The New World Order, like Britain, has suffered from decades of severe food insecurity, with untold millions dead from famine over the last century. However, as time has gone on, the food security situation in the Order has turned a corner. In recent years, especially in urban centres, food insecurity has merely meant inadequate nutrition as opposed to starvation, and the Order has actually made huge strides in increasing food security and decreasing malnutrition throughout its territory. In fact, today, citizens of the Order typically enjoy a much more varied, interesting and secure diet than Britons, albeit with much more inequality of access to food. In this article, we will provide a basic discussion of the modern New World Order diet.

Comparison to Pre-Collapse Times

In wealthy countries like Britain, in pre-Collapse times, it was customary for people to buy most of their food at large, corporate warehouse-stores called 'supermarkets'. Often, when people see pictures of these facilities, their reaction is that the photo must be a fake. The vast size, the piles of fresh-looking and exotic vegetables, the shelves and shelves of varied boxed and bottled and immaculately wrapped products, the neatly plastic-wrapped, perfect-looking meat, it seems impossible. It's all historically accurate, though. Those images are nothing like the modern reality of going to market, and it's hard for us today to imagine how this magical fantasyland of food that our ancestors took for granted was even physically possible.

The answer to that is simple - energy. That society in a century or two burned through millions of years accumulation of fossil fuels to use machines and chemicals to rapidly grow, harvest, process and transport food, and to maintain constant refrigeration until perishable items were sold, and even then, they were also prepared to actually waste mind-boggling quantities of food. This is especially egregious when you consider that even in that privileged age, there were still people who didn't have enough to eat.

The collapse of this highly globalised and interdependent system and its replacement with an ill-prepared system of local food production and delivery, combined with the creeping stresses and increased frequency of adverse weather from global warming, the cooling of nothern Europe later in the century, and, of course, the nuclear winter after the Middle East War, explains the century of famine that followed.

The New World Order has not come close to restoring the pre-Collapse global food system, but with decades to reshape the ruined global systems of the early 21st century, a global trade and transportation network, and access to the entire world that embargoed Britain simply can't match, they have been able to shape a new global food system which by and large is fairly enviable relative to Britain's purely local food system.

New World Order Food Systems

Food security and diet in the New World Order depend heavily on income and social class. We can speak in generalities before getting into those differences, but suffice it to say the types of foods that people have access to and the reliability of that access varies very markedly across income levels and geography.

Post-Collapse, food systems became very local, and especially with the various climate-related disruptions, this local supply became very vulnerable to local famines. The states that came out of the Global Collapse, and the New World Order that absorbed most of them, viewed reglobalising the food supply as one of their single most urgent concerns, so that a crop failure in one locality would not automatically equate to a famine.

The Order partially succeeded. Pre-Collapse, a food item might travel around the world three times before ending up on a 'supermarket' shelf, and that is certainly no longer the case. The Order avoids relying on refrigeration and extremely rapid transport, but durable foodstuffs might travel over very long distances by train and by wind-electric ocean liner to get to market. In any given locality, the food available in the market will still be heavily dominated by local production. But in recent years, famine has become unheard of, at least in urban centres and areas of strong NWO control, and that is in no small part due to the reglobalisation of some staple food supplies.

Foods that are available in the market will be foods that can keep a long time at room temperature, such as dried flours and beans, bottled and canned preserves, and cured and fermented products. Fresh foods like fresh vegetables will be available when in season, or else vegetables like potatoes, onions and carrots that can be stored for longer periods of time under cool but not reliably refrigerated conditions will sometimes be stockpiled.

It is very common for people to buy or grow fresh food and then do their own preserves, which if not done correctly can lead to problems like botulism. There is always a little element of fear with home preserves, but they're an important part of most families' diets.

People except for the very wealthy generally don't have electric refrigerators, because they are out of most people's economic means, and because frequent power outages make them less useful, anyway. Freezers can actually hold 0 ºC for a long time until everything thaws and are slightly more popular and useful. Iceboxes and ice delivery services have made a major comeback, and a sort of hybrid electric refrigerator/icebox is popular with the professional class. Anyone who can manage it has a cold cellar, but this doesn't work in many geographic locations. Communal electric coldrooms with locked cages that charge a monthly rent are popular in some communities.

People typically go to a neighborhood market for food that will often have some kind of backup power to enable it to keep food cold more reliably. Fresh, perishable food is purchased somewhat rarely, either in season or for special occasions, and it will usually be eaten right away. As in Britain, it is normal to go to the market for small purchases relatively frequently as opposed to buying a lot of food all at once. In some centres, markets may be larger, like a small version of the old supermarket, and in other cases, they are a laborious matter of going from stall to stall buying what you need from different merchants.

Meat eating is much reduced from pre-Collapse levels, where in the wealthier countries, a meal just wasn't considered complete without meat. There are some ideological reasons for this, as modern Hinduism and syncretic folk traditions based on it have spread far beyond the Indian community and tend to deprecate meat eating, plus Buddhists and Weists are typically vegetarian. There are many who are concerned about animal cruelty, although, in general, the early 21st century represented a high water mark for concern for animals, and this sort of reasoning isn't as popular today. Largely, though, it's due to the cost of meat, and a concerted state-sponsored campaign to get people to eat less meat to reduce their environmental impact.

With the exception of those who object for moral or philosophical reasons, though, meat eating, as well as dairy and eggs, is a status symbol for the elite class, and they consume a lot of meat (although not to the levels of pre-Collapse diets), which in turn tends to make the lower classes desire it as well, particularly the professional classes, who will tend to eat dried or salted meat, and fresh meat on special occasions. In many areas, dairy and eggs may be more available to the lower classes than other forms of animal products, and products like dried bouillon for flavour.

Generally speaking, the Order doesn't license or allow very much fishing at all, and fish farming is incredibly tightly regulated. It took the Order years to dismantle the global fishing industry - they practically had to patrol the seas and sink fishing boats on sight to make a dent in it. However, the damage to global fisheries is done, and global marine ecosystems are still absolutely decimated. Only the very richest people typically get to eat fish and other seafoods, at least legally, because the prices are astronomical. Most people would be disgusted by the idea anyway, because they are no longer used to thinking of fish as food.

One food item that never went away in much of the world and has made a big debut in the former West is insects, for example, crickets and waterbugs, and they are an important source of protein in many people's diets.

Agricultural Production

Family-scale farms, subsistence farming and gardening still have a large presence in much of the world, especially in the backwaters where NWO control is weak, but in much of the world, agriculture is substantially large-scale and corporatised. It is a heavily regulated industry, and because the New World Order bases much of its legitimacy on its ability to impose long-term sustainability, massive monocultures are generally not permitted.

The NWO simply doesn't have the energy reserves or economy to sustain mechanised agriculture at the pre-Collapse scale. Instead, it solves the problem of mass food production by throwing massive amounts of manual labour at it, as was still common in lower-wage pre-Collapse societies. In the Order, it is common for many of these people to be stuck in an extremely restrictive labour contracts that make them virutal slaves, and they do not have a good life. An enormous amount of the food security of the Order as a whole depends on this form of slave labour. Even those who are not held in virtual slavery are still heavily exploited.

Similarly, chemical fertilisers and pesticides are problematic for the Order to use on a large scale. Instead, the Order relies on crop rotation and mixing, on planting many varieties as in the theory the pests won't be able to go after them all equally, and on the extensive use of both old-fashioned selective breeding and highly sophisticated genetic engineering. There is hardly a plant-based food item that humans eat in the Order that hasn't been adulterated with human gene manipulation in some way.

Cuisine

The Global Collapse and the rise of the New World Order led to huge population movements and things being mixed up in general, and cuisine is no exception. Ethnically homogenous societies are practically unheard of today, and while there has been some efforts to maintain recognisable styles of cuisine, there has been an awesome amount of culinary syncretism, and even food that is advertised as beloging to a particular tradition typically has some element of culinary fusion to it.

Spices are typically a food item that can be effectively stored and transported long distances, and the Order is generally quite successful at making a wide variety of spices available at fairly affordable prices worldwide, especially in cities. The exact availablility may vary, though, which tends to encourage experimentation to find a way to work with whatever is available at any given time. Any spices grown and produced locally will be more available and more heavily used in any given locale.

For these reasons, as a generality, food in the Order is really good compared to Britain. People may have had to get used to making do without fresh, perishable ingredients a lot of the time, but they have learnt to do some pretty amazing things with preserves and other durable foodstuffs, and the combination of the greater variety of food available and the historic cuisines of the world coming together and mingling has led to some pretty impressive results.

There is still a huge amount of regional variation in NWO cuisine, often depending on what preserved foods are most available in that area and what fresh food is grown locally, and also just depending on the history and mix of cultures in the area. If anything, food is much less homogenised in the Order than it was in pre-Collapse times, as the Order has no equivalent of the 'fast food' of earlier times, that has died out, and it actually lacks a global cuisine to replace the starchy, fatty, salty and meaty American cuisine of the previous era.

Street food is everywhere in the towns and cities, and it is delicious, but be careful, it's not always safe to eat, and you are taking your chances until your body acclimates to the local pathogens. With that caveat, it is still highly recommended. The locals typically don't have any problems eating it and once you get past an often difficult phase of getting used to it, you will probably like it, too.

If you are vegetarian, or just squeamish about common food items like bugs, you can say 'we se uzreslek', 'I am a vegetarian'. Vegetarianism is common in the Order and if people know you're vegetarian they can and will normally easily accomodate you. If you want vegan food, though, make sure to specify 'we se zra uzreslek', otherwise, people will tend to assume certain animal byproducts are fine.