The Birth of Cakeconomics

The Birth of Cakeconomics

Whenever I order a piece of cake at a restaurant, I always wonder how many more pieces of cake there are back in the kitchen.  Not because I’m greedy but because I’m fascinated by how, from a logistics point of view, the restaurant manages to achieve that perfect goldilocks balance between stocking plenty of cake for customers on one hand, and avoiding financial loss due to unsold units on the other.  It must be a constant headache trying to speculate the level of demand, as well as variation in demand across high and low-consumption days, not to mention a shifting demographic profile of the clientele which, I would think, affects which cake flavour they choose, and whether they had any desire for cake in the first place.  How on earth do restaurants do this? 

As consumers of course, we never worry about how the restaurant manages to have our favourite cake slice in stock, if and when we decide to walk into their premises on a random day.  How does an entire back kitchen manage to match what is on the menu, at least most of the time?  As far as the customer is concerned, the entire menu should be available.  When they order, they should be able to select based on desire, not based on what is available or what is best for the restaurant. 

This civilization has been using natural resources much like a restaurant patron: based on its wishes and demands on the day, not based on what is sustainably available.  The way we manage our restaurants is a micrography of our global economic model: we have been raiding Earth’s kitchen with abandon, in much the same way that we rock up to a restaurant, ordering anything we like just because we happen to have a rectangular piece of plastic in our wallet. 

A wasteful, hedonistic consumer is central to this economic system.  Each impulsive purchase ensures that the system is driven by greed, desire and aspiration as opposed to need, availability and sustainability.  This happens because we are indoctrinated very early on with the core values of industrial consumerism: the customer is always right, no product should ever become unavailable, and if something breaks down, fastest solution is to throw it in the trash and buy a brand-new identical item immediately.  Welcome to cakeconomics.  

It is no wonder then that selfishness has reached a peak: hyper-narcissism was deliberately engineered by a psychonomy which recognized very early on that selfish and narcissistic people will simply buy more products.  Over decades of “aspirational” marketing by the Unhappiness Machine, this engineered narcissism atomized and isolated us into individual consumer units separated by layers of algorithm.  This has been great news for capitalism but bad news for the planet.  As for society, it became more of a collection of psychonomy-led consumer services than a community.  The psychonomy has successfully isolated us so that it can more effectively target, control and monetize us at the individual level.  We can all have cake, but we end up eating it all by ourselves.

Abundance Is an Illusion

Meanwhile an incredibly complex and burdensome system operates behind the cake counter, cleverly hidden from the eyes of consumatrons.  Our transactions always appear seamless and easy, leaving us with the impression of a faultless, effortless, magical and stable system that will satisfy all our demands.  Most of all, this deceptively stable system manages to give us the impression that we live in an abundant, magical world where nothing ever runs out, however much we consume.  The psychonomic network of extraction, manufacturing and supply is executed so well that it caters to every need and desire we could ever have, now available at our fingertips online.  We go to the supermarket and there are dozens of brands of cereal.  It is a perverse, gluttonous fantasy made reality.  Surely there is a catch? 

Our economic system is built on a grand illusion of abundance.  But this deceptively abundant world we consider normal won’t be normal for much longer.  It is not sustainable.  It is a house of cards violating the laws of physics when it comes to supply and demand.  In nature nothing is abundant. Supermarkets do not exist.  Animals scavenge for food and skip multiple meals.  Plants agonizingly reach out for the sun and may need to wait patiently for weeks or months for rain.  Even human bodies are designed to last without food for days, even weeks.  During this time, they can still function and go about their daily life by metabolizing the fat reserves under their skin.  This is our normal way of existing, and how our bodies were designed to optimally operate.  In the ecosystem resources may be scarce, but there is always enough food for everyone.  Those who are picky or want to order from a menu will starve while they wait for their custom order to arrive.

In nature life forms are not worshiped and spoiled like godlike consumers, because this would bankrupt the ecosystem in a matter of hours.  Yet humans have single-handedly raided Earth’s resources to virtual completion. The illusion of abundance is the dogma behind the most destructive force on the planet: extractive, corrosive necrocapitalism.   The motto “if the consumer wants it, we will bring it to them whatever it takes”, has been fundamental to the illusion of abundance.  The consumer became both a deity and a victim: at no point should supply fail to meet consumer demand, and at no point should consumers stop working.  The economy became a depressing conveyor belt of self-destruction.

The Fraud That Is Money

The restaurant manager is therefore an illusionist: He convinces his patrons that everything on the menu is available, while he plays a dirty magic trick.  As he maintains smiles on the main floor, back in the kitchen it is carnage: slash and burn agriculture, extinction, resource depletion – all of this just to make some cake.  As the list of victims and consequences grows, we can’t stop here.  We’re making too much money, and the show must go on.  We need to feed the customers.  The illusionist must keep the magic trick going for as long as possible, even if the odds are not in his favour.  How does he do it? 

Through yet another magic trick: money.  Money is abstract, invented currency with fluctuating value.  It is an instrument of profit capable of responding to variations in supply and demand.  If customer demand for cake increases, the price per slice just goes up.  As more people ask for cake, the higher price triggers more production and everyone wins: the customer, the restaurant owner, the farmers supplying flour, butter, sugar and eggs.  Of course, all these winners have one thing in common: they are humans.  

Earth is the big loser: the animal and plant species who participated in making the cake got absolutely nothing out of this process.  Some had to be tortured or had to die so that the cake can be made, others even went extinct in the process.  An uninsured, undocumented immigrant somewhere in an industrial-sized bakery not far from the restaurant had to break their back making cake batter all day.  Untold carbon emissions had to be released to create the steel industrial kitchen machinery he is surrounded by, which consumes vast amounts of electricity.

As for the consumer, when they got to the restaurant they realized that they had some leftover cake in their fridge at home after all.  It turns out they didn’t need cake.  They just needed to get some fresh air, so they filled up their tank and drove to the restaurant in their steel car to have their cake slice instead of the one at home, which they will probably throw out as soon as they get back.  

The plastic card they have in their wallet is the consumer’s own magic trick.  The invention of money was the single biggest fraud committed against nature.  Money is a loan of equity stolen from humanity’s one and only lender, Earth, distributed to bored consumatrons driving around in their gas guzzlers for their next cake fix.  As with all equity, it becomes worthless when the creditor goes bankrupt. The invention of money enabled humanity to maintain the illusion of abundance while committing ecological fraud.

The key to all fraud is deception.  Our civilization perpetrated its theft against nature by rearing Michelin-starred financial concoctionists and an army of Harvard-educated economic illusionists, proud to study an economic system that does not even obey first-grade math.  We are amassing a monumental debt towards nature to temporarily sustain the impossible illusion of abundance.  Colonialism, intensive agriculture, slavery, mining.  We have been living on “cake credit” for hundreds if not thousands of years, producing what we need through a process that eventually breaks the cake oven itself and sets the house on fire.  All of us are paid by an economic system which is a Ponzi scheme that has never really turned a profit. Our one and only lender, Earth, is going down, and she will be taking us down with her very soon.

The Invention of Waste

But there is one last magic trick the restaurateur-cum-illusionist must perfect: he needs to coordinate a complex, often unpredictable logistical operation from the production line all the way to the table, so that the customer gets their cake at an affordable price, and the illusionist turns a profit no matter what happens. 

This seems so challenging, one would expect the goldilocks balance of supply and demand to be met only if Harvard-educated economists were having board meetings with the restaurant’s manager on a weekly basis using advanced modelling and predictive analytics of cake consumption data and other variables, and adjusting cake supply accordingly on a daily basis.  They would look into the entire cake process from start to finish and try to make it more energy efficient and profitable, yet fair and sustainable.  There would be environmental scientists advising on the impact of overconsumption, population increase and intensive farming on the natural environment, and how this could affect “the future of cake on Earth”.  There would be a social scientist and immigration advisor helping Julio from Guatemala who works long hours in the cake kitchen, so that he feels more valued and appreciated, and better compensated for his back-breaking work.  There would be a doctor helping him with his diabetes, a result of working in cake quality control for years.    

Instead, there is a much, much easier magic trick which avoids all the above work and increases the restaurant’s profit in one single step: throwing all the unused cake in a new human invention called “the bin”, while jacking up the price of slices sold.  We’ll just make more cake at a cost to workers and natural resources, increase the price per slice to cover our expenses, and dump whatever cake is left at the end of the day in a place which we will call “trash”, which is invisible to other people.  This way the restaurant is always stocked, the customer always gets what they want, and we even make a profit.  The illusion of abundance has been saved for yet another day. 

Along with money, the concept of waste is the double-fraud which completes the cycle of extractive, self-destructive necrocapitalism.  Both money and waste are abstract concepts engineered by humans.  In the ecosystem nothing is ever wasted.  Every time uneaten cake is thrown in the restaurant’s dumpster, unnecessary work hours in the cake factory have been spent.  Plants and animals have been unnecessarily slaughtered.  CO2 was unnecessarily emitted to fire up the oven.  We may label the dumped cake as “waste”, but it came at an incredible cost to the planet.  Waste is yet another illusion.

All magic tricks must end sooner or later, when the curtain comes down and spectators return to their normal, real lives.  Our psychonomy has invented several magic tricks to keep the illusion going: abundance, money, and waste being just three of them.  But there is barely any Earth left to destroy without completely breaking the cake oven. The show is ending.  The red velvet curtain (and the red velvet cake) comes crashing down on the illusionist, taking the ceiling along with it.  And that’s not his only problem: a starving mob is about to eat him alive. 

The self-destructive entity of necrocapitalism will push the entirety of Earth, including humans, to their absolute limits.  Maximum profit requires maximum exploitation and maximum extinction.  This will end in maximum collapse of the ecosystem and the psychonomy that has been attached to it like a bloodsucking leech.   It takes an incredible amount of effort to kill an entire planet.  But rest assured, we have done all we could while maintaining our illusions and delusions.  The magician will die onstage, doing what he loves.  But this one will be his very last magic trick.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.

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