pasta

Hm, seems it’s starting bite, eh?

The news, all the stuff that’s fit to broadscat, has turned up a few gems of late. Here's a few from memory. Drought in Australia has trashed the wine harvest. Greece is devastated by forest fires following a heat-wave. The price of chips is set to soar as the UK spud harvest rotted in the summer floods. Bread prices are predicted to follow suit. And, pasta prices in Italy have been hiked following a record poor harvest. You know where I’m going to take this, so I’ll sidestep the obvious, and muse off leftfield.

Now, just because we have supermarkets rammed full of stuff our Grans had never even heard of, let alone regarded as food, and that the stuff turns up at the end of a very clever just in time distribution chain that limits our food waste to a mere quarter of what hits the shelves, doesn’t mean it didn’t come from the same place it always did. The ground. Ultimately. OK, the ground may be 1000s of miles away rather that a cart ride, but it’s still basically grown somewhere, or fed on something that was grown somewhere. Unless you eat processed cheese.

And, as stuff goes haywire, there will be less of it and at the wrong times. It’ll get less predictable, and predictable is what very clever just in time systems demand. All this has consequences. As the cliché goes, any society is three meals from a revolution. It’s amazing where a bread riot can take you. And not all of the destinations are utopian. In fact, I doubt many of them are even close.

When shit hits fan, and the streets are full of hungry folk who are used to four different flavours of bagel but have no idea which way up a spade goes, I’m willing to bet the majority of them will fall in behind the first half way credible guy in a tank who chucks loaves at them. And, well, we never really got on with the old neighbours anyway.

How’s that line form Pans Labyrinth go? ‘This is our daily bread in Franco’s Spain, kept safe in this mill! The Reds lie because in a united Spain there’s not a single home without fire or bread.’ If the fear or, more potently, the actuality of the loss of fodder and fire drives people to assail the state, the provision - or control of provision - of the same in times of crisis is a potent tool for it’s consolidation. People will trade freedom for food, shelter and warmth, at least in the short term. And by then it’s to late. Pasta price peaks today, tomorrow the tapas of tyranny.

So, you’d best stock up on your Hunter Valley Chardonnay and your artisanale pappardelle, and get ready for your ration book. And, remember, hoarding is next to looting - share you stocks, Friend Citizen, or the Millitia may have something to say….