Let Them Eat Leftovers

Un-friggin-believable. Does no one, an image consultant or anyone like that, survey these plans and say, "Hey, y'all will look like the most horrible, hypocritical oligarchs imaginable if you do this?" And then, who releases the menu, and the fat-cat portrait? Or is the answer more simple: they are simply entirely disconnected from the world at large and/or don't give a flying shit?

In any case, the UK Daily Mail brings this report from the G8 Summit, where world leaders are discussing the global food crisis...while sitting down to an 18 course dinner, which followed a six course lunch:

Just two days ago, Gordon Brown was urging us all to stop wasting food and combat rising prices and a global shortage of provisions.

But yesterday the Prime Minister and other world leaders sat down to an 18-course gastronomic extravaganza at a G8 summit in Japan, which is focusing on the food crisis.

The dinner, and a six-course lunch, at the summit of leading industrialised nations on the island of Hokkaido, included delicacies such as caviar, milkfed lamb, sea urchin and tuna, with champagne and wines flown in from Europe and the U.S....

...Dominic Nutt, of the charity Save the Children, did not approve.

'It is deeply hypocritical that they should be lavishing course after course on world leaders when there is a food crisis and millions cannot afford a decent meal,' he said.

'If the G8 wants to betray the hopes of a generation of children, it is going the right way about it. The food crisis is an emergency and the G8 must treat it as that.'

In 2005, at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, world leaders promised to increase global aid by £25billion a year by 2010 and raise aid to Africa, the world's poorest continent, by £12.5billion. But the bloc of rich nations is only 14 per cent of the way towards hitting its target.

Welcome to a world without irony.

The Menu: