Homo Sapiens as a species has been roaming the Earth for about 300,000 years, give or take the margin of error found in archaeology (which is, shall we say, large).

During the vast majority of that history–until about 13,000 years ago, more or less–we were hunter-gatherers. No permanent habitations, no agriculture, no herding, no…modern anything.

We didn’t even have toilets if you can believe it. Not a single one on Earth. Not only did bears poop in the woods, but we did too.

Among the many other things missing from our lives, including game shows, bingeable series on streaming, or personal masseurs human beings didn’t have anybody to prepare lunch for us.

No restaurants, no waiters, no nannies, maids, or personal chefs. You eat what you kill, like in Glengarry GlenRoss.

Many of us still don’t, although I feel confident that most of my readers have toilets at least.

See? Capitalism is totally evil. Nobody feeds him in a high chair at work.

— David Strom (@DavidStrom) May 17, 2023

The fact that there is no such thing as a free lunch is very troubling to Ian Bogost and his readers.

Bogost is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, as well as a game designer. He is even the Director of Film & Media Studies and Professor of Computer Sci & Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.

Bogost started quite the controversy on Twitter, bitching vocally about the need to feed himself during the day. This is unfair, he thinks because it is either expensive–purchasing food prepared by others is not cheap–or time-consuming.

Food, it seems, does not magically appear when hungry.

Bogost was merely whining, although a man who can regularly eat $40 lunches (who spends that much?) hasn’t much to bitch about. I assume he doesn’t really think society needs to be engineered to satisfy his desire for a magic burrito to appear at his desk.

Most of his replies were either practical–hey idiot, making leftovers isn’t difficult, nor is making a sandwich!–or derisive. Hey idiot: make your own damn lunch. You are an adult. Deal with it. It’s not like you have to kill an elk or gather nuts and berries to stay alive. You work at a university. I endorse both sentiments, actually. Especially the ‘Hey idiot’ part.

Bogost finds both suggestions obnoxious, because apparently Bogost is a jerk, or at least plays one on Twitter. To be fair EVERYBODY plays being a jerk on Twitter, so perhaps he is simply one online. He could be perfectly pleasant in person. I will never know, and I am fine with that.

The conversation spun out of control because of course it did. This is Twitter. And it became a master class in how people in the 21st Century are idiots.

Serfs in the middle ages would regularly face famines, and even in flush times worked dawn to dusk without having access to meat most of the time. Cheese was about as good as protein got for most people. Bread and cheese. Beer. That is most of your sustenance. Pigs and cows were kept, but nobody could afford to slaughter them regularly. They were assets, not hamburgers most of the time. Meat was a luxury.

Revolutions were fought over that fact. The Magna Carta was signed because nobles were pissed that the king wouldn’t let even the nobles hunt in his forests. Peasants? Those game wardens existed to prevent them from hunting, and the penalties were harsh.

Those lower down the social scale ate a less impressive diet. Unless you served in a large household, it was difficult to obtain fresh meat or fish (although fish was available to those living by the sea). Most people ate preserved foods that had been salted or pickled soon after slaughter or harvest: bacon, pickled herring, preserved fruits, for instance. The poor often kept pigs, which, unlike cows and sheep, were able to live contentedly in a forest, fending for themselves. Peasants tended to keep cows, so their diets consisted largely of dairy produce such as buttermilk, cheese, or curds and whey.

Curds and whey. Yuck.

Bogost is probably not a big consumer of curds and whey, I would suppose, but he does eat $40 lunches fairly frequently, so I suspect that meat is on the table pretty frequently. Unfortunately, it isn’t free, delivered to his desk. I bet he uses Uber Eats. $40 is pretty steep.

Far more fascinating than Bogost’s frustration with lunch is that of one of his readers, a former teacher named Jae.

Jae, whose pronouns are she/they, sees the real problem as capitalism. Now Jae is quite the character. She/They is grossly offended that food is not provided in the workplace and sees this as a serious flaw in capitalism. Of course, Jae apparently doesn’t eat lunch at home, outside of “safety meals” of cheese and crackers.

Jae’s mother is not at home to feed she/they in a high chair, so she/they goes foodless or eats chips and hummus.

Jae, though, sees she/they’s inability to feed sheself/theyself at home as a further example of how much emotional damage is done in capitalist societies. People are unable to function as adults because life is too traumatic to bear under the weight of bourgeois oppression.

Tell it to the hunter-gatherers. Or the medieval peasants. Or just about anybody else at any other period of time in history. Americans spend less time and less money on basic sustenance than any human beings in history. Life used to be Naked and Afraid every damn day of your life, and now making a sandwich is too emotionally taxing to contemplate.

Leftists are pathetic and revel in being so. They are oppressed at every turn, and when they get around to ordering avocado toast and pinot noir they sit down and bitch about being oppressed.

Jae insists that she/they isn’t lazy. Perhaps not. She/they certainly spends a lot of mental effort calculating the emotional damage being done by living in the wealthiest society in human history. She/they is almost certainly in the top 1-5% of the world’s wealthiest people. Even poor Americans are wealthier, when government subsidies are included, than most people in even OECD countries.

How many inches do you think she/they’s TV is? 50″ 60″ 70″? I grew up with a black and white TV at 13″, and we got a color TV in the 80s. I learned why NBC’s logo was a peacock in the 1980s!

We weren’t poor. We were quite well off, actually, so I am not complaining. I was, if anything, coddled in many ways, although I had to make my own lunch.

It is amazing to me that we have created a society where even the most basic adult tasks are beyond the emotional and intellectual ken of a vast swath of American culture. People who are physically adults are, it appears, incapable of doing anything besides bitching that they are not spoon-fed in a high chair while watching porn and planning the next drag show.

The problem isn’t capitalism–spend a year or two living as a resident of Venezuela or Cuba to get a feel for life under socialism. It is the culture. Specificaly the culture created by the Left.

We should create a socialist zone in America. Say, the slice of California between L.A. and San Francisco. It’s nice country. No hardship.

Let the socialists move there and build their own little country. It could be a socialist zoo, complete with poop in the streets, roaming felons, and coffee shops where people get to complain about capitalism.

I would give it 20 years max before the place is depopulated. All these Leftists would be crossing the border back into the free United States of America, calling themselves refugees.