8 November 2021. Change | Veganism
To make political change happen, we need the ‘Betaverse’. Getting beyond meat.
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. (For the next few weeks this might be four days a week while I do a course: we’ll see how it goes). Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: To make political change happen, we need the ‘Betaverse’
The Scottish writer and activist Pat Kane has cleverly combined the two noisy stories of the moment in a piece on his new newsletter, E2. Take COP26, in Glasgow, on the one hand, and Facebook’s posturing about the Metaverse in the other hand—and bounce them off each other:
(T)he coincidence of Zuckerberg’s vast and unlimited attempt at mental enclosure, and a convention of national leaders chafing under the demands of planetary limits—both playing out before me in my home town—needs to be marked somehow.
First point to make is this: if a metaverse is like a virtual and parallel world, running alongside and interpenetrating our own, then what exactly is the Cop26 compound on the banks of the River Clyde? Cavorting with your card-playing robot pals in a simulated space station is one thing—but declaring UN sovereignty for two weeks over an urban zone, and enforcing that with a ring of steel, is quite another level of ad-hoc world-building.
There’s lots going on in the rest of the piece, which moves quickly through a riff on Dominic Cummings’ apparent enthusiasm for micro-sovereignty and parallel institutions, stopping momentarily at the tech investor Balajai Srinivasan—apparently Cummings’ mentor here— who believes that “the network state is built cloud first, land last,” starting with the “digital community”.
This sounded a bit close to John Perry Barlow’s late 1990s Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace to me, and as we know, that hasn’t aged so well.
But Kane’s more interested in the ‘community’ bit than the ‘digital”, and as he observes, COP26 hasn’t so far been much of an advertisement for the nation state:
Will the instruments of change be nation-states, democratic or otherwise, fitfully and falteringly agreeing to climate targets that fall short of the necessary anyway? That seems an increasingly forlorn hope.
So, if we want change, then, we need to build a ‘parallel polis”, borrowing on a term developed by Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Benda in their strategy of opposition in communist Czechoslovakia.
(Image via climatefringe.org)
Kane’s been involved in The Alternative UK, whose founder Indra Adnan has been advocating for a local version of these called ‘citizens’ action networks’:
These are new structures for collective action that evade the toxicity of party/partisan politics, and seek to unite the will of communities via conviviality, skilled convening and a celebration of existing local capabilities and enterprises. The aim is to be cosmolocal, too—using ICTs and virtualities to connect up and share experiences/expertises with other communities across the planet, who share a fate of climate crisis and broken national politics.
Such a ‘parallel polis’ is a world away from the tech bro fantasies of Cummings and Srinivasan. And it also feels pretty rooted in the material world, to judge from a conversation Kane quotes with the head of policy at the Scots organisation Common Weal, Craig Dalzell:
[I] say at one point, “this is a century for engineers, chemists, physicists”. His answer springs back: “It's the century of plumbers, carpenters and shepherds. We need thousands of km of district heating pipes, and tonnes of timber construction and sheep wool/wood fibre insulation.”
And hence the ‘Betaverse’—an online space to simulate new practices that give us a chance of dealing with the climate emergency before it deals with us:
(Beta = in a preparatory stage, never quite ready, testing, testing…)
But: we need to be learning fast enough that we can manage the change at the speed we now need. Because the rollercoaster ride gets steeper every time nation states play national politics with emission reductions.
According to those terse trend-watchers at Axios, we’re seeing new places where vegan food is being supplied—at least taking a US perspective.
Interestingly, these are at opposite ends of the food spectrum. The first is at the New York Michelin 3-star restaurant Eleven Madison Park, which re-opened post-pandemic with ‘a fully plant-based menu”, as Axios puts it.
The second is across a slew of fast-food places, from Fuku to Starbucks, now offering plant-based equivalents to their chicken-based products (nuggets, for example).
(Meat free sausage roll, mafe by Fry’s Family Foods, England. Image by ‘Storye book’, via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)
This is obviously a good thing, since meat and dairy products are a significant contributor to carbon emissions (though in practice, chicken less than meat). Given the low standards of animal welfare in the US food supply chain, substituting animals for plants may also be a good thing from that point of view as well.
The new Eleven Madison Park menu has had mixed reviews, it’s true to say, and at $335 per head, excluding wine, I guess that’s not surprising. (And apparently, they will still offer meat dishes to diners in their private rooms).
But the more interesting thing here is that the top end of the market is busy redefining luxury in a way that doesn’t involve meat, a point that the somewhat scratchy CNN article seems to have missed.
Eleven Madison Park’s head chef, Daniel Humm, is explicit about this in his reopening letter to clients:
After everything we have experienced, it was clear that we couldn’t open the same restaurant in early June. With that in mind, we made the decision to serve a plant-based menu. We asked ourselves: What are the most delicious aspects of our dishes, and how could we achieve the same level of flavor and texture without meat? ... It is time to redefine luxury as an experience that serves a higher purpose and maintains a genuine connection to the community.
(And as well as the food, the restaurant also supports a New York programme that provides food to food-secure New Yorkers.)
In a similar vein, Axios also quotes the chef at an upscale vegan restaurant in Washington DC:
"We have dishes on our menu that take a day and a half of labor to get onto the plate," says Rich Landau, the chef behind an upscale vegan restaurant in D.C. called Fancy Radish. "There is a lot of luxury in that. More people are starting to understand that food is about flavor, not flesh," he says.
In terms of material impact, the non-meat options in the fast-food places will clearly have more material effect than a handful of top end restaurants. But without going all Bordieu here, changing the signs and signifiers of luxury also matters, a lot, if behaviour is going to change.
j2t#202
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