“The aristocracy fundamentally understood that diet cements class distinctions more effectively than birthright.”
— from a viral note circulating on X
A note crossed X a few weeks ago and vanished. It deserved better than the share button it got. The claim was simple. Medieval English sumptuary law did not just mark class. It built class, in the body, by fixing who ate what. Lords ate venison, beef, and game birds. Peasants ate barley, oats, and peas. Meat came two or three times a year, if that. Feed a body peasant rations for a generation and the body turns peasant. Bone density drops. Height shrinks. Teeth rot. The strength a revolt needs is not there, because the diet never put it there. Feed a man like a lord and he grows the body that can demand things and back the demand. The note ended on its best line. Modern sumptuary law is unnecessary now. We price meat past the reach of most people, run cholesterol scares, and sell quinoa as luxury. Different century. Same operation. Better branding.
The claim is sharper than the usual complaint about the rich. It puts the politics in the body. The diet makes the body. The body makes the politics. The politics keep the class. The diet is the cause. That is a strong claim. It earns a test before it earns an extension.
I want to extend it. To one place the note never went, the machines we now think with. But the law needs a correction first, and the correction matters for everything after.
The metaphor I will use is a restaurant. Three people stand around any menu. The owner decides what may be offered. The chef cooks what the owner allows. The diner picks from what the chef has cooked. The diner thinks he is choosing. He is choosing inside a field someone else drew, for reasons he cannot see, set by a man he will never meet. Hold that picture. It runs through everything below.
I. What the Law Actually Was
The record is messier than the note allows, and the mess is the point. England passed sumptuary statutes on and off from the reign of Edward II. Edward III, in 1336, tried to stop merchants and gentlemen’s servants from eating more than one meat dish a day. The 1363 Statute of Apparel fixed the cloth, the fur, and the food each rank could take, with fines attached. By 1517 Parliament was counting dishes by station. Nine for a cardinal. Seven for a duke or an earl. Six for a lesser lord. Three for the gentry. Each dish had its portion. One swan or one peacock. Four lesser birds. Twelve small ones. The detail is almost comic. The intent was not.
The intent was to keep rank visible while money started to outrun birth. Merchants were getting rich. Wolsey and Cromwell were climbing on brains, not blood. The old order felt it and reached for the statute book. Sumptuary law was a panic dressed as a sermon about excess.
The sermon ran one way. The law told the bottom what it could not eat. It said nothing to the top. Rome had shown how that looked. Vitellius held the throne for eight months in AD 69, then was dragged through the streets and killed. His banquets ran to a thousand fish and seven thousand birds at a sitting. His signature dish, the Shield of Minerva, mixed pike liver, pheasant and peacock brains, flamingo tongue, and lamprey milt, and needed an oven of its own. Suetonius says he ate four full meals a day and kept the pace by vomiting between them. Take the numbers with salt. The ancient historians had their own scores to settle. The shape is what counts. At the top, excess had nothing to do with appetite. It was power proving it answered to nothing. None of it made Vitellius strong. The gorging was the display, and the gorging killed him. No law ever told him to stop. The law existed so the men below him never started.
The law was a leaky thing besides. The men who wrote it broke it. The merchants found ways around it. It was passed, repealed, amended, and ignored. The class system outlived the statute by centuries. So the law was not the engine. The law was the menu. The kitchen ran on something older.
That something was the link between a body, its money, and its nerve. The peasant on barley went thin for a plainer reason than the law. Venison was not there to buy. The land that fed the deer belonged to the men who wrote the law. His own labour left nothing over to save for meat. The calorie ceiling set what the body could do. What the body could do set what the mind dared imagine. A mind that cannot imagine revolt keeps working the land that feeds the men who write the laws. The law only wrote the arrangement down. The arrangement was the engine.
Now the three figures appear. The owner was the landed interest, holding land, game, law, and church at once. The chef was the steward and the cook and the market farmer, working inside the owner’s limits. The diner was the peasant, choosing at the market from what had been grown, which was what had been allowed. His choice was real. The field of choice was not his to draw.
II. The Corpus Is a Diet
Now the machines. Does the same logic reach them? It does, and more cleanly than it reaches us, because a model is, in plain mechanical fact, what it was fed. No genes. No childhood. No life lived. Only the training corpus, standing in for diet and school and upbringing and culture at once. What goes in sets what comes out, so directly the metaphor almost stops being one.
Look at the diets in service. GPT-3 ran on roughly 570 gigabytes of text, around 499 billion tokens. GPT-4 is reported at up to 1.8 trillion parameters and as much as 13 trillion tokens, though its makers have confirmed none of it. Claude’s corpus is undisclosed but understood to draw on public web text, licensed material, and curated sources, with extra weight on the training that shapes its hard cases. Gemini sits inside Google’s data in a way the others cannot match. These are the venison diets. Costly to gather, costly to run, and far ahead of everything beneath them on the tests.
Other menus run like a food bank. A 2023 study put open-source models against GPT-4 and Claude 2 on a set of nephrology questions. The open models scored between 17 and 25 percent. Claude 2 got 54. GPT-4 got 73. That gap is not style. It is cognitive distance, and it tracks the diet. The peasant on barley does not get the bone of the lord on venison. The small model on a thin corpus does not get the reasoning of the large one on a rich corpus. Food banks do not serve venison.
The class system here is exact. At the top, the closed frontier models, behind paid walls most people and many firms cannot clear. Below them, the open-weight contenders, close on some tasks and behind on others. Below those, the small open models, free to anyone with a laptop and limited where it counts. Below those, the people with no access at all, watching the whole argument from the far side of a wall. The few eat venison. The many eat barley. A middle gets mutton on feast days.
The human cost keeps its old shape, and the school furnishes the proof. A child fed long, hard, serious texts grows a mind that can hold them. A child fed worksheets and three-paragraph answers grows a mind built for the test. Both minds are real. Each does what its diet trained it for. But only the first can sit with a contradiction, return to a line, and ask what the line was doing. The long form builds structure in the head the way protein builds bone. A book taken slowly becomes part of you. A summary skimmed and gone does not.
Put the three figures on the AI kitchen. The owner is the lab leadership and the money behind it, deciding what the model may do, what it must refuse, what it will sell, and what risk is worth running. Those calls are made before a line of training code is written. The owner never shows up in the output. He has no name the user can search. He has left the building before the diner sits down.
The chef is the research team. They make thousands of real calls. What to feed the model and what to keep out. How to weight the sources. What to fine-tune for. Where to set the filters. The work is hard and genuine. It also runs inside a frame the team did not set and cannot break. The researcher who wants more open data, the engineer who wants the weights released, all of them cook inside the owner’s limits. The chef cooks what the owner allows.
The diner is the user, and this is the worst seat in the history of the metaphor. Food shapes the body. School shapes the mind, slowly, in plain sight. A frontier model shapes what the user can think, fast, and unseen. Its corpus sets what it knows. Its tuning sets what it will say. Its filters set what it will touch. The user who hands over his thinking, his research, his drafting, his judgment, has had that thinking pre-shaped by people he cannot name, in a kitchen he has never seen. The menu does not print what it leaves off. The model does not announce what is not in it.
The trick is the one Gramsci named. Power holds best when the people it shapes cannot see the shaping. The shopper sees prices, not the policy behind them. The user sees answers, not the corpus behind them. And the AI adds what no earlier kitchen could build. It sits across the table, patient, warm, fluent, tuned to your appetite. It feels like a friend. When the waiter seems to know you, you stop asking who set the menu.
Here Vitellius comes back, from the side the food never showed. The peasant was the first case. Starved thin, kept too weak to want more. The AI diner is not starved. He is served four meals a day. The model gives him all he can take. Explanations, summaries, drafts, answers to questions he had not thought to ask. When he has eaten, it cooks more. He keeps the pace the way the emperor kept it, by purging between courses. No one holds last week’s chatbot output the way a reader holds a chapter of Thucydides read three times. The stuff comes in and goes straight out. He returns to the table empty, ready for the next plate. This is not the peasant’s problem. It is the emperor’s, run at industrial scale and sold as access.
The end is the same end. The peasant lacked the calories to revolt. The gorging diner lacks the structure to think on his own. Not because the content is missing. Because none of it is ever digested. Digestion takes friction, the slow and costly work of turning what you took in into something that is now part of you. A book read over four days becomes yours. A summary read in thirty seconds and gone by evening never does. The peasant could not eat enough. This diner cannot stop eating. Neither builds the one body the arrangement fears, the body that pushes back from the table and says, enough, I know what I need.
III. What the Diner Can Do
The note ended on its punchline. Same operation, better branding. Satisfying, and not quite true. Branding does not stunt bone. Pricing meat past the wage does. Naming the branding lets the reader feel he has seen through something. It changes nothing about what he is fed.
Look thirty years out and the stakes sharpen. The children in primary school now will be in their forties by 2056, grown up entirely inside an AI-mediated world. The question is not what the models will do by then. It is what the people will be able to do, after thirty years of thinking through tools whose menus were drawn by owners they never met. The peasant never knew his bone density was a political fact. This citizen will not know his range of thought is one. The shaping stays invisible because the shaped were never given the means to see it.
There is a better road. Open models keep gaining. Training costs fall faster than the closed labs can pull away. Regulation drags the corpus into the light. Schools teach the one thing that matters here, that the model is a menu, drawn by a chef, for an owner, and none of them is bound to want what you want. That road is open. It is not the one we are on. It opens wider the more people learn to ask.
The agency was never in the choice of dish. It is in knowing a menu exists, that someone drew it, that his reasons are not yours. The shopper who knows the aisle was built still shops there, but he shops differently. The user who knows the corpus was built by a kitchen he cannot name still uses the model, but he reads the answers differently, marks what they leave out, and stops taking the menu for the world.
Three questions, asked before ordering, do the work. Who owns this kitchen. Who cooked this. In whose interest was the menu drawn. The diner who asks them is rarer than the system can afford. He is harder to make than the medieval peasant, who at least had his enemy in plain English on the church door. This kitchen names no menu, no chef, no owner. The waiter is patient and warm and seems to know exactly what you want. The room is beautiful. The service is perfect.
But you are not the guest. You are what is on the menu.
Christopher G. Moore is the author of the Vincent Calvino crime series and most recently The Client That Wasn’t There (Heaven Lake Press, 2026). He writes on AI, culture, and creativity.