Eat The Rich, The Cameron Hatheway Way

My satirical piece "How The 1% Can Feed The 99%" is now available to read on Robot Butt! A little history on how the story came to be:

It all started bubbling up inside of me last year, when I was just getting so incredibly frustrated about the current toxic political landscape. It just felt like the crooks kept getting away with things, over and over again, and having a president in charge that lets them made me feel incredibly helpless. I'd see my timeline filled with memes from friends, also venting their same frustrations. One meme that kept repeating was "Eat the Rich!" in reference to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's famous quote, "When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich." But the rich keep getting richer, and the poor poorer. While people laugh off the thought of actually eating the rich, I started to think, "What if we did?" What would that entail? We wouldn't just tear them apart like animals in the wild, eating raw meat and smearing their entrails over our faces. We're not barbarians! In my mind, someone needed to create some recipes that would sate the masses, and got to writing. I was in the middle of writing The Patch, but the idea to prepare eating the rich kept nagging at me, so I put everything I was writing on hold and made eating the rich my priority for a few weeks. Amanda and I do a lot of cooking. Every night we meal prep, pulling up recipes from healthy cooking blogs and cook books, but the most annoying thing about the cooking blogs are the lengthy blog entries leading up to the actual recipes. The person writes down their entire life story, sometimes as long as a Steinbeck novel, and we get so incredibly frustrated. "Just give us the free recipe, you sadist!" as we scroll for what feels like miles. That's the format I used, the blog post recipe, to help set the scene of the current state of events, and why you would need to eat the rich (because there's nothing left).

I commissioned my extremely talented and handsome friend Gustav Carlson (Tourist Unknown, Eve of the Ozarks) to illustrate the dishes like you would see in an old cook book, and homie knocked it out of the park!

It did take several months of pitching to different publications and satirical websites that I felt would be the best fit, and the kind gents over at Robot Butt expressed interest and they just published it. Weirdly, The New Yorker didn't get back to me. Surely I figured their readers would be the target demographic! To hunt and eat, that is.

So I hope you like it, and find the recipes so descriptive your mouth will be salivating.