Joshua Citarella

Cooking Wars (full stream)

Added 2022-04-01 13:01:10 +0000 UTC

Watch the Cooking Wars live stream (1:47:50).
Watch the full collection (2:09:40) extended intro + outro.

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Dorian joins me to prepare a delicious bunker meal of emergency survival rations: creamy stroganoff, mashed potatoes, mac & cheese, "Maple Grove" oatmeal, orange drink, the strangest pancakes I've ever seen + much more.

This is definitely some of the most fun I've had on the stream. The bucket contains 118 servings (two week supply). Everything has a 25 year shelf life. In the beginning, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the food. In the end, I was feeling pretty sick. We both had major stomach cramps post-stream. I could feel the dehydrated food expanding in my guts. Yikes.

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As political fragmentation continues to mount in the coming years, today's radical fringe may swiftly become tomorrow's mainstream. Post-pandemic, popular narratives of preparedness and resilience have been revealed as (what they always were): paranoid folklore. Even the most ardent preppers eventually had to leave their bunkers to get more pasta sauce. Mass society requires cooperation and coordination. There is no amount of self-sufficiency that can replace a disrupted supply chain.

For me, projects like the Cooking Wars live stream are a way to safely indulge in the hyper-individualist fantasy of preparedness, to defuse it of its power over our political imaginations, and to contemplate greater forms of collective action that may scale to the crisis before us.

Many earlier generations have felt the desire to leave society and return to a "natural" state of self reliance. (But damn, 1968 didn't know how good they had it lol) In reality, exit has always been a fantasy. If our generation can't leave, then we have to be the ones to fix it.