The reader of our Post will be well aware of the emergence of the Menjòmetre, an application born from the (ordered) chaos of the networks and the mysterious pen of the anti-hero Segell Fosc, which allows any user to inquire about the public subsidies received by a specific company or individual. Many of the data presented by the Menjòmetre are, as some administrative nitpicker would say, the mere sum of the data that public entities already publicize openly for any common query. But, as everyone also knows, transparency portals (it must be said; scarcely visited and with usability that is highly improvable) offer valid but fragmented information on public aid that often depends on multiple different departments and administrations and that ---once added up and communicated without so much muting--- make us see to what extent there are business chiringuitos in concert with public money.
Among all the information shared by the Menjòmetre, there are also curiosities that affect the pockets of Barcelona residents. A few days ago, the application revealed to us (attaching the contract in question, five years in length) how one of our planetary star chefs, Albert Adrià, had collected more than 1.5 million euros from the City Council for the services of "conceptualization, design and production of exclusive gastronomic proposals" for the new spaces that will open in the Tibidabo amusement park. Among all these attributions (for which the awardee will ensure a minimum remuneration based on 10% of sales of... ¡¡¡750 thousand cucumbers!!!), the explicit inclusion of the work "production of an exclusive ice cream product" is surprising, to which an amount of 800,000 euros will be allocated. I understand very little about making ice cream, but I would say that this level of spending is intolerable even if the client turns out to be a maharajah.
I can perfectly understand that our city council wants to publicize the city (or what the imbeciles call "the Barcelona brand") through its most excellent chefs, men and women who have achieved worldwide fame, initially, without any kind of public help and working like real animals. And I can also understand that the City Council wants to reverse the fate of a space in clear decline like Tibidabo (which, if we look at the latest post-pandemic data, came to have 8.5 million euros in deficit) by exciting the stomachs of cretins. But this operation sounds like a fix and smells like a typically socialist attempt to keep certain catering agents with their wallets overflowing with cash to buy their will. I have consulted the preceding figures with my spies in the marketing universe of the hospitality sect; there is not a single voice that has not told me that they are absolutely crazy.
Some sectarians of the journalistic tribe have questioned the appearance of the Menjòmetre using the hackneyed story of affirming that the invention in question will be the ideal tool for what the prissy call the extreme right and also the perfect excuse for all those who strive to cut even more some necessary public aid. I would say that the colleagues from many media outlets do not act out of conviction, but out of the fear they have felt upon knowing themselves minimally audited (and I write minimally, because our friend Menjòmetre has not yet dealt with the scandalous business represented by certain Catalan cooperatives and production companies in relation to our public television...). To all those who are shaken by the invention, I would say that auditing the money we give to the administration in exchange for protection, services and compensation is never a bad idea. Nor is it a bad idea for us to also perpetrate what, after all, the state continually does to us: namely, control us.
In short, the appearance of the Menjòmetre has also served to highlight the slowness and dependence on power of our media universe. Because I say that if, once it's published and publicized that someone charges 800 thousand silver coins to conceptualize a nice ice cream, our mayor doesn't have twenty or thirty journalists chasing him at every event and even chasing him when he goes to pee with the aim of asking him what the hell this mockery represents... it means, dear colleagues, we have a serious problem. But don't worry, beloved readers, you'll always have me at the ready to talk about those things everyone keeps quiet about. And, as can be seen in the Menjòmetre itself, I come out more than dirt cheap.