Every time you see high automation technical wonders in the food industry, remember this funny precursor 50+ years ago.
In Claude Zidi’s 1976 satire L’aile ou la cuisse, the Tricatel factory scene serves as a grotesque, neon-lit premonition of culinary dystopia. As Charles Duchemin and his son Gérard infiltrate the facility, they witness a mechanical assembly line where “food” is birthed from chemical vats rather than soil or livestock. The visuals are unapologetically absurd: synthetic chickens are inflated like rubber gloves, cubic eggs are extruded to maximize packing efficiency, and petroleum-based pastes are molded into recognizable shapes.
Today’s food industry has arguably caught up to Tricatel’s madness, though it has swapped the clunky 70s machinery for sleek Silicon Valley branding. While the movie’s “petroleum chicken” was a punchline, we now head to 3D-printed wagyu, lab-grown “cultivated” proteins, and ultra-processed snacks engineered in labs to hit “bliss points” with surgical precision. The cubic eggs of the film have evolved into the hyper-optimized, square-packaged meal replacements of the modern era, proving that Zidi wasn’t just making a comedy—he was drafting a blueprint.
We may have replaced the rubbery textures of the past with sophisticated plant-based binders and high-tech marketing that makes the industrialization of dinner look like a lifestyle choice.
Note that this “modern” food industry is from 1976. So what will you have at dinner:
- a so-called chicken
- a mold injected fish
- an inflated salade
- cubical eggs
Factory abstract, from “The Wing or the Thigh“, from the French “L’aile ou la cuisse” directed by Claude Zidi, starring Louis de Funès and Coluche:
The bad side of fake food apart, we largely prefer regular, quality-focused, factory manufacturing, than very bad artisan cooking, as the movie also illustrates below.
Charles Duchemin (Louis de Funès) plays a foreign tourist for a secret restaurant’s kitchen audit):











