Abstract. TheFWD. Michael Geoffrey Swifte
The Age of Warlords Cookbook blog: Looking at the future of food and violence in the west. An exercise in speculative empathy.
It seems we manufacture ‘consent’ more than just about anything else in the west. Our media and commercial food industries are staking their claims on the last pieces of moral and aesthetic high ground in an effort to exploit our patterns of conspicuous consumption. Our tastes in food are being driven by our unprecedented access to global resources. This is all at a time when age old aphorisms like “teach a man to fish...” and “there's plenty of fish in the sea” are in the process of being rendered untrue. A time when catastrophic climate change and economic disintegration threaten to test the stability of western civilisations. Food is our fuel and when we are at our greatest need it is the one thing we value above all else.
The Age of Warlords Cookbook engages speculative empathy to both imagine possible futures of violence and desperate need in western societies, and learn lessons about resilience from people in developing countries who live with warlords now. It's about accepting that our growth obsessed societies do not have contingency plans for all the possible futures. Most importantly it's about embracing history and experience to grow resilience so that we in the whest can help grow a future for all.