According to the Guardian, Sky News and other news organizations, a leaked British government document on food strategy advises the public to eat more venison in order to tackle climate change.
This deplorable attitude is indicative of liberal ideology, which is dominant in British society, where systemic issues like climate change are reduced to the most performative and ineffectual individual action. It is very revealing that the idea of individual carbon footprint was coined and popularized by the monopoly-capitalists of British Petroleum, who in reality, are some of the most culpable to the degradation of our planet and climate change.
Currently in the UK, 3 million people are starving or are suffering from resultant malnourishment. One in three people admitted to hospital have been found to suffer from malnourishment and every ten minutes someone in the UK dies of malnutrition.
All of this is part of the ongoing cost of living crisis that currently grips the UK, while the Tory government’s response is that the cost of food “isn’t the business of government strategy”. The pleas from teachers, unions and working class parents to extend free school meals to the extra one million children brought into poverty in recent years fall on deaf ears.
Science, technology, and labour productivity have all advanced to levels we have never seen before, yet capitalism is leading the mass of working people back to living standards resembling the Middle Ages. And in place of the decadent French aristocracy, out of touch with their immiserated subjects, proclaiming: “Let them eat cake!”, we now have the similarly detached from reality Boris Johnson regime essentially proclaiming: “Let them eat venison!”. As Marx said:
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” – The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte