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A quote: “We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.” ~~ George Orwell
I’ll start with a story …
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Assigned housing, public transportation & caloric ration cards. Everything was finally “equal”.
Pay no heed to neighbors snitching on illicit tomato grows or someone cooking black-market eggs. Yet in this era, underground dinner parties proliferated. Word was passed last minute and entrance only cost an offering from your bathtub lettuce or closet herbs or clandestine cantaloupes.
Steak …
… No “citizen” ever saw beef anymore. State dinner menus were classified.
… seared to perfection, topped with real herbed butter.
Life had color again. Cops couldn’t identify the sauté pan subversives.
Who knew revolution could be sparked by a perfect Hollandaise?
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
Fletch says: It was my first time hunting. Uncle Ashby and his friend Wren took me away from the organic garden and out into the wilds of Calhoun County.
We bagged a deer the first day. I was cooking our first batch of deer steak, when a cis-gender man in a cowboy hat began giving us trouble.
“You had no right to shoot that animal,” he said. “That’s my property; I’m taking it with me.”
Uncle Ashby got into his face. “We shot it. We cleaned it. It’s ours!”
The man shook his head. “It’s not yours. You shouldn’t be here.”
“Listen,” Ashby said. “We are here, and we’re not going anywhere.”
The cowboy held up his hand, “Fine,” he said. “Let me get my saddle off it and it’s yours.”
By force of will, Jennifer Redmond kept her mouth from falling open. “Just how many people are we going to be getting?”
Reggie Waite didn’t even have to consult any of the computers on the commandant’s desk. “About five hundred from the NASA clone crèche, and that doesn’t count the ones who’ve aged out and are living independently or are in the Armed Forces logging their flight hours before they join the astronaut corps. And there are several hundred more from the earlier generations, before artificial uterine environments were available.”
Jen understood that last one. Her husband was one of those early clones, implanted in a mother who knew only that she was participating in a secret government project critical to winning the Cold War. As a NASA engineer he’d come up here voluntarily when anti-clone prejudice began to heat up in earnest. “And most of them will have dependents, who will also be included in the Writs of Expulsion. So figure doubling or tripling that number.”
“But that’s not all.” Reggie’s face took on The Look. “NASA’s getting word from all the service branches that they’re not cool with just handing three to five hundred clones of famous battlefield leaders off to Russia, for God’s sake.”
“Unsurprising.” Jen had no clear memories of the Cold War, but her in-laws had more than made up for that lack. “And we’re going to be expected to take them all in, which means feeding and housing them. You’d almost think someone wanted us to fail.”
“That or they want to blame Tsar Joseph for a humanitarian crisis of their own making.”
Reggie didn’t need to remark on the long history of using food as a weapon in that part of the world. The Tsar himself was a clone of the man who used a terror-famine to break the peasants of the old Soviet Union to collectivization — something the Administration could throw in his face when they blamed him for the disaster that had resulted from the transformation of his invitation to take American Sharps into forcible Expulsions.
“Which means we can’t let them get away with it. As long as Shepardsport is still run like a research base or a ship at sea, and bed and board is part of everyone’s compensation package, it’s up to us to make sure everyone has food to eat.”
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