somewhere, while the rich sit above it all, insulated from the consequences and enriched by the damage.

we’re all just cash cows.

truthfully, we’re not so different from factory farmed animals, raised for meat then slaughtered in the name of profit.

maybe we should just eat the rich instead.

-o.c.