26 March 2009: "I want to move away to the city, dress like an altBro, and become a Pizza Alt"

This post is about the green revolution and the lasting ramifications of agricultural improvements, and their likely impact on the eating habits in developing economies. What has happened as a result of dramatically improved grain yields around the world is that fewer are consigned to agricultural labor while at the same time, the world's food diversity flattens out. So there is more consumerist individualism (i.e. globalized conformity to branded consumer products) as people are freed from peasantry, and more people eating the same things as the same foodstuffs are shipped around the world. As a result, Carles points out, the mechanics of sexual attraction are flattening out as well: "I have always wonder what makes "˜the perfect woman.- I think she needs to be alternative, creative, endowed with a treasure chest of electro accessories, and she must have similar interests as me. She must "˜like alternative music and culture- and "˜enjoy eating pizza.-" Pizza stands in as a symbol of ubiquity itself, a genericness that haunts romantic dreams of unique particularity and transcendence, even in the most hallowed of intimate relations. From an economy of scarcity, which yielded a true localism, we have entered an age of cultural abundance built on a surfeit of staples. Carles grasps this: "Feel bad about the attention economy," which threatens to consume the surplus the agricultural revolution has yielded, that has forced a politico-social situation in which "altbros are evolving in2 pizzaAlts".