In 1729, Jonathan Swift published his Modest Proposal to Prevent Ireland's Children from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country. A few years ago, Editora Unesp invited me to write a preface to the Brazilian edition of the book, an unmissable piece by the Irish writer.
Swift’s “solution” is a familiar one, a macabre, aggressive humor. The idea of turning poor children into food is shocking to good souls. To paraphrase Marx's phrase about religion, it is a cry of the spirit in a spiritless world.
Every now and then we realize that we are missing some Swifts. Or, alternatively, that not even with thousands of Switfs we would be able to realize what the non-fictitious proposals generated by creative minds like that of the mayor of São Paulo offer us. The young sexagenarian's latest invention is astronaut food made from food on the verge of becoming trash. Yes, the idea is to “aggregate” supermarket foods, with an expiration date marked. And from this aggregate, produce packages of granulates to serve as food for the hungry in the big city, including students, with school meals “reinforced” by the preparation. The food prototypes were provided for testing by a somewhat strange company, which does not have a factory and does not appear to be in a position to have one – it itself “bundles” services from other manufacturers. Another invention, perhaps a candidate for inclusion in the city hall's supplier register. After analyzing the way the policy is implemented, we come to the conclusion that it will, in fact, be a big deal. Suppliers of “almost unsellable” food would no longer lose this balance. And, even more, they would have tax incentives. They win double. A find.
The idea seems original – maybe it is. That doesn't mean he deserves an award for it. But we must recognize that it is creative. I'm not referring to the creativity of the technologists who invented the product and the process, such farinata. Maybe they are even ingenious. Maybe some of them have the best of intentions. There is always the temptation to use science and technology as a shortcut or alternative to tackling social problems that we seek to stifle. And then the eccentric inventions multiply. Sometimes in a sophisticated and “serious” way, of course.
What the proposal highlights, in a very creative way, is a way of looking at the existence of the “underprivileged” people for whom the device would be intended. They don't eat, they are supplied with energy sources. This is better than nothing, says the mayor's secretary, with some logic. Even clearer was the mayor’s own phrase: “Do you think that humble, poor, miserable people will have eating habits? If he eats, he has to say thank God.”.
This logic – a peculiar way of looking at the bottom floor of society – has a history, it has its moments. Let's look at some, just a few examples, that I gathered from my introduction to Swift's text.
In the 19th century, faced with the controversy over child labor, the so-called propertied classes claimed, claiming scientific basis, that the elimination of this practice would destroy the English economy, physically and morally. At the same time, in Brazil, slave owners predicted chaos if and when abolition “broke the contracts” and attacked their “acquired rights” regarding black men and women and their offspring, current or unborn. In the southern United States, slave farms were set up to reproduce this fundamental input. A little later, in the splendor of the Third Reich, the Vorstand (Board of Directors) of IG Faberben and the SS seriously discussed how to liquidate Jews and Slavs at the lowest cost and “exhaust” workers at rates suitable for production.
Can't creative minds produce a better solution to hunger? Something that, for example, does not harm the self-esteem of the so-called target audience? Don't reduce the joy of living (and eating!) to the intake of energy drinks consumed “even by astronauts”, as the elegant mayor says on his Roman tour.
In fact, numerous studies, in different fields of science, guarantee that children who do not receive necessary calories and proteins, during the last intrauterine weeks and the first months after birth, will be mentally impaired in a lasting way: Brain “batteries” will not maintain the “setup” of memory and intelligence. They tend to turn into apathetic adults. Degradation will bring some loss to the productive world – acceptable as long as they are leftover parts. But, on the other hand, perhaps the apathetic will one day kick back. Keynes once made a dire prophecy in his Economic Consequences of Peace (1919):
"Economic deprivation advances in slow phases, and while men bear it patiently, the outside world cares little. Physical efficiency and resistance to disease slowly diminish, but somehow life continues to the limit of human endurance , until the advice of despair and madness removes victims from the lethargy that precedes crises. Then, man becomes shaken and established relationships loosen. The power of ideas becomes sovereign and men begin to listen to any promises transmitted over the air (...)
"men will not always die in silence. This is because, if hunger leads some to lethargy and irremediable discouragement, it leads other temperaments to the nervous instability of hysteria and crazy despair. In their suffering, they can bring down what is left of organization, and drown civilization in its desperate attempts to satisfy pressing individual needs."
Our poet João Cabral described the reduced and abbreviated man produced by hunger in another way: he “falls short of man, at least capable of gnawing the bones of the trade; capable of bleeding in the square; capable of screaming if the mill chews on his arm, capable of having his life chewed away and not just dissolved”.
It is not from this school that the mayor's thoughts come. Good kids: they don't scream – this seems to be the motto or expectation of the “farinata” created in the company’s mysterious laboratories.
Recently we had a painful and still hushed case, the embezzlement of resources from children's meals. Now, the poor's kitchen is revisited by strange and agile hands. It already resembles a pattern, almost a fetish.
One of the evils of our world is that we have quickly become accustomed to a “new normal” that until yesterday was unthinkable. We need, from time to time, some shocks, to think inside out, since the world is too straight to be right. Straight as a pink sweater, draped over her shoulders with studied indifference.
