MasterChef

08/21/2026

I’m sure some bloke, an academic no doubt, has done a study of failed civilizations and found that the common sign that indicates impending doom is the public obsession with food and the fuckwits that prepare it.

So I did some research…

The bloke who actually did the broad comparative rise-and-fall-of-empires exercise was Sir John Bagot Glubb, a British historian, in his 1976 essay The Fate of Empires.

He compared eleven empires and proposed a recurring sequence ending in an Age of Decadence, characterised by materialism, frivolity, pessimism, loss of duty and excessive wealth. He specifically remarks that declining societies develop an “eat, drink and be merry” mentality and compares Roman preoccupation with free food and entertainment with later societies.