The Ardsnarkian community, after years of debate, finally decided that instead of each family providing their own meals they would create ‘eat centers,’ where Ardsnarks, young and old, would go for their meals. This was a large step for a people who traditionally had been very independent in all their habits. They concluded however that ‘eat centers’ would save time and effort. The money to support these ‘eat centers’ would be provided by each family unit ‘donating’ what it would usually cost them to feed their own family, plus enough to pay the wages of those who would be dedicated to feeding all the Ardsnarks.
The Ardsnarks, being a people with a good deal of foresight, realized that they would need to set up ‘Eaters Colleges’ in order to train the future cooks, nutritionists and dietitians for the Ardsnark Eat Centers. The first President of the first ‘Eater College’ was a mann named Dewey Rugg-Ardsnark, and in his acceptance speech Dewey promised that the ‘Eater College,’ would ‘forever be a place where the most cutting edge dietary methods and techniques would be taught in order to keep average Ardsnarks in their place of health.’
At first this arrangement worked splendidly. What with the time free from meal preparation and clean up the Ardsnark women now had more freedom then ever and eventually many of them decided they could work a little in order to expand the family budget. Further, the arrangement worked well because the Ardsnarks were a community where meat and potatoes was the standard meal, therefore there was little murmuring by the meat and potato meal that was routinely offered.
Incrementally and imperceptibly, though, over the course of generations something to begin to happen to the Ardsnark community. Suddenly, the Eatists (thats what they called the Eat Center professional) started bullying the rest of their Ardsnarkian brethren. It started first by the ‘Eatists,’ in their brown shirt uniforms (better to hide the food stains they said) insisting that in order to do their jobs as Eastists properly they really needed to have full control over the food supply and manufacturing. They just couldn’t do their jobs adequately if they had to depend on Ardsnarkian farmers since the farmers didn’t ‘know how to farm in such a way to give the Eatists the optimum quality food.
Once the Brown Shirt Eatists took control of the food supply and manufacturing as well as the cooking some Ardsnarks, who still were retrograde enough do to their own home farming and cooking, began to notice that both that the Eatists seemed to be getting bigger and stronger while the rest of the Ardsnark community began looking kind of puny and reasoning as if their brains were suffering malnutrition.
Now these retrograde Ardsnarks began to try to bring this to the communities attention starting a campaign to warn of the ill effects of public eateries but the community, both the Eatists and the mainstream Ardsnarks, accused them of being conspiratorialists. The mainstream Ardsnarks, who were, on average, 25 pounds leaner, 5 inches shorter, and 15 points down on the non-adjusted Ardsnark I.Q. test, then their great great grandparents, insisted that “since they came out of the eat centers alright, their children would as well.” The Eatists who the retrodgrade Ardsnarks were now calling ‘Elitists Eatists’ insisted that the retrogrades were “trying to destroy the Ardsnarkian way of life,” which was absolutely true.
Over the course of time this division between the retro Ardsnarks (R.A.) and the Eatists Ardsnarks (E.A.) developed into an Ardsnarkian culture war, as the RA’s did all they could do withdraw from the orbit of EA influence while the EA’s kept trying to put all Ardsnarkia under their hegemonic control. Indeed, so vast did the difference become between these two warring Ardsnarkian elements that some of the Retro’s began bombing and blowing up the Eat centers and the Eaters Colleges with the more benign Retro’s writing heavy tomes quoting the early Ardsnarkian fathers who warned against the dangers of the Eatists and who prophetically and accurately, as it turned out, projected where these Eat Centers would lead. The EA’s on the other hand insisted that the orderly farming, production, and preparation of food required them to take over all Constabulary duties in the Ardsnarkian culture in order to better insure the free flow of food to all of Ardsnarkia, and so a nationalized ‘Food Police’ was created, (Black Shirted Uniforms in order to hide the non food stains) devoted to protecting the Ardsnarkian way of life.
The EA’s didn’t stop there. They insisted that prevention was to be preferred to law enforcement so they developed a Ministry of Information for Ardsnarkia dedicated to the purpose of canvassing and reaching the Ardsnarkia hinterland with the Gospel of Eat Centers. The motto of this new agency was “Nutrition or Death,” which fit nicely on a snazzy patch they had on their camouflage uniforms.
