Dis(h)course in Literary Sauces: Brave New Food

"Hug me till you drug me, honey;
Kiss me till I'm in a coma;
Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny;
Love's as good as soma."

A short summary

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World poses a number of questions regarding freedom of choice, predestined futures, human knowledge and also, how food and pleasures are treated.

In order to better understand the underlying features, let's take a look at Huxley's life.

"Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, film stories and scripts. Huxley spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death.
Aldous Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist, and he was latterly interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism.^[1]^[2] He is also well known for advocating and taking psychedelics.
By the end of his life Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley)

His most famous novel, entitled Brave New World is available here: http://www.idph.com.br/conteudos/ebooks/BraveNewWorld.pdf

So who we have is a thinker, interested in the paranormal, often taking drugs. Wouldn't it be nice if such an approach existed in his works? It does, let's have a look! (http://www.huxley.net/soma/somaquote.html)

"..there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon..."

"you do look glum! What you need is a gramme of soma."

"the warm, the richly coloured, the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday. How kind, how good-looking, how delightfully amusing every one was! "

"The service had begun. The dedicated soma tablets were placed in the centre of the table. The loving cup of strawberry ice-cream soma was passed from hand to hand and, with the formula, "I drink to my annihilation," twelve times quaffed."

"I don't understand anything," she said with decision, determined to preserve her incomprehension intact. "Nothing. Least of all," she continued in another tone "why you don't take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You'd forget all about them. And instead of feeling miserable, you'd be jolly. So jolly,"

A fan-made advertisement for this "marvellous" material:

Food, especially the drug soma, in Brave New World is used as a way of controlling people.

By eating, people forget about their everyday struggles, they become free and part of a world that exists outside their heavily controlled thoughts and behaviour.

You may wonder now, where Huxley got the idea from and/or where it lead to in our modern world.

It seems that Huxley's fears became true in the form of genetically modified food and pills that can cure everything instantly.

The question is now how Huxley would describe today's food using the style of Brave New World? Here's my attempt:

The Beta was conditioning the Gamma PLUSes at the institution called the STANDARDIZING CENTRE. She did not enjoy it, nor did she dislike tutoring. She was chosen for this even before she was born. Along with her ninety-six identical twins, they did this all over the country. Their job was to ensure that all the Gammas hated literature, culture and creativity. She did it by teaching them everything they would never need, thus making information into undecipherable bits, that no one understood. After some years, nobody wanted to learn about new things They thought they would never understand it anyway. Some Gammas fell asleep sometimes during her lectures, but she only needed one button to wake them up. She pushed the button and immediately the screech came: A LECTURE A DAY KEEPS CULTURE AWAY. She did her job without emotions and the Gamma PLUSes did the same. For them, the standardizing centre was the same for 3 to 5 years. Some of them lost interest in 3 years, they were free to start working in the STANDARDIZED FEEDING CENTRES. For some students, for some unknown reasons, it took 5 years to perfectly eliminate all kinds of interest in knowledge and culture. They then became members of the STANDARDIZED PHOTOCOPYING AND COFFEE-MAKING DEPARTMENT. Finally, there were the Gamma PLUSPLUSes. She tormented them for 8 years without the slightest remorse. Their days were spent the same way. In the morning, they were woken up at 7 AM, were fed their genetically created nutrition, some cereal flavoured, some toast and butter flavoured and then attended her lectures. The day was punctuated by one more feeding, this time, they were given meal capsules. A capsule provided nutrition for the rest of the day and consisted of 3 meals that mixed with saliva gained their final taste, tomato soup, chicken with potato and yogurt. The recipe was from a person named Wonka, centuries earlier. Their final meal of the day was always looked forward to. They did not have any emotion towards it, but their body, this constantly ticking biological clock felt that soma was coming. They put it in their mouth and quickly swallowed it. The sensation took them to secret places in their minds and freed them for the rest of the day. One gramme was enough to fly to the Moon and two meant a roundtrip and a sleep for the rest of the day. All in all, hers was not the worst job. She always got the two grammes. After all, she did her job well. She created the perfect unified entities.

The whole movie can be seen here: