Dishtopia
How and where it started no one can recall. Exactly what size it has become no one can say, but still it grows. Covering hundreds or perhaps thousands or maybe even tens of thousands of miles, the complex seems to run itself; no single person or committee is in charge. Everyone knows what to do.
There is no nourishment here and no wholesomeness or moderation. It is a place of glut and bloat, of surplus and indulgence. It is packed out with produce. Spilling out of huge sacks slumped here and there, the scattered raw ingredients cover the floor creating a carpet of excess and thick pile waste. There is too much stuff; the rooms jammed with cooking utensils and packed out with food - too much food. It is squashed underfoot, crushed and kicked around and still each day more sacks arrive: all types of flour, rice, beans, potatoes, and crates of vegetables and fruit, churns of milk and dairy. Layer upon layer, each successive delivery heaped on the last, which already sits on top of mouldy piles, the bottom layer slowly spoiling. The stench of decaying food mixes with the aroma of fresh produce. Somewhere in a corner of the vastness a putrid rotting swamp has formed that slowly drains to some unknown sump below.
In amongst this, an army of cooks strive to make ever more perfect, ever more entertaining food. The chefs are at liberty to cook whatever they want, free to choose ingredients and create recipes - they are considered artists each one a potential messiah who can deliver the diner to taste nirvana. This has become the organism’s single purpose: to discover the most perfect and exciting dish, the most exquisite taste that has ever been created and consumed by humans. It is to this end that the system is geared and the chefs work as fast as they can - all day and night, they cut and pound and grind and slice and sauté and grill and bake and boil to create rare dishes and exquisite delicacies. And every minute of every hour of every day huge numbers circle the complex snatching at the dishes that emerge. We slurp and suck, drink, nibble, chomp, crack, munch and gulp each new dish: every soup, salad and stew; all the roasts and bakes, we empty all the tangines, the duchies, the hot pots, the casseroles and the bread tins.
It keeps growing, sucking in more produce, more people: more chefs, more consumers. More ovens, burners and cookers are installed, the growth is unrestrained and it is like a bloated and swollen stomach that requires constant feeding. The whole world is geared to maintaining the system, feeding it with resources, materials and labour. Different groups seem to attend to separate parts of the complex. Some are tasked with sourcing ever more exotic raw ingredients from every part of the planet; others are responsible for ensuring the energy supply to keep the operation running smoothly; everyone has a role.
The noise is deafening – the shouts and cries from the chefs, their hectoring belligerence and pitiless criticisms of each other’s work - all part of the banter cuchina. The smashing of plates, the banging of pots and scraping, the fizzing, sizzling of the pans, the cursing and swearing produces a hellish din that can be heard across the globe. A noise only matched by the sound of the consumers, clamouring for food, each scrapping and fighting to get close to the counters. Huge fights break out that last a few seconds and quickly die out, only for the baying crowd to surge again. The chaos is home to every human function, procreation, birth and death all happen as part of the scramble for the perfect taste, nothing matters more than this single striving – everything else, every human need and emotion is subsidiary to this central concern.
Without pause, we eat our way through everything. But still we are not sated, still our demand continues; our appetites swell and with every swallow a new need is born. The palate of the corpulent crowd is on a constant high alert. Bombarded with herbs and spices, sugars and salts our taste receptors have reached a state of extreme tension; they sing with every blast delivered by each new recipe. And when we bite into a dish that for a moment we imagine to be perfect, we think - That’s it! Sattori! We glimpse a faultless world, a sublime future of gastro heaven stretching out ahead of us.
We imagine if this moment can be held, preserved and then repeated, then everyday I will be in umami paradise. We grab for more helpings seizing the hand of the cook we thrust the serving ladle into our mouths, feeding our need, our desire. But almost as soon as it arrived the sensation is lost, the instant slips away. The perfection fleeting – or maybe it was never really there and despite however many more mouthfuls we take, the moment recedes, the new dish seems to lose its appeal. It is diminished and desperately we shovel more in, but the promised paradise moves further away until finally after a sustained overload, the dish is rendered bland almost tasteless. It joins the archive of half-remembered highs, a jumbled library of flavours failed.
Yet still we come for more and still the place strains to generate enormous quantities of new dishes – the produce keeps arriving and the heat continues to build. Chefs collapse from exhaustion and are replaced from our ranks. Falling at their posts, these soldiers of the stove, crumple to the floor and become part of the mass of organic materials. Their bodies covered with the constant deliveries of ingredients are gradually lost to the decay below eventually merging into the morass.
Meanwhile we clamour for richer, more extreme culinary wonders pushing the cooks deeper into unchartered territory. Nothing seems to satisfy us. The chefs are driven to despair such is the demand placed on them, their role is unquestioned, their place in the system fixed. If one dies from exhaustion then there are already others willing to take their place such is the prestige of the role. To be close to the food, to be the one tasting and developing these wonderful recipes is the most desirable of post.
Deep in the belly of the beast, somewhere lost in the enormous labyrinth, a unique flavour has its moment of genesis. It’s not clear what happened exactly but certainly it was a chance discovery. Sure human flesh has been used before in recipes – that’s nothing new. Parts of dead chefs have been sliced up and added to dishes to try impart a rare or unexpected kick. The organs have been pickled and served up as unusual delicacies or black puddings made from the blood of the deceased. Nobody is too concerned by the cannibalism. Some chefs use it, some do not. Perhaps the consumers are ignorant of the fact, or maybe they know and don’t care because what really matters is what is produced. Sometimes the flavours catch on and there is a brief wave of intensity that ripples the crowd as the rare meat is tasted and tested, but this does not differ from any other outbreak of gastric pleasure that is generated by a novel dish. And since no recipes are ever named by the staff and no ingredients are ever divulged since no one cares to know. There is no secrecy or attempt to suppress knowledge, it is just assumed that if the dish works then the crowd will bray for more. But something else is happening here, there is a new layer of flavour, an additional dimension to the taste structure. It almost certainly began by accident. Likely that the chef concerned had a nerve problem, which meant she could only partially feel that her hand was being fried in the pan as she leaned back to rest on the stove for five minutes respite. It hurt but not so much that she wanted to take her hand away, so tired was she from the never-ending shifts. When the pain did reach a certain point she lifted her hand round and only then saw what damage had been done, her palms and fingers had been completely cooked – not burnt but fried to a fine golden colour with some crispy pieces of fat around the edge. No one can be sure as the telling has gone through so many mouths but it seems that without thinking, she took a nibble on her hand. Perhaps because she was so used to tasting and testing everything she cooked that it was automatic and so before she realised what she was doing, she had taken a small bite. Some say she was shocked and screamed aloud once she realised what she had done, others say that the sheer intensity of the flavour forced the cry from her lips, but whichever telling is correct, it is true that she liked what she tasted and keen to analyse the taste she took further bites – each time savouring the flavour and trying to discern the exact nature of the experience. She had tasted human flesh before probably everyone of the millions of chef working in there had. This however was different; she could not quite work it out. It was of course painful but the uniqueness of the sensation was such that she continued to nibble and wince, nibble and wince making her way through the rest of her fingers. Meanwhile others in her section had stopped working and were watching her in amazement as she slowly devoured most of her hand and although she was crying she clearly enjoyed the meal.
It took a while for the chefs to work out what was going on. The cook who ate her own hand, was seriously damaged by her auto feasting, but she so desperately wanted to re-live the moment and share it with others that she had her foot removed under anaesthetic and slow cooked some of it in a stew and sauté the toes in olive oil. It was hard work as she only had one hand and one foot and had to be helped in the cooking. She could not capture the same flavour though and in fact the food was pretty ordinary. Although some claimed it was excellent, she knew it was nothing compared to the taste she had experienced when eating her hand. So although it was a terrible cost that would render her incapable of working, she decided to repeat that process with her other hand. Gathering round a set of her fellow chefs she plunged her remaining hand into the hot oil. The pain was intense but as before while it should have been unbearable and others would have fainted she was able to withstand the agony until her hand and fingers were nicely fried ready for eating. The assembled chefs all took a bite of the proffered appendage and all agreed it was exceptional - the best they had ever ever tasted. The handless chef wept with relief. Others shed tears of joy, as they knew they were party to a special moment. They had seen and tasted something quite unique and were certain this was to be the beginning of a new era in their quest. But it puzzled them - what was it that made this so unique? Was it this particular chef? It could not be the case because her foot had not matched this. It must be in the process; somehow it must be to do with the alive-ness of the limb that was being cooked. Perhaps it required a living and conscious person to be cooking their own flesh – or at least the person to whom the body part belonged must still be attached and conscious. Other started experimenting but often failed because they could not so easily withstand the pain, they had feet or hands removed surgically but this never produced the same result. The flesh must be cooked live – that was clear and since this required extreme levels of pain tolerance it was initially only few who could manage the culinary act. It became the pinnacle that all chefs strove to achieve and it became part of the training to develop a tolerance to pain. Finally after many trials it became clear that the exercising of the pain receptors in the brain was generating the flavour. This was triggering a hormone and protein release that infused the dying flesh with its unique tang.
Word of the new flavour seeped out along with rare samples of the food and it was not long before excitement about the dishes began to grow.
Even now, the whole vast operation continues to produce gargantuan amounts of food to satisfy the demand of the consumers outside and there are still many successes which millions enjoy, but everyone knows that deep inside the maze exceptional flavours are being produced. Within the complex the new self-cook taste is being tried and tested in random sites throughout. The food just comes up and out at the point closest to where they are produced. And as these new special dishes begin to be made in greater numbers so the demand for them spreads across the immense plains that were home to the all-consuming hoards. Demand grows ever more shrill and incessant and to match it the supply of people willing to find the strength and resilience to self cook also flourishes.
But there is a problem. Each self-cooking chef can only manage four or five sessions before they lose all their extremities and render themselves useless in the process and in many cases so weakened from the trauma and loss of blood that they die after preparing their last appendage. Instead of a chef producing hundreds of dishes throughout a career they are generating only a handful before their remains make a final pot roast (as it soon became the custom to quickly chop up and cook these dead colleagues because in fact it was discovered that some of the flavours produced in the self cooking remained in the rest of the muscle tissue albeit in dilute form. It proved a popular second tier taste.)
The chefs are now the labour, the raw material and the final product. Despite the self sacrifice and the inevitable suicide the desire to be up there cooking is undimmed and the billions and billions of consumers that lived outside continue to provide a vast pool of willing labour and material resource to keep the stoves working and the dishes coming. Tens of thousands of new recruits are stepping up every hour replacing the dead or dying, cooking their own body parts and then quickly being replaced themselves as they keeled over in agony.
The whole system is now making and eating auto-fry human, and in fact this is the dominant raw ingredient. No dish is made without and it appears that deep-frying is one of the most popular ways of making the food. Thousands upon thousands of chefs are self-cooking every day to keep up the supply of dishes to the consumers and the consumers are replenishing the stock of cooks, and the system had settled into a regular pattern.
But after a while it seems to stutter. For some reason the cooks are not producing themselves fast enough and the crowd hammering on the counters are growing boisterous and unruly. Impatient for the fix of torture-flavoured flesh, they yell and bawl, leaning over and shoving the chefs, goading them into working faster. At some point an impatient punter volunteers his hand to a chef who is at the same time boiling his own left hand, without a second thought the cook takes the proffered appendage and plunges it into a vat of boiling oil, the person half faints with the pain but his desperation for the food keeps him hanging in there while his body part is prepared for him. All the agony and pain is quickly dispelled the moment he takes his first bite. As in the story of the original chef the exquisite flavour was like nothing he had tasted before. All the other occasions he had been eating the self-cook flesh, it was of course someone else’s body and their pain receptors, nervous system and enzymes. The release of the protein hormone cocktail into the muscle tissues was theirs alone. This gave the flavour a certain subjective poignancy, a kind of personal piquancy that can only be experienced by the individual and while tasting the flesh of others made in this way was akin to that sensation it would never match it. It was like kissing God.
And so a final era begins during which the consumers are thronging at the counters, dangling hands and feet over the worktops to have them cooked by the chefs. All manner of recipes are developed and for the first time a dialogue between the punters and the chefs develops as they deliberate and discuss how best to prepare these final suppers. A great creative wave rises up and washes through the system, passionate debates involving hundreds of people rage over just one person’s remaining foot and how it should be served. The fast food frying so popular before loses its appeal as punters opt for slow cook methods and even sashimi has its champions in some corners. It is for many a golden era, when culinary care and compassion returns. Relieved to know where the raw ingredients are sourced, the production line frenzy of previous years is regarded with a touch of regret.
The extremities are still the most popular parts used in the cooking although other bits had been tried. Some fanatics had made extreme attempts at removing vital organs like a kidney and having it quickly cooked, but the chefs were not surgeons and more often than not the person died from the trauma and loss of blood before they could get a mouthful. Legs and arms worked well but for the best flavour there nothing could match the hands and the feet.
Most people die after the fourth meal. Some survive beyond this point, but not for long, they could barely fend for themselves and are often so sick from the suffering and injury that they have little fight left in them. No one has time to care for the shuffling moaning casualties so engrossed are they in their own meals and recipes and the fervent debates over cooking methods. The cries of anguish and pain are everywhere mixed with the roars and whoops of joy, for no individual can contain the agony just as they cannot suppress the pleasure. In general there is a festive spirit – each person feels intimately involved with the system, the separation between consumer and producer, between chef and diner is gone they work together to produce the best results. A wonderful feeling of empowerment and agency in the process has spread to every region, we are finally all master chefs, masters of our own demise. So the fourth and final meal takes on the character of a celebration, others gather and party with the person who is enjoying their final supper, their ultimate repast. A true spirit of carnival emerges, a farewell to the flesh celebrated in its most perfect form.
Everyone knows it is coming to an end though. The death rate far outstrips the birth rate and the population is shrinking rapidly, chefs and punters alike there is no difference anymore. The parties rage but over the years the attendees dwindle. Folk are dying at a terrific pace and the system naturally reduces as the demand/supply drops. Whole sections of the complex empty out and are soon forgotten, the organism draws inwards as its extremities atrophy and die off.
The farewell parties are morphing into long-drawn-out rituals and the pace slows even further, long gone are the frenzied days of years gone by, people are savouring every mouthful. There is no superior taste, no better sustenance - the quest has been fulfilled and we finally can relax knowing that we had with our immense powers of intelligence and imagination found the ultimate food that produced in us paroxysms of pleasure and well being. So, naturally we slow down to best cherish and enjoy these moments.
In the end there is only one person left, high on their own supply they struggle to cook the last dish with no hands, holding the knives and pots between two stumps. Dying from the earlier amputations, they bravely struggle on cooking alone on small fire, dead bodies litter the vast plane stretching for miles around. Moaning tunelessly to themselves they painfully fix the final dish, taking great care to prepare their remaining foot. There is no one left to partake in this ceremony, the only sound their anguished screams as they braise their living flesh for this last time. Weeping they joyously bring the tender foot up to their mouth and biting in sends a rush of deepest pleasure spreading through the brain, an ecstasy. The pain is unbearable and their strength is fading fast, but they keep munching on, until finally they can take no more and die and the kitchen closes.