I decided not to bake the fascist cake

After spending a lovely week in Bretagne with Gaëlle (yes, she has a website now!), I had yet again to find a way to keep myself busy during my train ride back. I clicked on a video sent by Paul on a common group chat: "Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future", by Adam Neely. I found myself agreeing with his opinion and the position he has taken. And I learned something that somewhat surprised me.

The video shows a snippet of a podcast with the CEO of Suno, where he uses the term "decel" as a derogatory term. This word is used to describe someone against "acceleration" (of progress), and plays with the word "incel". Adam Neely then compares the current accelerationist movement that a lot of Suno investors seem to be obsessed with to a similar historical movement, "Italian Futurism". Which, well, contributed to the rise of fascism in Italy. But hey, you can watch all that in the video yourself. A fun anecdote from it was that part of the movement also suggested a new, futuristic Italian cuisine, and called for "pastasciutta" (pasta) to be abolished.

Well, I decided to look for that "Futuristic Italian Cookbook". I found and downloaded the EPUB of "La cucina futuristica" (1932) from the Internet Archive (I love you Internet Archive), in Italian. Copied the file on my e-reader, and started reading it. My goal was to truly understand the thinking at the time. And maybe finding new recipes.

I have only read the first 40 pages so far, and boy is it an odd book. The language is strange, wanting to be poetic, philosophical, and scientific at the same time. I personally find the content to be none of the three. The first chapter, "A meal that avoided suicide", talks about some guy driving to a friend's house after he sent him a telegram mentioning suicide. He arrives at his massive villa, goes to the kitchen and orders to the "servants" to make him a meal with the following ingredients:

"Our ingenious hands require a hundred small jars of the following essential ingredients: chestnut flour, wheat flour, almond flour, rye flour, cornflour, cocoa powder, red pepper, sugar and eggs. Ten jars of oil, honey and milk. A quintal of dates and bananas."

So, I thought of trying to recreate the recipe, and reviewing it here as a silly blog. But I kept reading, and got the need to organise my thoughts about the content of what I was reading.

The book then proceeds to describe why pasta should be abolished as an Italian meal, abandoning this tradition for the "future of food" while constantly clinging to some "traditions of the past". A past where the Italian "race" (which seems to be used as a synonym for what we now call "nation") conquered the sea and did other great things.

Future meals are referred to as "plastic aerocomplex". There are sentences like "Pasta [is] nutritionally inferior to 40 % to meat, fish, legumes" without sources or even explaining what "nutritionally inferior" means, and how exactly it was compared to "legumes". They ask chemists to invent pills and powders to replace pasta, so humans will somehow (not specified) have 3 hours less to work per day (hey finally something I can relate to!) so they can spend time enjoying thinking and... eating. Food is compared to cars and women:

"a slender, supremely sleek ‘lasso’ of shortcrust pastry, the embodiment of all those cars hungry for distant bends and a lightness of flight that offered to the onlookers’ eyes 29 silvery women’s ankles intermingled with wheel hubs and propeller blades, all fashioned from soft, leavened dough."

I get that foot fetish is a thing, but I will never get why they were so obsessed with women's ankles.

A reason given for switching from pasta to rice is to avoid importing from other nations and promoting Italy's rice agriculture, while the first futuristic recipe given after that is "Alaskan salmon basking in the sunshine with Marte sauce". Another reason is that pasta gets Italians fat, which is not convenient for the "aluminium trains of the future". Other recipes casually include ingredients like black truffles, and huge amounts of meat and alcohol.

My impression from this is that the author and this group of people must have been quite wealthy, and perhaps disconnected from most of the population.

I wish this was a science-fiction book. Or I wish I was exaggerating this. But hey, I'm really not! To give you an idea of how alienating this is to read, here is a direct passage (translated) from the book:

"We Futurists feel that for the male, the voluptuousness of love is an abyssal excavation from top to bottom, whilst for the female it spreads out horizontally like a fan. The voluptuousness of the palate, on the other hand, is always ascending from the bottom to the top of the human body for both the male and the female."

idk what the hell they are talking about.

The feeling of not understanding another human being, present or past, is quite frustrating to me. Understanding does not mean agreeing with. It means seeing their emotion, and being able to communicate with someone in a meaningful way. The language used is perhaps old, but it is made harder to read by all the adjectives used and the choice of words. In general, the "vibe" feels really off.

There is little for me to add to this topic. I have heard the word "fascist" being used more and more often in recent years, with some countries banning anti-fascist organisations. I fear and feel that the word may slowly lose its meaning and being used to vaguely refer to "people I agree with" and "people I don't". I encourage anyone to spend time understanding the origin of the word, and the history that followed it. And use it to make sure the errors of the past are not repeated, tolerating or inciting oppression while focusing on "progress" as an only metric for success. I personally do feel alienated by the narratives from contemporary CEOs about the future, in a similar way.

Well, this post wasn't as light as I wanted it to be. I thought I would bake the cake mentioned in the book and write a fun post about it. Turns out I didn't want to buy 4 Kg of expensive flours and spend an afternoon baking something I would not enjoy eating (as I don't like sweets). But I hope this made you smile nonetheless. Thanks for reading!

Also: la Cucina Italiana, did you read the actual book before writing this post, writing an elogy of it? I both do and do not hope this was AI-generated.