Imagine a sky that rains cheese, rivers that flow with wine, roasted pigs wandering by with carving knives already in their backs, and grilled geese flying straight into your mouth. This is Cockaigne, the mythical medieval land of gluttony and idleness dreamed up by people who were quite literally starving. In this episode we explore how this bizarre fantasy world reveals the grim realities of peasant life and how it spread through languages, place names, art, and music around the globe.

We look at the 13th-century French poem that describes abbots beaten by their monks and total sexual liberty, and why the myth worked as both wish fulfillment and a safe vessel for class resentment against feudal lords and the church. We trace the word from a sweet cake sold at fairs to the Dutch Luilekkerland, the German Schlaraffenland, English Lubberland, and the Spanish Jauja, a real mining region in Peru. Along the way we cover the greased Cockaigne pole, Bruegel’s 1567 painting, the Goliard drinking song later set to music in Carmina Burana, Pinocchio’s land of toys, the Big Rock Candy Mountains, and Nick Bostrom’s Deep Utopia.

• Why medieval peasants under Christian asceticism imagined a world of eternal youth, mild weather, and food that cooks itself
• How the land of plenty functioned as satirical rebellion against the elite with plausible deniability
• The clarification that the word has zero connection to the drug cocaine, which was named in 1860 from the Quechua word for the coca plant
• Real places named after the myth, including a Dutch village founded on peat-cutting labor and a Bedfordshire village named for a family of idle dreamers
• How the dream of a life without labor became the modern idea of a post-scarcity economy, and what that might do to human purpose