Halfway Through the Slow Boil

On the Road to Weaponized Food

The empty beeps of the self checkout at Walmart. 

I'm never less human than I am right here, in this place. I am the very definition of a consumer: a void to be filled by cold corporate products. Each sound of a barcode scanning into the machine chips off a fragment of my vitality. The pieces fall around my feet, to be swept up by a low wage immigrant worker. They're happy to do this job; to have arrived in a land of promise and build up from the bottom. Nobody has the heart to tell them they're too late; they're already as far up the mountain as they'll travel- the rest of us are on our way down to meet them.

I loathe the Walmart brand cheese. It looks and feels like plastic. Intuition tells me it probably is. The higher quality cheese pushes the boundaries of my budget when it isn't on sale, and this week I have enchiladas to make, so shredded free range chicken wrapped in chemicals and cellophane it is.

At least my colon will be perfectly preserved when I develop stage four cancer and the oncologist has to remove it.

I refuse to buy meat here. It's the one line I won't cross. I still have enough dignity to search out the locally grown chicken, beef and pork- although I know that time is coming to an end. Soon I'll either have to hunt and kill the meat I feed my family or accept a diet purchased exclusively via vending machine.

There is no nutritional value in a twelve dollar family size lasagna.

The 90’s were a great time. Most people who grew up during that era were raised on processed foods. Our parents were the first dual income generation and the convenience of an entire premade meal in a colorful box was too appealing to resist. Mothers were career women and didn't have the time or energy to make a healthy dinner from scratch, so Tyson Foods and Kraft Heinz became the unofficial sponsors of gender equality. I run no less than twenty miles per week and I'm still fifty pounds overweight. I have years of eating Bagel Bites and Pizza Pops to thank for that. I've cleaned up my diet as I've gotten older, but the damage is done. My liver and kidneys checked out somewhere around 2002.

The other consumers around me produce a symphony of scanner blips; little black holes swallowing their own parts of a trademarked universe. There are no smiling faces, just drowning souls thrashing violently as the public private partnerships above them push their heads underwater. Sadness looms between the rows of pay stations. We were all idealists once. We all vowed to never enter the Eye of Sauron and purchase the most essential in life sustenance from this faceless behemoth. Inflation and stagnant salaries changed that. One by one we were all dragged in by the magnetism of lower prices. All of us are here out of necessity; the last stop on the road to moral compromise. The devil offered us two dollars off corn flakes and the slow economic decay of first world nations made that two dollars a factor.

Billions for BlackRock and Ukraine, Spaghetti-O’s for you.

Life is getting harder as the days pass. They're trying to edge us into irrelevance. We're the last generation to remember life before the internet; before selfies and instant virality scrambled our sense of self-worth. Once we're gone, likes and followers will transfer into social credit scores. It'll be an easy transition; a world of people trained to define themselves by level of recognition within algorithms will view their rating by fascist governments much in the same way. Top scoring citizens will be rewarded with special privileges and will assume a quasi-celebrity status analogous to the Instagram influencers of today.

We’re the only barrier between our children and a return to feudalism. The aspiring nobility are eager to eliminate that obstacle from the equation. They want to pulverize us into a fine dust and blow our particles into the winds of history. They enlisted drag queens to usher our offspring through the gates of gender dysphoria and condemned us when we correctly identified their scheme. We were labeled homophobes and bigots for questioning what interests men with their dicks tucked into sequined lingerie would have in our children. We knew the reasons- even if we were too polite or afraid to voice them. They observed our awareness and were shocked to find signs of consciousness still flickering within our weathered shells.

A camera displays my face on the screen as the computer adds products to my customer profile. I'm forced to stare into the infinite blackness of my pupils as I become onions, spinach, tortillas, and of course, monterey jack flavored shards of plexiglass. This is a glimpse into the future of a Bill Gates controlled universe; the subtle humiliation of watching yourself decompose in real time- or not so subtle if you recognize what you're looking at.

Microsoft’s prince of darkness is now the largest owner of farmland in America. China is not far behind. In Canada independent farmers are being systematically exterminated. Nationalization is the goal, Venezuela is the model. But in this scenario we aren't spinning into a communist death roll, we're gliding into the caves of fascism. Gates, China and a handful of others will become the exclusive producers of food in the western world. Social credit will decide the quality of nutrition we have access to. High scorers will be granted rations of meat, fruit and vegetables in accordance with their personal carbon allotment. Low scorers will subsist on synthetic insect patties. Food and water will be weaponized to subdue the population. By 2030 manufactured scarcity will be common- a means through which the nobility will contort society in whichever ways they desire. Bagel Bites will become a luxury item. Vaccine schedules will determine your ability to acquire them.

I hit the pay button and am subjected to a tirade of ads from MasterCard. Walmart is baiting me into a line of credit that will ensure my continued patronage. Mammoth interest rates guarantee poverty, and what's poverty without Walmart? The two live in tandem; paratroopers leaping out of a plane with a flailing public attached as a parachute. Flesh and bones don't provide any substantial resistance against gravity, but that's the entire point- the crash landing is the intention.

Just another splatter on a rainbow painted crosswalk.