It would be great to cook a better world. In theory, the issues we are facing are so obvious that it shouldn’t be that difficult to make things at least a little bit better. The situation is so tragic I sometimes try to forget it. The situation is so terribly wrong, that if the world was a restaurant it would feature in a cooking show with angry chefs shouting. The situation is so well known that when I meet my friends for dinner, we always end up talking about how we are all going to die kind of soon. Possible apocalypses range from ecological disaster, gender and racial injustice, the next pandemic, and, more recently, WWIII. In a way, we say, we may deserve it after all. Night, thank you for coming, thank you for having us. The Old Fashioned was amazing. Yep.

Ingredient n.1 Positionality – AKA acknowledging how cooking varies depending on who you are.

Let’s try to think of reasons why it would be fair for us to keep on living the lives we live. It is difficult, let’s face it. My friend Paolo once referred to a common friend as someone who thought he could change the world by recycling domestic waste. We all fell in this illusion, at some point, let us admit it. Thinking sustainability is difficult especially for middle class European like us – ‘us’ meaning myself and most of my friends, I am not making assumptions about you as a reader. We grew up and we were told that everything was alright, our mothers proudly serving frozen food and snack bars full of palm oil. We were fed OGM chicken, and no one ever asked where it came from. We were told to travel, because travelling is so good, and St. Ryan Air made it possible to go everywhere in Europe, when Europe included the UK. Incidentally, we must recognise that Ryan Air contributed to the construction of European identity much more than years of international cultural policies. We spent nights watching half-naked women half-dancing on TV. Our older brothers commenting on their body parts. If we were white, we were told that in order to not be racist it was enough to buy a Benetton jumper, and say that we loved everyone, and we were all equal. Nature was nice and taken for granted, plagues were stuck in past: fossils from an archaic society in which people wouldn’t wash their hands often enough. Watching Dr Strange Love we would feel sorry for those who had to live at a time of conflict between Russia and the West.

Ingredient n.2 Gradual and painful consciousness- raising moments AKA how we have may have been poisoned all along.

And then… Some of us, like me, followed the script. We travelled. We ate cordon bleus, innocently, cheerfully. We put ourselves on a diet and tried to buy clothes that were ‘flattering’. Until one day, we woke up and realised almost everything we were doing was contributing to the death of the planet, and that European identity was based on colonial extractivism rather than low-cost airlines. And by the way, do you know how much Ryan Air pays their staff?

A gesture like eating, of which we never thought so much in depth, started to unveil its dark side. The more cordon bleu you were eating, the more people were dying. You decide to go for avocados. But no, it turns out avocados are the worst: they are a monoculture that encourages deforestation and erodes the soil. And have you heard of almonds? They seem so innocuous in your ‘wow-no-cow-milk’ but they have an enormous water footprint (ah, water footprint, I didn’t know this word existed).

Ingredient 3. Vicious circles AKA everything suddenly seems not edible.

I know we must fight for a more sustainable world. We really want that. Let’s all go vegetarian, and eliminate coal. I truly believe in this, out of awareness, out of fear, out of ‘please-do-something’. Let’s get rid of cars, of airplanes, of everything that pollutes, let’s please save ourselves from extinction. So, who, exactly, can afford to be vegetarian? After having exploited the word’s resources for centuries, how can we tell others that doing the same is not feasible anymore? And when we shut down car factories, what do we do with the workers?          

As someone on Twitter put it: Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.

Cooking Method

Once you have reflected on your positionality and become aware of the many contradictions entailed in trying to cook up a better world, the only method I can recommend is keeping on asking questions.

Isn’t it curious that reading How to talk to White people about race or This is not a drill – books which may be defined as manifestos for the Back Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion social movements, respectively  – you download them on your Kindle, an Amazon device, which is probably built by underpaid workers in condition of modern slavery..?

If you are White – how to come to terms with your ancestors’ guilt while still maintaining a sense that you deserve to be born?

If you are a woman – then, how to be a woman? How to figure out if it is more ethically sound to have children or if it is better to get a golden Retriever instead? You can think that since we’ve failed as a generation, we may at least do the effort of creating a new one who can possibly sort out this mess. What we can do is to give birth to someone better than us. Isn’t it the whole point of the species? Or maybe we’ve had enough of this species, and so it would be better not to have children: with a growing population in a planet that has not resources for all, isn’t it the ultimate crime to give birth to yet another human-all-too-human? Is the will to have a biological child just an obsolete expression of the narcissistic fetish to produce somebody with approximately your genes? Make kin, not babies, as Donna Haraway put it. (And Donna Haraway is a very respectable source: one of the most important feminist scholars of our time, author of the seminal essay Cyborg Manifesto, and she lives in a beautiful house immersed in nature, and has a beautiful dog whom she happily brings to agility courses in the weekend).

Is it queerer to get pregnant or to start a new kink?

How can we deal with these short-circuits? At the very least we need a broader framework to understand what it is that makes us stuck. For instance, we could draw on Mark Fisher.  Fisher was a sociologist, philosopher, music critic, cultural theorist (and so on and so forth) who could see with unique clarity the relation between politics and the life of the subject. In his book Capitalism Realism, he reflects on our incapacity to imagine a vivid, coherent, possible alternative to the current state of things. The problem, he says, is how to imagine the end of capitalism without the end of world.

So, are we really going to kill the earth to save capitalism?

Sometimes I find relief thinking about our ancestors in the Middle Age, of how they would fantasise about the end of the world at the turn of the millennium, 1000 A.C. But they were wrong. Maybe we are wrong too. After all, if we want to be really serious, who can guarantee that our scientific tools are substantially better than the tools of medieval folks? Except, they probably are. But let’s hope they are not. But they are.

The movie Don’t Look UP, number one on Netflix UK on Christmas day 2021, shows quite well how tempting it would be to just nott believe in science, and turn an existential threat into a meme. It is a movie on the end of the world at the times of Twitter, and at the end of it you are left with a mixed bag of feelings: the apocalypse depicted in it resembles our everyday reality too closely to be classified as dystopia. Yet, it is unclear just what to do as an individual or group. My brother, my partner, my sister-in-law and I, fell back on a critique of capitalism, with Portuguese port and a gourmet panettone.

After Dinner

And now, having tried to put together so many difficult components, we are left with a big mess. Pans and cutlery are all around the room, liquids have been spilled on the floor, powders are on the stove, the sink is full of dishes. This is the inevitable outcome of questioning how things are, wrestling with moral dilemmas, refusing to settle for superficial solutions and universal formulae. I will leave it to you to do the washing up. I hope to be soon invited to a dinner party with a menu that finally harmonises all of these diverse ingredients. A few options can be found in the rest of this cookbook.