Look to the West Volume IX: The Electric Circus
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
It also occurs to me that Timeline-L crosstime researchers would likely see OTL as a horrifying synthesis of Diversitarian and Societist positions.
From the former:
*DUN DUN duuuuuuuuuuuun!
From the former:
- Separate nations and their attendant languages and superstructural elements.
- HPOCs, albeit unenforced, both between and within nations, with all the attendant grandstanding and culture war, although the resulting riots are unfortunately far more "lynch mob" than "football riot" depending on where you are.
- Truly all-encompassing global economic order that de facto melts straight through national boundaries. One underwritten by petrodollars (that actually work) to boot!
- Global monoculture, albeit one that isn't quite as totalizing, yet still capable of far outstripping individual national or regional competitors on balance.
- The dissolution of traditional cultures and the synthesis of global music and foodways, albeit at an insidiously* slow pace.
*DUN DUN duuuuuuuuuuuun!
How exactly do you even begin to "purify" cuisine?
Would they even bother? After all, cooking is a universal human practice, as is just mixing things together and seeing if it tastes good. Just because the ingredients are from half way around the world, doesn't mean that the dish itself is invalid.
If anything, they might try to form universal cuisine, incorporating ingredients from all around the world.
That was my take on it, I think people were taking their approach to music and assuming it applied to food in the same way. Really if they were clever they would just make universal cultural appropriation mandatory until everything's so blended you can't tell what came from where anymore.
Exactly - they want a homogenised world culture, not a differentiated one.
If anything, "food purism" is something I'd expect Diversitarians to do. Or at least some (e.g. the Russians).
Oh boy, I'm just imagining the Russian government trying to force their people to give up vodka, just because potatoes aren't native to the country.
But global warming and resultant dislocations might homogenize humanity in the end with “states” roughly corresponding to continent-sized groupings of the still-habitable areas
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Basically, since people anywhere cassava and shrimp are endemic eat them. It's just weird outliers (horse meat has been specifically mentioned, bugs and species only found in narrow areas would be another) that would be getting suppressed under this schema.
That's exactly what they'd do, imagine all those Prohibition agents smashing anything with potatos but completely ignoring anything with beets.Exactly - they want a homogenised world culture, not a differentiated one.
If anything, "food purism" is something I'd expect Diversitarians to do. Or at least some (e.g. the Russians).
Oh boy, I'm just imagining the Russian government trying to force their people to give up vodka, just because potatoes aren't native to the country.
That's what I mean, it's happening, it's just A) slow and B) not the direct and explicit result of top-down government policy.
Ideological deviationism is obscene to them but it's likely easier to tolerate the Gray Societists rather than risk them falling back into the grips of the nationalistically-blinded. Even moreso in the case of the Eternal State, since that population would be harder to incorporate given the Universal Church and the probable Combine tendency to incentivize pork consumption.
But again, the Societists, and especially the Combine, are the opposite of rational about this sort of thing. So I don't think it's particularly likely that they'll take a path of least resistance until after a path of most resistance fails miserably.
Maybe LTTW 20th century culinary innovations might look very vaguely like Marinetti's attempt at making a new cooking? Marinetti purposefully expunged French loanwords from his culinary terminology, tried to make a "scientific" cooking with ozone machines and ultraviolet lights, railed against pasta because he thought it made people sluggish and wanted Italians to be a race of speedy, agile rice-eaters instead (also because Italy had trouble importing wheat at the time), wanted perfume sprayed on food, abolished cutlery and tried to turn cooking into an art with set principles on aesthetics and preparation.
There was also that Soviet cookbook whose author I forget, but that seems pretty boring and mostly based on the need for people to cook simple nutritious meals with limited ingredients.
Also I object to the idea that cooking is so obviously a "universal human practice" because while it obviously is, it hasn't been seen that way, and an element of early modern proto-nationalisms and xenophobias was a sort of culinary nationalism. In LTTW where casual xenophobia and a world order of early modern-derived nation-states vs societists is the norm I definitely think there would be culinary nationalism+strange sciency and artistic attempts at constructing a "human cuisine". Something like cooking with ozone machines, perfumes and pulverised ingredients eaten with hands doesn't even seem out of place for Societists, considering the Combine's use of atonal music and disgusting Novalatina it's right up their alley. It wouldn't have the same futurist messaging behind it but superficially maybe similar.
Here's a video of one of Marinetti's recipes being prepared just for fun.
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The Futurists are absolutely fascinating. The Futurist Cookbook, the Manifesto of Futurist Lust, say what you will but given how long they lasted they made a good go of "reimagine literally every facet of human culture".
zang tumb tumb
Yeah we already know a bit about what diversitarian culinary culture is like from that one post by Thande in which airlines are mandated to stock different cuisines for different nationalities, and they fly in separate cabins. So in my opinion Societist cuisine might try to imagine something completely new free of the baggage of the past (for different reasons than the Futurists of course) like that, either that or their cuisine is about as exciting as soylent (or maybe some Spanish-Indonesian mock blend of rice and spice like some people suggested).
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A trend that could happen in LTTW is that while assimilation in the 19th century was more stronger and forced the OTL, there were more key aspects of the previous immigrant culture surviving that assimilation more than otl. This can probably be seen through some of the first-generation immigrants having better relationships with their countries and thus being able to keep some of their key cultural aspects throughout the worse assimilation. I can see this in the germans of russia and the ENA, with the Germans in both countries having to assimilate into their cultures. However, thanks to having far better relationships with the powers that be compared to OTL, they are still able to be slightly germen in their assimilation process. I can see other immigrants in other countries' assimilation processes do something similar. Basically, it's the assimilation process of Germanized Polish from the OTL 19th century, but more so and more widespread in other assimilated communities. I can definitely see assimilated immigrant names being more strange compared to OTL assimilated immigrant names.
I mean, I'm Dutch - for us Philip II of Spain has long been the 'big bad' of the Dutch Revolt. But I know he's called "Philip the Prudent" in Spain, and I don't think there's anyone here who's bothered by that fact.
The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food - Wikipedia
It is an interesting approach - it has everyday fare as well as for special occasions.
Common meals could be made from ingredients that were, from what it seems, intended to be available to anyone anywhere in the USSR.
That would not be the case for the Combine - at least not at first.
One would expect that not everything would be equally available on each zone - for example, not all fruits can travel well. (Lúcuma rings a bell - needs to be dried into a powder, which is something relatively recent, for example)
Human Cooking could be standardized by dividing it into several parts:
- Tools and Processes: pots, pans, searing, blanching, acids, browning, heat and cold... These are -or can be made- universal.
- Ingredients: Classified globally by flavour profile, any needed cooking instructions for safe consumption, nutritional values, etc. so that if some product is hard to obtain in say Zone 3 Urb 56, for example... quince, you can use guava instead.
- The recipes would be combinations of processes with a suitable combination of available ingredients.
So a recipe can be generated from the book in a process similar to Ramón Llull's Ars Combinatoria. Or the pornography generator machine in 1984, same principles.
However, there's another approach - similar to Familistas vs. Garderistas, you could have no kitchen at home (except for maybe reheating something) and all cooking done in collective ones, like the Dutch used to have, and leave cooking to professionals.
(This approach has likely contributed greatly to the tiny kitchens at the homes in Dutch cities in the Netherlands even nowadays)
This probably works better - the Human Cookbook can be set up at central locations on each ZoneXUrbY so local cooks can consult it, and available processes and ingredients can be expanded or refined as they become available.
Kaiphranos
Donor
I still think the way to go for weird Societist food culture is class-based sumptuary laws - the intelligentsia are issued with fish (or other "brain food"), workers get bland and hearty fare, Zonal Reyes are required to feast in the grand manner...
That's hardly a leap, the rations for the universal food guarantee are already class stratified
