good omens

friday

Raven Sable, slim and bearded and dressed all in black, sat in the back of his slimline black limousine, talking on his slimline black telephone to his West Coast base.
"How's it going?" he asked.
"Looking good, chief," said his marketing head. "I'm doing breakfast with the buyers from all the leading supermarket chains tomorrow. No problem. We'll have MEALS in all the stores this time next month."
"Good work, Nick."
"No problem. No problem. It's knowing you're behind us, Rave. You give great leadership, guy. Works for me every time."
"Thank you," said Sable, and he broke the connection.
He was particularly proud of MEALS®.
The Newtrition corporation had started small, eleven years ago. A small team of food scientists, a huge team of marketing and public relations personnel, and a neat logo.
Two years of Newtrition investment and research had produced CHOW. CHOW® contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman. It didn't matter how much you ate, you lost weight. [And hair. And skin tone. And, if you ate enough of it long enough, vital signs.]
Fat people had bought it. Thin people who didn't want to get fat had bought it. CHOW® was the ultimate diet food-carefully spun, woven, textured, and pounded to imitate anything, from potatoes to venison, although the chicken sold best.
Sable sat back and watched the money roll in. He watched CHOW® gradually fill the ecological niche that used to be filled by the old, untrademarked food.
He followed CHOWS with SNACKS® junk food made from real junk.
MEALS® was Sable's latest brainwave.
MEALSD was CHOWN) with added sugar and fat. The theory was that if you ate enough MEALS® you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition.
The paradox delighted Sable.
MEALS® were currently being tested all over America. Pizza MEALS, Fish MEALS, Szechuan MEALS, macrobiotic rice MEALS. Even Hamburger MEALS.
Sable's limousine was parked in the lot of a Des Moines, Iowa, Burger Lord-a fast food franchise wholly owned by his organization. It was here they'd been piloting Hamburger MEALS for the last six months. He wanted to see what kind of results they'd been getting.
He leaned forward, tapped the chauffeur's glass partition. The chauffeur pressed a switch, and the glass slid open.
"Sir?"

"I'm going to take a look at our operation, Marlon. I'll be ten minutes. Then back to L.A."
Sir.
Sable sauntered in to the Burger Lord. It was exactly like every other Burger Lord in America. [But not like every other Burger Lord across the world. German Burger Lords, for example, sold lager instead of root beer, while English Burger Lords managed to take any American fast food virtues (the speed with which your food was delivered, for example) and carefully remove them; your food arrived after half an hour, at room temperature, and it was only because of the strip of warm lettuce between them that you could distinguish the burger from the bun. The Burger Lord pathfinder salesmen had been shot twenty-five minutes after setting foot in France.] McLordy the Clown danced in the Kiddie Korner. The serving staff had identical gleaming smiles that never reached their eyes. And behind the counter a chubby, middle-aged man in a Burger Lord uniform slapped burgers onto the griddle, whistling softly, happy in his work.
Sable went up to the counter.
"Hello-my-name-is-Marie," said the girl behind the counter. "How-can-I-help-you?"
"A double blaster thunder biggun, extra fries, hold the mustard," he said.
"Anything-to-drink?"
"A special thick whippy chocobanana shake."
She pressed the little pictogram squares on her till. (Literacy was no longer a requirement for employment in these restaurants. Smiling was.) Then she turned to the chubby man behind the counter.
"DBTB, E F, hold mustard," she said. "Choc-shake."
"Uhnnhuhn," crooned the cook. He sorted the food into little paper containers, pausing only to brush the graying cowlick from his eyes.
"Here y'are," he said.
She took them without looking at him, and he returned cheerfully to his griddle, singing quietly, "Loooove me tender, looooove me long, neeever let me go . . ."
The man's humming, Sable noted, clashed with the Burger Lord background music, a tinny tape loop of the Burger Lord commercial jingle, and he made a mental note to have him fired.
Hello-my-name-is-Marie gave Sable his MEALS and told him to have a nice day.
He found a small plastic table, sat down in the plastic seat, and examined his food.
Artificial bread roll. Artificial burger. Fries that had never even seen potatoes. Foodless sauces. Even (and Sable was especially pleased with this) an artificial slice of dill pickle. He didn't bother to examine his milkshake. It had no actual food content, but then again, neither did those sold by any of his rivals.
All around him people were eating their unfood with, if not actual evidence of enjoyment, then with no more actual disgust than was to be found in burger chains all over the planet.
He stood up, took his tray over to the PLEASE DISPOSE OF YOUR REFUSE WITH CARE receptacle, and dumped the whole thing. If you had told him that there were children starving in Africa he would have been flattered that you'd noticed.
There was a tug at his sleeve. "Party name of Sable?" asked a small, bespectacled man in an International Express cap, holding a brown paper parcel.