We can't help but think about food

I’M not going to jump on the Dublin Web Summit bandwagon, says Colm O’Regan.

Frankly, if you’re even using the word bandwagon it shows how out of touch you are. Bandwagons are a thing of the past, having been ‘disrupted’ by iRE – an app that effectively outsources your emotions for you. iRE scours the world for hot topics and decides how you feel about them. (You’re generally angry) I’ve just made that up but already it’s worth four billion dollars.

Anyway, the web summit is gone now – off to Lisbon. Just like the Monorail episode of the Simpsons, there’ll probably be people denying it was ever here. I’m not interested in who was invited or hush money or wifi. I’m interested in one particular valuable lesson that was reiterated from the whole thing. The event had some of the finest technical minds speaking at it, millions of dollars of venture capital funding was announced, but the one thing everyone was talking about was overpriced food. Should we have looked past it and stopped being so short termist and petty?

Maybe in decades to come, when we are in a ‘post-food’ society having affairs withsex-robots while our self-drive cars secretly sell the photos to tablandroid newspapers, we will look back at this debacle and laugh.

But that’s in the future. I’m hungry now.

American psychologist Abraham Maslow came up with the notion of the hierarchy of needs. He arranged in a pyramid, the layers of things that were really important to people. At the top was nice-to-haves like creativity and spontaneity. At the bottom was the stuff you couldn’t do without – breathing, water, excretion, sleep, homeostasis – (your body’s internal police force, hormones and the like) and ... food.

Mess with any of those and the body has a problem. Sleep is for wimps, air is still free, there was no talk of hormones at the web summit - although I imagine there was lots of testosterone. We don’t know what the toilets were like. There weren’t photos but when you act the maggot with food, people react as if there are maggots in their food.

Ask anyone who’s planning a wedding reception - what is the primary concern? Make sure the guests are well-fed.

Fill them up to the gills. Then, when they are just about recovered and are staring at a pint wondering how they’re going to finish it, pummel them into submission with the afters food. As the weddings arms race has reached a stalemate in so many areas, one of the few places a couple can differentiate themselves is the afters food. The humble rasher sandwich as been eclipsed by full-on Chinese buffets.

What will guests remember? Is it the string quartet playing near the entrance – is it the prosecco. Yes maybe. But is there a biscuit or a bittofa scone to keep us going when they’re off doing the photos? Especially for Auntie Deirdre because they came from Galway this morning because he’s not well so they don’t want to spend two nights away.

News of skimpy food or a draught spreads like wildfire. There could be a fight between the groomsman and and the guitarist from the band in the middle of the dancefloor but still if there was a nice vegetable soup for your father because he won’t eat that goat’s cheese thing, the whole do will be characterised as grand.

No coincidence that of all of Jesus’ miracles from the Bible, the ones that people remember, were largely to do with catering. People walking away from the Loaves and the Fishes incident saying – well the sound system was terrible and the queues but fair play to them, they put on a grand spread.

So in conclusion, when it comes to events - food food food.

Not that the Web summit would give one hoot about what I think – they’ve bigger fish to fry. Or hopefully after this week, they’ll at least throw a few more on the pan.