What Rich People Eat

Food and wealth have an often fraught, occasionally delicious relationship. Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP website is a very good example of one end of the food/wealth spectrum. As you can see, if you can stomach the vibe for long enough, there’s a particular kind of rich-people-food that only rich people eat. It’s usually sustainably sourced, deeply adjectival (it’s not just salt, it’s purple, Himalayan, fair-trade, aura-healing, large crystal, hand-harvested, farmers-market-salt-pan-salt), and more expensive than logic dictates anything should be.

In contrast, there’s a kind of food that poor people eat. This food is mysteriously sauced, deeply homogenised, and cheaper than anything edible can explicably be. I once saw a whole chicken meal for sale for $6.99. Nothing with a whole chicken in it should cost that little. Nothing should be that cheap to nurture from cradle to grave, not even horrible feathery yellow-eyed velociraptor-ancestored bird-monsters. I mean, seriously. What corners are you cutting? (Answer: All of them.)

This is not a real chicken.

Since the glory days of the Sumptuary Laws, where people of certain classes were only allowed to eat and wear certain things, food choices have been a signal of social class. I mean, you’re not going to get tarred and feathered for eating a Quinoa Salad in an lower-economic-band area, but people sure are going to look at you with the fear, disgust and mistrust of people who know it's only a matter of time before you gentrify them out of house and home, and Quinoa Salad does not taste good when seasoned with class-warfare.

In HG Wells’ victorian science fiction novel, The Time Machine, the narrator travels forward in time to a time where humanity has evolved into two separate species (yes, that’s a lot of times in one sentence, but time is infinite, so stay with me).

In The Time Machine, there are (will be?) two species that will (have?) evolved. According to HG Wells, (and the Future Perfect tense) these are (to be?) the Eloi, and the Morlocks. The Eloi are effete fruit-eating rich-people, and the Morlocks are ugly underground poor people. Because the Victorians were big on morals and warnings, a moral warning seasons Wells’ time travel parable like a meaningful spice. The ugly Morlocks (poor people) have evolved into a rich-people-eating species, which basically will have served rich people right if they didn’t have their act together in time for the future. (In grammatical terms I think that tense is called the Future Perfect Continuous Fucked.) 

This is top notch Victorian sci-fi time travel, and surprisingly predictive about modern concerns about Veganism's failure to be intersectional. 

Can I call myself 'raw vegan' if I only eat raw vegans?

Anyway, as I said at the beginning of this article (OooOO, it's like time travel!), food and wealth have had an often fraught, occasionally delicious relationship. These days, Superfoods and nutrient dense foods are the province of the wealthy. Rich people demand the most nutrient bang for their overblown buck. In equal and opposite movement, Poor People Food has become emptier and emptier of nutrients, packaging sugar, salt and convenience in one greasy paper wrapping. This means rich people are now 73% antioxidant, while poor people are increasingly subject to chronic preventable 'lifestyle' diseases.

Lifestyle is of course a choice, made autonomously by fully informed individuals who therefore deserve everything they get. That's particularly true for Gwyneth Paltrow who has nothing but time and money to use thinking about alkaline water, and equally true for stressed out individuals teetering on the edge of financial and social ruin. I definitely make good choices when I'm overwhelmed by the need to temporarily hold off the constant threat of losing everything.

Let’s go back to the satirical Quinoa salad from paragraph one. Quinoa, previously a subsistence crop grown and eaten by Bolivian farmers, hit health food shops and rich peoples’ consciousness at about the same time. 

An incredibly nutrient dense, protein rich food, Quinoa quickly became so in-demand that prices soared. The quinoa became so expensive that it was uneconomic for the farmers who farmed it to eat it. In this example, rich people were not literally, but kind of literally eating the food out of poor people’s mouths. It’s okay though. This increased demand gave the poor farmers money to buy rice and other less-nutrient dense things, which is good because as we discussed before, poor people really shouldn’t be eating things with too many nutrients. Who do they think they are? Gwyneth?

"Have you tried being me? I find it helps immensely"

This trend towards rich people hogging all the nutrients and leaving the ‘bad food’ to the poor is an excellent development. As we move inexorably towards a dystopian future, it’s good to know who will be the most nutrient dense when we start eating people.

Of course, there are many different kinds of poor people. The poor people we have in the first world are for the most part a kind of poor that is only poor compared with rich people. If you compare poor people in Australia, for example, to poor people in almost any other country in the world, they look a lot more like rich people than they did when you were comparing them to rich people. This is called having perspective.

It's the difference between not being able to afford one of these and not being able to afford not to eat unless you work in a factory making these.

Let’s just call our Australian version of poor people the ‘Less Rich’, so we don’t accidentally mistake one for someone who works in a factory somewhere for less money per month than you lose behind the couch per week. If you have trouble telling who is rich, who is less rich and who is actually poor, here is a list of 5 questions about food that you can use to determine how likely someone is to be eaten when the future comes.

1)      They have a staple food.

Only really poor people have a staple food, because they are too poor to buy lots of different things. In Australia, most people get to eat a wide variety of food, even if they are less rich. This is a luxury that would have been beyond the comprehension of all but the most bloated aristocrats over the whole of recorded human history.

2)      They ask where something is sourced.

Demanding a narratively satisfying origin story for food is a classic rich-people giveaway. It’s like asking what your daddy does, but about asparagus.

3)      There are too many bright colours on the package.

This code is definitely reserved for the ‘Less Rich’. Rich people food comes in earth tones. In the wild, anything that is the colour of Doritos will kill you horribly and immediately. This is true of actual Doritos too, but in a slower, more chronic obesity and type II diabetes kind of way.

4)      The food is difficult to pronounce.

Quinoa, Gubinge, Camu Camu, Acai Berry. All of these are foods that rich people pay a lot of money eat. The more of them there are in close proximity inside a dish or spoken sentence, the more likely you are to be talking to a Rich Person.

5)      They don’t eat for days at a time.

This is true of both Rich and Poor people. Poor people sometimes can’t afford to eat food, and so they don't. Rich people sometimes refuse to eat food so they can feel smug or thin. If you can’t tell the difference, check for an aura of smugness.

By these signs you should be able to determine if the person you’re observing is poor, Rich or ‘Less Rich’. This will probably have already determined your attitude to them, and by the time the future arrives, whether you have decided to eat them or not. Bon Appetit.

Note: The Author realises this may seem like a rallying cry for a social revolution in which we, the people, eat Gwyneth Paltrow. The Author would like to disclaim any and all responsibility for the use of synecdoche, in which Gwyneth stands as a symbolic representative of all the moneyed classes. She would be delicious, though. I'm just going to say "grass fed" and let you think about it.

Look how delicious she is!

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This article of mine was originally published on the now defunct SBS comedy, and has been edited for you Patreonites as well as slightly punched-up along the lines of my current comedy aesthetic. 

Let me know if I should do more of this kind of thing on this place. 

Chiz!

Alice

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