The rapid industrialization of farming has had mixed consequences for the environment and animal welfare, and it has had overwhelmingly negative consequences for the health of rural communities. But for nonfarmers the most meaningful changes brought about by the increased efficiency of agriculture have been the creation of an unprecedented abundance of food and an unprecedented distance from its production; there’s sausage in the fridge, but no one knows how it gets made.

Couple profligate ignorance with the reality that food is one of the few human needs for which there can be no digital substitute, and the result is a collective psychodrama. In the online spaces that have come to define modern life, food has accrued a totemic significance, a capacity to shape bodies and minds and perhaps even souls. Thinkers from across the spectrum, from irony-drenched neoreactionaries to transhumanist tech millionaires, believe that to better ourselves and our societies we must better our food. At once divorced from the realities of farming and fixated on the visceral necessity of eating to sustain a human body, to them food has become not just sustenance but potential damnation and salvation.

But you can’t eat your way to immortality or manliness…