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By David Boyle There is a growing demand for what is authentic, local and trustworthy. This new commitment to authenticity—real food, real culture, real politics, etc—requires a revolution in the structure and methods of business
My main, hazy memory of the trip that Apollo 11 made to the moon in 1969 was the food the astronauts took with them. The famous meal of beef and vegetables in a translucent plastic pack, which would turn to soft mush when they added a little hot water, became world famous. This was the future of food, we were all told in those heady days of technological hope. All that fancy stuff we used to eat would soon be a thing of the past—if boiled cabbage and bangers could be described as fancy stuff. All meals would soon come in tubes or plastic bags, without fuss or effort. The following year, the presenters of the BBC programme Tomorrow’s World—Raymond Baxter and James Burke, both familiar faces from moonshot commentating—published a vision of what Britain would be like in 2120. This is how they saw the inevitable future of food: ‘ Much of the food available will be based on protein substitutes and, as with a book club today, a family will contract with a company to supply it with part-cooked daily menus which will be delivered once a month in disposable vacuum packs. The most complicated dish will need only a few seconds under a microwave heater to make it ready for the table. As a result of this development, modern homes will no longer have kitchens for food preparation, and the resulting saving in space on a national scale will provide room for a million and a half extra full-sized living units.’
But 30 years on from Apollo, it hasn’t happened like that. There is fake food in abundance—anything from Pot Noodle to Dunkin’ Donuts. We do buy ready meals in their plastic-packaged millions, but it’s pretty clear that the culture is also going another way entirely. We are not seeing the last gasp of authentic eating in a flurry of what used to be called ‘analogue’ food—the word ‘artificial’ was thought to frighten people. We’re not embracing the brave new world of artificial smells, artificial tastes and artificial consistency. Quite the reverse. Organic food is enjoying an explosion of interest on both sides of the Atlantic. Cookery TV programmes and cookery books are some of the most popular. Farmers markets, stuffed with fresh produce straight from the farm, are popping up in towns and cities all over the country. It’s not that the market for fast food has somehow disappeared—it clearly hasn’t—but there is a growing demand for what is authentic, local and trustworthy.
And if you think about it, this trend is true of many other areas of life. Despite all we’ve been told for the past 40 years by corporate technologists and globalisers—that the future is entirely global and virtual—there is a sizeable minority who are increasingly committed to real food, real culture, real politics, real schools, real community, real medicine, real stories... The rise of local brands, real ale, reading groups, organic vegetables, slow food, poetry recitals, unmixed music, materiality in art and unbranded vintage fashions, are all symptoms of the same thing—a demand for human-scale, face-to-face institutions and real experience. The idea of authenticity has been hijacked by the advertisers and although Young & Rubicam recently claimed that brands are the new religion—the source of authenticity in people’s lives—the opposite is actually true: brands disappoint. That’s why the big global brands are trying so hard to buy up the local ones, and why banking giants like HSBC claim they are ‘the local bank’. This new commitment to authenticity—a new kind of authenticity that is based on finding ways of delivering it to a mass audience—requires a revolution in the structure and methods of business. That’s what has to happen if they are going to have face-to-face contact with people, to produce products they can tell stories about—made by specific people in specific places. But what enough people demand, they will get. So watch out: the New Realists are coming. (David Boyle, author of ‘Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life’, is also the editor of Radical Economics (Issue No. 14, September/October 2003, ‘How to Make the World a Bit More Authentic’.) Third World Network Features, December 2003
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