Recycling is Bull S***

Treehugger: Recycling is Bull S***

Before anyone gets offended, I’m borrowing the title from Treehugger. And I agree.

*waits for gasps of shock to disappear*

Recycling is a huge waste of time. The fact that students spend a total of about 50 hours per week collecting and sorting recyclables on this campus: waste. Those recyclables have to be trucked somewhere, and Kent County, just like so many other municipalities all over the country, is responsible for finding someplace willing to buy the materials (usually China). They don’t make very much money at it. But the alternative is to dump them in a landfill, and landfills are even more expensive.

Why is this such a waste? What alternative could there possibly be, you ask? Well, not so very long ago in the past, there were refillable bottles. You drank a Coke, say, and then you gave the bottle back. And they washed it out and put more Coke in it. Whoa. Same with most other beverages, including alcohol.

But for this to be possible, there had to be places making beverages in the relatively near vicinity of the place where people were drinking them. Otherwise you had to transport a load of glass bottles over long distances, and, well, obviously glass doesn’t travel very well. Plus it’s heavy, and costs a lot to transport. Having a lot of little places each making soda or beer or alcohol meant lots of little companies each making their own product, often unique, often with local ingredients. There were hundreds and hundreds of brands of sodas, and probably thousands of microbreweries.

Now, Coke couldn’t have that, could they? Thousands of people doing their own thing, making unique diverse products? Bad for business. And Coke couldn’t afford to have lots of little factories all over the place- far more efficient, and far cheaper, to make Coke in one place and ship it all over the country. But not if you have to ship glass bottles back, and wash them, and refill them, and ship them out again. Thus was born the aluminum can. Lightweight and cheap to ship. Can’t be refilled. Never mind the fact that aluminum is ridiculously expensive to mine, that’s all done in Africa, and who cares if strip mining demolishes native populations and leaves millions of people in stark poverty. For Coke, it’s not only cheaper, but now they don’t have to deal with the end product: it’s all yours! Part of the bargain! But what in heavens name are you supposed to do with that aluminum can?

Well, for years, throw it in the trash. Then the environmental movement got all crazy, and you had to recycle it. Notice the key word here: YOU. YOU had to recycle it. YOU had to figure out what to do with it. Municipalities, which are not exactly money making organizations, had to figure out what to do with it. And they, and you, have to do this with every single consumer product.

But I say NO. NO, it is NOT my responsibility to figure out what to do with this plastic bag. I don’t want it. I don’t take them. What the hell are they doing in MY river? I don’t remember anyone ever asking companies to make plastic bags. I don’t remember anyone asking the companies to start producing aluminum cans. And seriously, did anyone go around asking companies to make the ridiculous tons of plastic s*** that plague waterways around the world? I certainly didn’t. And yet it’s supposed to be MY responsibility to deal with it? Are you kidding?

It is time, far past time, that we stop putting all the blame on ourselves. Oh yes, you as a consumer can vote with your wallet and all that. I’m just not sure why we have to continue to be defined as consumers at all, as if we don’t have any option other than to consume. What if we become producers? What if there are local microbreweries, who start taking bottles back again, and refilling them, and selling them? What if you buy products locally, so they don’t have to be shipped at all? What if you buy them from craftspeople, who don’t wrap them in tons of packaging? Or, if you’re still determined to keep using those multinational corporation products, why don’t you DEMAND, with your consumer dollars that are supposed to be all-powerful, that THEY take responsibility for the packaging of their products? That THEY deal with the millions of tons of plastic, of aluminum cans, of other useless packaging, instead of passing that cost on to you, the consumer (because the municipalities are collecting recycling using your tax money)? What if THEY take responsibility for the pollution they create, and not just the waste, but the air and water pollution? Why is it our problem? Did we ever ask for it?

Companies will undoubtedly say this makes their products more expensive, but I say bull S*** to that too. Coke spends billions of dollars on advertising. If their product was really all that great, they wouldn’t have to. They could use some of that money to solve the problem THEY’VE caused.

But, oh right, the global economy depends on shifting all the responsibility away from corporations, who have the legal rights of people, but none of the responsibilities, and putting it on “consumers.” And CLEARLY the global economy is more important than the environment, and our health, and our lives.

How very silly of me.

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Ten Things Not to Buy in 2010

Ten Things Not to Buy in 2010

I think this list is kind of funny because I probably wouldn’t buy a single thing on it anyway, except maybe a newspaper subscription. I disagree that books are going out of style (send me your books! I’ll give them a good home), probably because I’ll never get a Kindle (my eyesight is bad enough without trying to read on yet another computer screen). I can’t understand why anyone in their right mind would buy new college textbooks anyway. And I definitely agree that buying CDs is pointless (when you can get them for free, and save waste in the process). Thumbs up to the no gas guzzling cars or energy inefficient appliances- but that’s another one that should have been a no-brainer.

I have another what not to buy list. In fact, call it a New Year’s challenge to rival the one to exercise more and lose that last ten pounds (except I encourage you to actually try and do this one). In fact, this one is even more of an imperative: it might actually make a difference.

1. Things from the grocery store
If you’re lucky, you live in an area with a farmer’s market and CSAs and co-ops. The marvelous thing about CSAs is that you don’t have to think about it at all- you just show up for your pickup and there is an array of fabulous delicious (local) produce for your selection! There are even meat CSAs and if you are in the right area fruit CSAs- all of which you pay for beforehand, in the winter- so you don’t even need your credit card when you go. The farmer’s market can supplement your purchases with things your CSA doesn’t offer- ranging from bread to pastries to jam to candles to produce to chicken to lamb to eggs and much more. Finally, for those products you can’t typically find at the farmer’s market, you can join a co-op to get (more or less) locally produced dry goods- I get flour and other baking necessities, as well as dry beans and rice, from my co-op. As long as I remember to put in my order each month, a wonderful friend of ours divides up the orders and gives everyone their bills. If you don’t know of a co-op in your area, start one up! It’s easy- it just requires a little extra time each month to put in orders and email everyone when its time to come pick them up. As a result, the only thing I buy at the grocery store is paper towels, and occasional random items like salt and lemon juice.

2. New Electronics
Seriously, why would you even bother to buy new electronics? Talk about a waste of resources. Check out this website for more on why: Last Year’s Model

3. Disposable Pads and Tampons
Many, many, reasons for this one, from the environmental to the personal. Check them out here: Green Girl Talk

4. Anything that comes in individually wrapped packages
And that includes granola bars- as well as candy, gum, tampons, crackers, snack products, and who knows what else. It’s pointless to individually wrap something when you can just buy a big version and save the waste. Besides, have you ever noticed that individually wrapped items are ALWAYS more expensive than bulk? Buy in bulk- save money, save time, save the waste!

I also want to include in this one bottled water. This is the biggest waste of resources known to consumerism, if you ask me. DRINK TAP WATER. If your tap water is not drinkable, bring it up with your city. Don’t spend all your money on bottles of water that are probably not much cleaner than your tap water, AND require ridiculous amounts of energy (and oil) to produce, as they are made out of oil, and the FDA does not allow bottles that contain food products to be made out of recycled plastic. So you can recycle all the water bottles in the world and STILL each new plastic bottle must be made from oil. Besides, even recycling uses ridiculous amounts of energy. Recycling plastic is not efficient.

5. Tissues
Handkerchiefs. I had to use a tissue again the other day, after having switched to handkerchiefs maybe… three years ago? And I got snot all over my hand. I was not pleased. Tissues are sad pathetic excuses for handkerchiefs. Believe me, your nose will thank you. I make mine out of old shirts, and just throw them in the wash when they get gross. They come out good as new!

6. Gag gifts/ Keepsakes/ Paper weights/ Things they sell at the Hallmark Store
I find these to be the most irritating things to receive from other people. They don’t DO anything. Apparently sales of them are high because there are entire stores devoted to these sorts of things. I go inside them every once in a while out of fascination: what is all this for? Why do we spend our hard earned money on things that have absolutely no purpose? Gag gifts can be funny, but it is more the concept that is funny, and after you’ve seen them once the laugh is over and that’s the end of it. Then what? Then it just sits around collecting dust and taking up space. Same with the objects people buy- I mean, one or two, sure, but seriously, some people have hundreds of these random little figurines and statuettes and who knows what else sitting around.

7. Soda
Do yourself a favor this year and give your system a break. It will thank you- as will the waterways that are poisoned every year by run off from the corn fields that go into the production of soda and other items made entirely of corn. You can find all about it elsewhere on this blog: here and here and here, to start.

8. Cleaning products, especially the nasty ones
You can clean with vinegar and baking soda. Really. There are tons of recipes out there for making your own cleaning products from very basic ingredients, and there are even more recipes for personal care products. Do some research, be a little creative and DIY, and spare our waterways from the nasty chemical runoff coming from our sinks and drains. No one needs fish kills and fish with both types of reproductive organs. If you must buy cleaning products, look for things that are biodegradable and contain the least number of toxic death chemicals possible. And buy in bulk.

9. Clothes
I once made a pact with my cousin not to buy any new clothing for a year. I used to have a serious addiction to buying clothing, especially shoes, and found myself spending an awful lot of money and time on the pursuit, and then not wearing half of what I bought. So I made a pact, and I broke the habit. Now I still almost never buy clothing, unless I really need something, and when I do I try and give away at least one item in my closet (to keep it even). I think in the last year I’ve bought: underwear, new snow boots, and leggings (which I wear every day). Definitely saves an awful lot of money, and reduces waste.

10. iPhones
This one is just because they annoy me. I know I already put “electronics” on the list, but I hold a special level of dislike in my heart for iPhones and Blackberries and the rest of them. When my dad is interrupting conversations to check his email on his Blackberry, and my friends are surreptitiously taking pictures of me and uploading them to facebook on their iPhones while we’re hanging out, I develop more and more reasons why the internet should just stay on the darn computer.

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Forget Shorter Showers

Forget Shorter Showers

This is so spot on I almost don't feel the need to comment on it, except I think a lot of people might be confused by the message. But take a look at that statistic: if EVERYONE in the US did ALL of the things Al Gore promotes at the end of Inconvenient Truth, they'd still only reduce emissions by 22%.

22%, people. That's not exactly ending global warming.

It's not that it doesn't help. It's not that we should all go around leaving all our lights on all the time, because yes, the old saying "every little bit helps" stands true. It is, however, why I don't beat myself up when I take twenty minute showers.

I am not releasing billions of tons of carbon emissions into the air. Industries are emitting billions of tons of carbon emissions into the air. Now, whenever I've pointed this out to people, and suggested possibly shutting down industries, they usually reply with cries of horror and "no, that's not possible!" They then go on to tell me that it's me: the industries are producing all this stuff for me. Well, no, not really. Vote with my dollars? I do. I don't buy anything. Seriously, I really don't buy anything, except every once in a while a new pair of underwear. Oh, and soy milk, I still buy soy milk. But that's beside the point: I don't want the industries to keep producing things. I never asked them to produce all these (mostly) useless things. And yet somehow its supposed to be my fault that the industries keep emitting tons and tons of carbon and pollute the water and all the rest.

I get really, really tired of the arguments that put all the blame on consumers. Even if you stop consuming, which is next to impossible, because you are an animal and you have to consume SOMETHING to stay alive, you will not stop carbon emissions. You will not stop aquifers from drying up. You will not stop the production of millions of tons of waste. You really won't even make a dent- not compared to industry, government, and military uses. But you certainly aren't going to see Al Gore on TV telling everyone to take out industrial plants. Can you imagine? He'd be thrown in jail, or at the very least discredited and never heard from again. His supporters, after all, own many of the very corporate industries that are causing quite a lot of the pollution. Hm.

None of this is to say you don't have any power as an individual. You have quite a lot, as a matter of fact. But you can be guaranteed that any action that is condoned by people who stand to make money off it probably will not stop the destruction. Just a thought.

Also I love the phrase "systematic misdirection." I think that sums things up quite nicely.

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Chickening Out, Pt 2

The reason the whole chicken thing is so significant (aside from the fact that I broke a nearly ten year hiatus on meat), is what it implies. When I was standing there watching the chickens have their throats slit with one of my neighbors, she asked why I had decided that I needed to watch the chickens die. She wasn’t the only one- a lot of people have been asking why I couldn’t just decide to start eating meat, why I had to be there to witness the blood (there’s less than you’d think) and guts and gore (which is mostly fat).

And I told her that my biggest problem with our food system is that it allows you to look away. A live, feathered chicken looks absolutely nothing like the chicken you buy in the grocery store, and it’s amazing how quickly after death they cease to look like animals and more like hunks of meat. And that’s fine- you wouldn’t want to eat it with all the feathers on- but people in our culture have the luxury of not having the faintest clue where their food comes from. And when you don’t know where your food comes from- especially when it comes in a bright and shiny package in the store- you divorce yourself not only from the knowledge of what went into the process of bringing that food to your table, but from the responsibility of choosing foods that are not only going to nurture your body, but are thoughtful, humane, and environmentally friendly choices.

In direct contrast to my afternoon standing outside in the sunshine butchering chickens, last night the college showed a PBS Frontline feature called “Poisoned Waters.” In it, journalist Hedrick Smith explores the causes of the vast amounts of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay, pollution that never seems to abate regardless of how much money we pour into the problem. And he traces that pollution, unsurprisingly, back to CAFOs- Confined (or Concentrated) Animal Feeding Operations, a term more commonly used to apply to cattle, but which can also refer to chickens. The audience around me gasped at images of vast chicken sheds- often holding as many as four hundred thousand chickens in one long building. Chickens live in close, cramped quarters, usually in darkness, frightened and falling all over one another. They end their lives by being unceremoniously dumped into a truck, driven down the highway to one of the plants (plenty of ‘em down around Salisbury), and butchered on an assembly line. Stainless steel belts filled the screen- workers in gloves and hairnets and masks each making one cut, each only doing one part of the process, as fast as possible- and certainly not talking to each other. I had to lean over to the person next to me and point out the difference- our slaughter was a community event- people came to see their chickens before picking them up, they brought their kids, they talked and caught up and brought snacks. Not so in the poultry industry.

Smith interviews Jim Perdue, Chairman of Perdue Farms, one of the biggest poultry growers on the shore. Perdue argues that to succeed in business you need efficiency- and “efficiency is often size. Things had to become bigger to keep costs lower.” And this does indeed keep prices down. But chickens on the Delmarva, in addition to providing cheap chicken, produce about 1.5 billion pounds of manure. A year. And there’s not a whole lot you can do with 1.5 billion pounds of chicken s***.

Instead, a lot of the nutrients are washed into the bay. At one site where manure tainted water was running off into the bay, E. coli counts were found to be 48,392 colonies. The standard for clean water is 126. Arsenic was found at 9 times the standard levels- not to mention the high doses of nitrogen and phosphorus, which cause the algae blooms that suck the oxygen from the bay and cause massive fish kills every year.

This was no surprise to me. After all, there was a reason I was only going to eat chicken from a farm where the chickens are raised on grass, and where the manure is just tramped down into the soil, where new grass grows up out of it. You can only do so many chickens this way, and chances are it is a far more expensive process. It is nowhere near efficient. Efficiency doesn’t even begin to account for expenses like pausing in cleaning a chicken to explain to a child why we saved out all the livers (for fishing) and what that green stuff was (accidentally slicing into a gall bladder). Not to mention that most of us had never butchered a chicken before, and kept pausing to compare techniques and debate over whether or not we’d gotten the lungs out (they are tricky little things).

The one problem I had with the film was its’ sideways attack on farmers. No, it’s not right that farmers allow so many nutrients to wash away from their chicken operations that the bay is barely functional. But the farmers are not the only culprit. The film spent a long time attacking the poultry industry- the CEOs who could very easily assist their farmers in upgrading their farms to manage wastewater and to prevent those nutrients from escaping into the bay- but who will not do so because of the cost. They certainly share a far greater portion of the blame than many of the farmers, who aren’t given a whole lot of options if they want to keep their land.

But there is one other place where the blame can squarely fall. After all, would Perdue produce millions and millions of chickens if no one was eating them?

What if the millions of people who eat chicken EVERY DAY demanded that chicken operations prevented those pollutants from running off into the water? What if millions of people actually visited the chickens they were eating, and then watched them being slaughtered, and took a turn at helping with the butchering?

Do you think we’d still have the system we do?

You can watch the full PBS special here: Poisoned Waters

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Food Inc

I love this town.

No, I really do. Whenever there is a need, the entire town comes together to support that need. And the need last night was to support Colchester Farm, CSA, the place where so many of us get our food from June to October. The evening started with a cocktail hour, featuring delicious local foods (I went back for the roasted pepper ravioli several times), most of it made by local chefs, including Kent County High School, and several of the Colchester Farm board members. This was followed by a showing of Food, Inc., which, if you haven’t seen yet, you should. Soon.

I wanted to start by praising our town though- we’ve kind of taken food on as our issue, for whatever reason. Possibly its just because we have access to so many wonderful local foods, grown by so many wonderful people who are such a part of the community. We’re proud of our food, proud of the fact that we’re a town in the so called middle of nowhere, which in reality is the middle of a cornucopia of delicious things to eat. And so fortunately we don’t constantly have to look the full brunt of the realities of the industrial food system right in the eye. We at least have other options.

So in some ways Food, Inc. didn’t have much to do with Chestertown. But in others, it hit a point very close to home. Most of the farming done on the Eastern Shore is in commodity crops- corn, grain, soybeans- and most of it goes to feed chickens down on the lower shore. Actually, there are plenty of chickens up this way too. If you sit out on 213 late, late at night you can watch the empty trucks go north toward Galena, and if you wait long enough, you can watch them come back again, full of chickens on their way to the slaughterhouse.

The movie isn’t for the faint of heart. If you don’t want to see the inside of a chicken house (and I have to say, this was a pretty decent chicken house, as far as they go- there were no cages and it actually had windows), don’t watch this movie. If you want to continue to eat industrial food completely unawares of what you’re putting in your body, of the horrors you’re supporting by eating that cheap chicken, don’t watch this movie. But if you’re interested in what plagues our food system- what plagues us, right here, on the Eastern Shore, then watch this movie.

I’ve talked so much about what’s wrong with the food system on this blog that I don’t currently feel the need to reiterate. The movie didn’t reveal anything to me that I didn’t know- but I’ve also made it my life’s work to take on the industrial food system, so I’d be curious to hear the reaction of someone who actually (for some reason?) still eats fast food. But the movie made a good point- not only do most people not know what’s going on behind the scenes in the places their food comes from, they’re not allowed to know.

If you want to trace your food back to the source, good luck to you. I hope you have a lot of time and a lot of money. We aren’t allowed to see inside those chicken houses- we definitely aren’t allowed to see inside the slaughterhouses. If we were- as sustainable farmer Joel Salatin says in the movie- our food system would be something rather different. That’s why he slaughters his chickens in an open sided shed, and invites all the people who buy food from his farm to come and watch and participate.

There was also a strong theme of better regulations for food in the movie. But at the same time, a lot of us are struggling locally to be able to get access to local meats and dairy because of the overbearing regulations of the state of MD. The contradiction came up during the Q&A, but I personally don’t think it’s a contradiction at all. I believe they even said, in the movie, that when you’re selling to a place like WalMart you need those regulations, you need to have had your food inspected and carefully labeled and have the assurance that it doesn’t contain E. coli, because the consumer has no other way of knowing. The shopper at WalMart can’t go out to the farm and meet the farmer and take a look around, because likely the farm is on the other side of the world- and likely the process that food item took to get from that farm to the WalMart would be more than enough to stop the consumer buying the item, anyway.

But in the case of local foods, you have the option of seeing what you’re buying produced first hand. Not everyone wants to watch their chickens get slaughtered- but when I talked to the guy who I plan to get chicken from last night, he invited me right on out to the farm to meet the chickens, allowing me to feel a little bit better about consuming meat. Locally, it really is a case of buyer beware- if you choose to buy locally, you are responsible for checking out the person you are buying from, not USDA. A farmer last night pointed out that this is a big risk for farmers- they could easily get sued- but I’ve heard a great suggestion that would solve that problem all around. What if we were allowed to opt out of the conventional food system? What if, as we do in so many other areas of our life, we were allowed to sign a waiver that said, we don’t want to participate in the conventional food system, thanks so much, and we hereby take responsibility for our food choices upon ourselves, swearing never to sue our local farmers, because we’re part of a community, and its our responsibility as well as theirs to double check on the process and make sure our food is safe?

Can you imagine what WalMart would say to that?

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Just a thought…

A new 1/3-ounce, 18-karat gold ring creates about 20 tons of mine waste.
Source: IdealBite.com

So, just to do some quick math… there’s 32,000 ounces in a ton, and a ring is only 1/3 of an ounce… that’s about 1,920,000 times more waste than there is metal in the ring. Yes, about TWO MILLION TIMES more waste than metal in the ring.

Short story, buy vintage or recycled jewelry. Seriously. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how much better for the environment it is not to ever, ever, buy new jewelry- not to mention all the social atrocities associated with the mining industry. Just an estimate- and this is from a friend who’s visited and seen a mine in Africa, won’t mention which one, first hand- is that mining workers have a ten year lifespan, once they enter work at the mine.

If you think about it, we have to have enough metal above the ground- MORE than enough, considering how long we’ve been mining, to have more than enough to make jewelry for every person on earth. Not to mention the vast number of metal objects that make it into the trash (landfills)- aluminum and tin cans, pots and pans, even the little metal bits on pens that get thrown away. What I’d like to see is all the current manufacturers of all those products that use metal declare they will no longer use virgin (new) materials- but that they’re going to find ways to recycle all the millions of tons of metal that have already been mined. I’m sure if they started mining landfills they’d hit paydirt.

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Kipple

Having just moved (again), I find myself facing the same dilemma that faces me on a fairly regular basis. I have way too much junk.

Most of us don’t realize this until we go to move it- then suddenly it springs from unexpected corners- shoes we thought we lost years ago, miscellaneous boxes of papers and unwanted holiday gifts and things we put away thinking there would be need for them one day. And usually, because we’re rather in a hurry to move, we don’t take the time to sort through all these things, but just throw them all in a box and stash them in the closet at the next location.

This is what Philip K. Dick calls kipple. Well, he’s not specifically referring to the stuff that appears when you move, but the general accumulation of completely useless things. It seems to multiply. It seems to slowly creep ever onward until every last bit of space has been occupied by something.

So why do we have so much stuff? It is a question I ask myself on a regular basis. How did I end up with such a vast collection of candle holders, for example? What is all the stuff in my junk drawer? And is it possible that tupperware can actually breed (but not the lids)? I would blame a lot of this on obligatory gifting (the fact that people who barely even know you, including relatives who are only vaguely associated with your family) feel the need to buy you something for Christmas, but that doesn’t explain how so many random gadgets I never use and am not sure of the purpose of ended up in my junk drawer.

The real question, though, is what to do with all this stuff. Some things you can donate to Goodwill (or, here in Chestertown, WIN, Nearly New, or Hidden Treasures). But what about random bits of junk? What about the four or five extra screws that came with a piece of furniture but won’t fit in anything else? What about broken electronics, and extra cell phone chargers without the phone? Broken necklaces? Random plastic gag gifts? What about the things that its possible someone would want, somewhere, if only you could figure out how to connect the thing with the person?

And so we have landfills. None of us have enough time to somehow figure out how to get all the random things we have to the right places, and the right people. We do our best, certainly, we have yard sales and you get rid of some of it but at the end of the day there are just things that no one wants. No one knows where they came from. They can’t be recycled, because there are too many varied component parts and it’s too energy intensive to separate them.

What are we supposed to do with all of it, aside from throw it away? My vote is to stop producing it all in the first place. And make it commonplace for you to turn in old electronics when you buy new ones. And stop using so much packaging. I bought a set of speakers from amazon.com the other day, and when they arrived they were three boxes deep- as in they were in a box inside another box inside another box. And then held in place by Styrofoam, which is not recyclable unless you have the kind of quantity you can ship overseas (and even then, is that really environmentally friendly?).

It’s a conundrum, certainly.

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Local Co-op(ted)

When Local Makes it Big

So I like to talk about local foods on this blog. When I use the term, I am thinking in my head of something like… oh, I don’t know, food that comes from Kent County. Maybe if I were to stretch it I would include food from the Western Shore- maybe all the way to Virginia, maybe as far as PA, but that’s really pushing it. I can get most of what I need from a pretty compact area.

But now the Frito-Lay company is marketing their foods as local. That’s right. The massive national conglomerate that brings you junk food galore is claiming that their potato chips are local- at least in the areas that are more or less adjacent to their processing plants.

Back up for just a second. My brain quite literally balks at this concept. Frito-Lay- a division of Pepsi, which is actually an international corporation- is making claims of locality?

It makes a certain amount of sense. People want to know where their food is from, especially as issues of food security become more prevalent in the news, as well as more and more press in regards to the numerous benefits of the local food movement. Big companies are going to want a piece of the market, just as they did with the organic label (as the article points out). But as a result, the organic label has been worn so thin it means next to nothing. Almost anything can be labeled organic. And now, it seems, the same will be done with local- a term that seems so straight-forward it’s hard to imagine any way in which it could be co-opted.

But let’s think this through. If, in some places in the country, Frito-Lay buys potatoes from farmer’s within a relatively local radius of their plant, this is at least preventing them buying potatoes from the other side of the country, shipping them to their plant, and then distributing them nationally. This article says nothing about whether the chips from a certain plant are also distributed locally, but regardless, matching local farmers to local plants is a step in the right direction, right?

Well…

Yes, it’s better than shipping potatoes back and forth all over the country, as frequently occurs with other products. Frito-Lay has also banned the use of genetically engineered corn and potatoes in their products, and that may be an even greater step toward sustainability. But can their products be rightfully called local? There are a few missing pieces- whether the chips are distributed locally, for example, or if the chips from one particular plant are still sent all over the country, whether the ads are only displayed locally or not. Not to mention the simple fact that Frito-Lay has plants all over the country, and most of them only produce a few of their many products, which then have to be shipped over terribly long distances…

It makes you wonder, certainly. As the article eventually articulates, local, in the minds of most people, not only means local (regional), but small-scale. “Local” seems to imply some sort of added value aside from the mere distance between the buyer and the grower. However, this isn’t inherent to the term, and I think when we’re talking about what we value in our food it’s important to be as specific as possible, and not presume that when we say “local” or even “organic” anyone will have the faintest idea what we mean. I know for me, the best part of buying local (from within Kent County) is that I’ve met the farmers face to face, and usually have a nice little chat every Saturday morning at the market. I doubt I could do this with any of the farmers who grow for Frito-Lay.

As a point of interest, according to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frito_Lay) the Frito company started in 1932 producing 10 lbs of chips per day, in the owner’s kitchen. I’m going to take a stab and guess that these were, in fact, locally distributed.

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And Some Things are Just Like Home

During move out a few weeks ago, I had the fortune to participate in Give and Go, a program developed to collect the leftover items students did not want to take home and donate them to Women in Need. I say fortunate, because although I hauled all sorts of furniture and boxes of random items all over campus on one of the first truly hot days of the summer, I ended up with a number of random things I had in fact been looking for. A floor length mirror, for example. I had been wanting one, and in one hallway there was not one, but two. I had my choice.

I also glanced in the dumpster, and was alarmed to realize that despite our efforts, there was still an array of usable items, including a chair and a relatively new bike. Alas. But this is fairly normal- spending all my time in the vicinity of Buildings and Grounds, I am privileged enough to constantly monitor the items that end up in the dumpsters, and scavenge any useful items I find.

I really shouldn’t have been surprised then to come upon the Mainz University recycling and discover a mountain. Mainz has a much larger university than little old Washington College- about 35,000 students to be precise. The majority of these students don’t live on campus, reducing, I suppose, your average student waste stream- clothes, books, the bizarre little things students tend to accumulate (plastic inflatable hands, anyone?). But here I found a mountain of computers, fax machines, printers, even typewriters, all waiting, I sincerely hope, to be recycled. When I say mountain I am not exaggerating. I could have climbed up the side, as it towered over my head. There was a similar mountain of office chairs. Nothing, absolutely nothing, except office chairs. Most of which looked to still be in good condition.

This in particular blew my mind. Ok, fine, obsolete electronics tend to get thrown out and recycled. I can accept that, even if I don’t like it. But office chairs? What’s obsolete about an office chair? Office chairs in the Custom House are at a premium, so even the one with the broken arm gets used. But here, before my eyes, was a cornucopia of office chairs. Not to mention the four, count them, four, accompanying trailers (as in, the back part of a tractor trailer) full of everything else you can imagine getting thrown away at a college. Wall sized maps (of Romania), planters, desks, lamps, the entire contents of a kitchen (oven, utensils, pans, plates, cake mix, spices), and rows and rows of mini fridges. Not just one. Rows.

And it’s not just the university. Walking around the city, I consistently see piles of what we translate to “big trash,” which the Germans call sparemüll. Furniture by the scores, working tvs and dvd players and just today, an entire kitchen floor, the planks of hardwood stacked on top of one another in an enormous pile. I think somewhere in my mind I imagined Europeans were simply more thrifty than Americans, and would therefore waste far less in terms of usable items. They tend to hang on to their cars until they fall apart, for example. But clearly I was wrong. While I’m sure there are some exceptions, I can hereby state that Germans are just as wasteful when it comes to consumer products as Americans. The evidence lines the streets. It provides a veritable (free) shopping mall for anyone with the time and energy to haul it away. And believe me, many people do, which may be the one difference between here and America.

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Green Girl Talk

The revised text of the lecture, back for your edification.

All right. We’re here to talk about periods. Who hates getting their period? Who was told by their mother the first time they got their period that it was a curse, that it would be the bane of your existence, that you now had to suffer for the rest of your life, or until you got pregnant or menopause, those blessings of female existence.
But wait. This lecture is supposed to be about the environment! What does this have to do with it? Well, a lot. For one, if you aren’t even comfortable talking about your period, you’re going to have a problem with most of the alternatives I’m going to outline. The reason we even ended up with the products most women use today is that women were uncomfortable with their bodies, uncomfortable with talking about them, and uncomfortable with finding out the facts. Not to mention, willing to let themselves suffer when it came to their periods. We expect it to suck, and therefore it does.




So let’s talk “feminine hygiene.” Disposables have only been widespread since the 1930s. The only way they became popular was that they allowed women to drop money in a jar on the counter without speaking to the clerk. Kotex introduced the equivalent of the disposable pad in 1921, while the self-adhesive pad wasn’t introduced until the 1970s. Before that, women used rags, fabric, wads of cotton, sponges, whatever worked best, and usually washed and reused the same rags each month. There were belts, suspenders, or sanitary panties with hooks or tabs to hold pads in place, because tight fitting underwear is a recent trend. For thousands of years, women have used reusable pads that they likely made themselves, and no one seemed to mind.
So how did we get stuck on disposables? Well, for years, women have been made to feel ashamed and dirty about the natural functions of their body. Early advertisements told women that disposable pads could help them hide their problems by disposing of the evidence. The same theory seems to persist in today’s advertising, when we’ve even gotten to the point of pads with “silent” packaging so the other women in the bathroom won’t realize you’re opening a pad. Our society expects us to hide our periods and pretend nothing is happening- like we’ve got some kind of terrible disease. If we’re buying “sanitary” products, we must assume we are unsanitary. Whatever embarrassment you feel probably came from negative advertising. Periods aren’t discussed openly. Very few of us had positive first periods. The usual response is, “oh, now you get to spend the rest of your life “inconvenienced” once a month.” Likely this has an effect on our periods- how much of PMS is really irritation that for five days you have to continue to deal with the world when you’d rather stay in bed all day eating chocolate and sleeping?
Many other cultures celebrate a girl’s first period with a party and gifts. Others hold menstruation to be a time for meditation and reflection, when women can take a break from regular life. Our culture still seems to think menstruation is a punishment from God. Long ago, women’s cycles followed the cycles of the moon, often menstruating during the dark of the moon and ovulating during the full moon. Even now, women with irregular periods are sometimes advised to leave a light on while they sleep to emulate the light of the moon- which will regulate their periods. This is known as the Dewan effect.
Tell me- what’s unnatural about your own blood? Knowing your own body and being aware of your cycles gives you self-confidence, especially the first time you observe all aspects of your cycle and are not only able to predict the exact time you will get your period, but feel when you ovulate, and, amazingly enough, this can also improve your health and destroy some of those symptoms normally associated with periods- fear, pain, agitation, etc. A positive outlook can go a long way. It’s no big deal if someone knows you have a period. Are you afraid they’ll find out you’re a woman?
Disposable pads are made of wood fiber, polypropylene, and polyethylene (#5 and #4 plastic). Tampons are made of a cotton rayon blend with a polypropylene cover, unless you buy those which are all cotton or have a cardboard applicator. In a woman’s lifetime she can use over 15,000 sanitary pads or tampons, adding up to about 250 to 300lbs of waste. There are 85 million women of menstruating age in America, throwing away about 13.5 billion pads and 6.5 billion tampons per year (2001). Can you even picture 13.5 billion pads? These fill landfills and clog the sewer systems, and can take over 500 years to degrade. Over 170,000 tampon applicators were collected along US beaches in one year.
In addition, both tampons and pads can contain traces of dioxin, a carcinogen. This is left over from the bleaching process, and over time can accumulate in the system, causing, surprise, cancer. Have you ever noticed how the ingredients aren’t listed on a box of tampons? Tampons also put you at risk for Toxic Shock Syndrome, which occurs when bacteria build up in the vagina from the fluid absorbed by a high-absorbency tampon. The FDA uses research provided by tampon manufacturers to tell the public that tampons are completely safe- even though there are no federal standards of quality or absorbency that could determine which are less likely to cause toxic shock.
Now for some solutions. You could start with all organic non-chlorine bleached tampons, though that does nothing to solve the waste problem. The cost is about the same or a little more than regular tampons. There are also reusable options. If you feel the need to use a reusable coffee cup in the morning, there is no reason not to use reusable pads or a tampon alternative. These include cups like the Keeper or Diva Cup and natural sponges. The Diva Cup is a small silicone cup that collects blood and is emptied when full. It usually can stay in up to 12 hours, and will last 10 years if properly cared for. The come in different sizes, to accommodate a variety of vaginas. The initial cost is $35, which over ten years amounts to about 29 cents per month. Natural sponges are animals that live on the ocean floor, which are dried out and cleaned and can be reused for about six cycles. They are, however, dead animals and have to be scraped off the ocean floor, which is not exactly an environmentally friendly option.
Reusable pads come in an amazing variety of options. You can purchase them from one of many female run companies such as Glad Rags or Lunapads. A starter kit costs anywhere from $30 to $150. Or you can make your own out of scrap fabric. They are usually cotton with a terrycloth liner; some also have a piece of nylon for extra protection. They come in all shapes and sizes and colors and if you make your own you can of course customize for the best fit. They’re bigger than normal pads because they wrap around, but they’re also more breathable and are highly recommended to women that have problems with frequent irritation or infection, which can be caused by the plastic backing of disposable pads.
There are always issues with any choice. Just look at tampons- in some countries they’re sold with little plastic finger covers so that women don’t have to touch themselves. That sounds strange until you realize that some countries don’t sell tampons with applicators. You don’t have to make the switch all at once- people will start by using reusables at night or at home, which can cut over 1/3 of the waste. Yes, you have to clean them yourself; yes, you have to get over touching your own blood. People will see them and wonder. Reusable pads will get stains, but if you soak them in cold water and wash them the stains will be minimal, and stains do not mean they are dirty. They make special bags so you can carry them around during the day, though Ziplocs work just as well. You can generally wear them longer than disposables because the cotton is more absorbent (and also less likely to leak). You really only lose from 2tbsp to one cup of fluid during each cycle. Plus, you never get the adhesive stuck to your hair.

“To make the switch from disposables to reusable products requires an attitude change from being able to throw away the mess (or is it the evidence?) of our menses and perfume and deodorize at the same time, to accepting the reality of this natural part of our bodies.”

I also wanted to bring up, at least briefly, birth control. I never used to discuss this in my lecture because, well, for a long time I thought the benefits of not getting pregnant outweighed the downsides of birth control. But as there are alternatives, and birth control becomes more and more of an environmental issue, I wanted to at least mention it.
There are two reasons this topic is important for girls. One, like pads and tampons, there is an environmental concern in regards to birth control. There have been a lot of rumors circulating in regards to hormones ending up in our water supplies, and whether these are all true or if we really have to worry yet, no one seems entirely sure. It’s typically safe, when it comes to pollution, to err on the side of less pollution is better.
The second, and this has been subject to even less research, is that birth control in its many conventional methods has not been proven to be entirely safe for all women. Most methods haven’t been out for a long period of time, and several have been pulled from the market after they were discovered to have negative effects on our systems, such as Norplant, and suspicions have been raised about many of the other forms- though no one has bothered to figure out what exactly all the side effects are.
I’m not going to go extensively into alternatives, because this is an area where you have to choose for yourself. Some people don’t seem to have the same bad reactions to hormones as others, and some people have a harder time counting days and paying attention to their own bodies. And sometimes accidents just happen. Believe me, I have contemplated going back on regular birth control for the convenience more than once. But I am one of those people who can’t tolerate hormones in my system. Even aside from the risk factor, I do not personally like to be dependent on pills to take care of my body any more than I like being dependent on pads made of plastic that come from the drug store. If there is a more localized alternative, that gives us control over our own bodies, and puts the knowledge of how they work back into our own hands, then that’s the option I’m going to take.
When it comes right down to it, the real question is, do you love your body? One of the most radical things you can do, for yourself and for the environment, is to care about yourself, and to be attuned to what’s going on. I mentioned before that with practice you can literally feel yourself ovulating. That kind of power can change your life. And if you care about yourself, and your body, you’re going to treat it right- and that means not tormenting it by trying to shove your period to the side, and trying to hide from the simple fact that you are a girl and you menstruate and I am here to tell you this is beautiful and amazing.
And, to not lose sight of the theme of this lecture, I strongly believe you can’t love the planet while you’re hating yourself. Look at the damage we do to the environment and how much of it has to do with how much we just don’t care about its effects on ourselves- thousands of kids get asthma every year from power plants, but we let it slide- thousands of people get cancer from pollutants in the air, in the water, and we do nothing… because we don’t know how to love ourselves, dirty and chaotic and imperfect animals that we are. If you can change that, you’ll be surprised how quickly everything else falls into place.

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Money Money Money

Reality Sandwich: Money, A New Beginning

There are two important (related) points I want to address from this article:

We have a growth economy (in fact, an exponential growth economy) and a finite quantity of resources upon which that economy is supposed to be based. This is undeniable.

In a growth economy, we must constantly have more things if there is going to be more money in circulation- in other words, in order to grow, we must have more things to sell. If you look at our society, it is based almost entirely on the privatization of things which were once free (such as clean water), and the constant invention of new things to spend money on (for example, “upgraded” technologies, which renders the old versions obsolete).




This causes two problems: first, that in order to continue to grow, our economy encourages phenomenal amounts of waste. If you reuse something for ten years instead of buying a new one every few months, there is no profit to be made, as a long lasting reusable item subverts your need to constantly make a purchase. The same principle demands the constant use of more resources to produce the new items.

Second, it traps you into a constant cycle of accumulation. I’ve talked about this in terms of major environmental groups previously on this blog. When you constantly require additional funding to stay afloat (literally to stay in business- to maintain your employees and programming) a vast percentage of your time is spent on accumulating money in order to do this. Now imagine if we were secure, and accumulating money was unnecessary- that same amount of time spent on fundraising and grant writing could be spent on immediate, tangible applications, such as going out and quite literally cleaning up a stream.

It’s yet another way to look at sustainability. Let’s look at one of my favorite examples again, water. One way or another, we have to pay for water. Even if you refuse to buy bottled water, which is thus far the ultimate in privatization of water, you still have to get it from somewhere (a tap) because it certainly isn’t clean enough when it’s running in a stream or something similar. There are methods of collecting and purifying your own water, but these are typically discouraged, looked down upon, or made otherwise difficult, if not outright illegal. So we get our money from a tap, the cleaning of which is paid for typically by a municipality, which pays with our tax money and the like. If you have your own sink, typically you have a house or apartment or something around it (which you had to pay for), or even if you are getting water on the go, you need some kind of container to put it in (which you had to pay for). Water is by no means free. We must accumulate some sort of material good to grant us access- whether it be a whole house or a Nalgene bottle. Take a minute and imagine someone in a tribal society with a Nalgene bottle. What the hell would they do with it? They’d have to haul it around all over creation. If water were simply available, clean and without pollutants…

Well, possibly you can see what I’m driving at. The destruction of the commons, as it is typically called, has deep reaching consequences for our environment. If everything is privatized, it is no one’s responsibility- who is to blame for the polluted air in the vicinity of a power plant, as we’ve asked before? The plant, or the people who purchase power from them? And when it comes down to removing the pollution, who should pay? And who, ultimately, pays when the people living nearby (regardless of whether they purchase power from that plant or not) suffer from exposure to pollution?

Something to consider, certainly.

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Green Elitism

Is Rural Green Living an Elitist Illusion?

I didn’t just post this because they use a Monty Python picture in the article. I swear.

No, I was actually just talking about this recently with some friends (my friends are so nerdy that we typically sit around talking about things like the true definition of sustainability). Hybrid cars are great and all, but I can’t afford one. Most people I know can’t afford one. I typically use the word “inaccessible” for most “green” innovations. Many argue that new green technologies will eventually trickle down, but I honestly don’t think we’ve got that kind of time. Products trickle down as newer, better innovations come along, but that can take decades- and it means that there will be even more sustainable products on the market, leaving those with the least money using outdated, inefficient models.

Additionally, how green is it if the majority of the population simply can’t afford it? It means only a small percentage can go green, leaving the rest of us… well, not green.


This article presents a good point, and turns it about a bit. Not only can “green” products be labeled elitist, marketed as they are to people with money (Whole Foods is a great example of this. I dare you to find a Whole Foods in a depressed area), but those toting the green products tend to look down on those who are lacking. There’s certainly a “greener-than-thou” attitude among a lot of the environmental advocates, comparing notes on whose wardrobe is more organic, who has the newest, most efficient car, who has the fanciest fair trade furniture. And that’s great and all. It’s better than all of those same people driving gas guzzling sports cars. But what about the part of the population who doesn’t have the disposable income for that sort of shopping?

That’s where you encounter what this article calls “the rural poor,” and by extension, I’d imagine, the same group in urban areas. When people have less money (and I think college students, at least the ones I hung around, sometimes have a similar experience, even if it’s temporary), they become very innovative in their attempts to cut out expenses. For those in rural areas, especially in the UK, which this article refers to, they’ve likely been practicing sustainable methods for centuries. A hybrid car would be completely ridiculous in that situation- as would a reusable grocery bag, or organic cotton shoes, or any other of the trappings of middle class greenism.

It makes you, I think, really question what sustainability is. I personally don’t think it has anything to do with products whatsoever. Some may be “greener” than others, and may be improvements in terms of damage done to the environment- but if we’re really going to be sustainable, I think improvements are just not going to cut it. We need to rethink how we approach everything in our lives, and that, I believe, means cutting out the consumerism all together. What’s more sustainable, after all- solar panels, or not using any electric at all? Oh, I know how most people will react to this- I get labeled a luddite all the time- but I’m not suggesting we all go without electric, as I’ve said before. I’m just suggesting we take a long, hard look at the things we call “green” and ask if they’re really helping save the environment, or if they’re really just helping us feel better about ourselves- while we maintain the exact same lifestyle that got us into this mess originally.

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The Bottled Water Debate

I’ve recently been privy to a series of emails from various college dining services purchasers and the like, all debating the relative merits of banning bottled water from campus, as they call it. To be more accurate, they should say, to stop selling bottled water in campus retail locations. There’s no way they can “ban” bottled water from being brought onto campus from outside sources.

To me, this should be a no brainer. Bottled water is one of the most wasteful inventions in history. Americans throw away sixty million water bottles PER DAY in the U.S. Sixty MILLION. Take a moment to picture that. And arguments that recycling can eliminate this problem are a load of BS. Barely a quarter of the bottles produced in this country are recycled. The obvious and very simple alternative to this extraordinary quantity of waste is to stop selling bottled water. However, the industry, including a number of college retailers, argue that they wouldn’t stock bottled water if people weren’t buying it. However, this is another ridiculous argument, and one that you hear to justify everything from fast food to underpriced sweatshop clothing- “well, people are buying it.” People would probably buy crack if you started selling it in retail locations, but you don’t see anyone doing that, now do you?


To an extent, there is some validity to this argument. People ARE buying all the shit out there on the market, and the people selling it are making money off it- so they keep selling it. McDonald’s would not continue to exist if it weren’t raking in billions of dollars every year. But who’s to blame, really? You can blame consumers for being uninformed and not thinking about their decisions. You can blame the industries for aggressive marketing, especially to children. Hell, you can blame every aspect of this society for making people into consumers, and leaving them with no choice except to be slavishly dependent on what they can purchase- and for being driven to look for the lowest price out of necessity. If we still knew how to grow our own food, and still had access to clean water, things like fast food and bottled water wouldn’t even be issues.

But we are currently trapped within the confines of a consumer culture (for the time being), and that leaves the question: do we stop selling bottled water, or continue in this vein? Stopping selling water would clearly eliminate an enormous amount of waste. But if colleges stopped selling bottled water, they would be required to install more water fountains, so that students continue to have access to water- and that, and this is the key, costs money and does not make any profit for the college.

The various people at other colleges who have weighed in on this like to laundry list excuses like, “tap water isn’t as high quality as bottled,” which is patently not true in most cases (tap water is more strictly regulated than bottled, the problem comes with poor plumbing at the college itself, which is fixable), and rambling about how they only want to offer the highest quality products to their students. I honestly would not be so irritated if they would just come right out and say they don’t want to lose money.

No, if they really cared about students they would be more interested in providing the cleanest water possible- in a form far more accessible than expensive bottled water, ie public fountains at more regular intervals. And if they cared about the environment, it wouldn’t even be a question. But, like people everywhere, they refuse to acknowledge their real motivations- instead attacking the environmentalists for not also attacking bottled soda (uh?).

It comes down to the same thing that is ALWAYS an issue, and is at the heart of every environmental argument: if we all had access to clean water, would bottled water be in any way successful? Is it within our rights as human beings to continue to access one of the basic necessities of life without paying an arm and a leg for it? It hearkens back to the public bathroom issue. The trend right now is to make you pay for everything, basic necessity or not. The perfect consumer is one that doesn’t have any other options.

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Green Blowjobs

EcoGeek - Interview with Paolo Bacigalupi

This guy is just fantastic. I've largely stopped reading scifi in recent years, but scifi authors generally have the ability to look sharply at our own culture by exaggerating it and setting it just far apart that we can look at it from a perspective we can rarely turn on ourselves. Ursula LeGuin is a great example of that. I haven't read any of this guy's books, but from what he says in his interview, I think I'm going to have to. I'm going to be eternally indebted to him for inventing, to my knowledge, the term "green blowjob." That just about sums up my opinion of most of the green products being pandered to us on the market these days.


I just want to quote this section:

"One of the things I dislike intensely about technological fixes is that they often involve payment in order to replicate a natural service that once was provided free of charge by nature. Don't have clean water? One techno-fix is a water filter. Let's give a huge shout out to Brita filters, right? But then we all have to buy one.

"In India, middle-class households all have water filters... the poor go without. The other option would be to protect our water sources. But that's just not sexy. Using a technology almost automatically means we have to hire and pay a technology creator, which in turns creates an economic interest that does not actually care to remedy the core problem. If I sell water filters, I'm not going to be interested in clean water for all. That would kill my market of clean water for the ones who want to buy it from me. Once there's an economic interest, you end up with corporations lobbying tooth and nail to keep us from simply taking the most simple long-range planning steps.

"So no, basically, I think trying to find another tool to fix what we've already done with our tools, generally works out poorly. This has partly to do with the narrow way we approach environmental problems and our lack of foresight over cascade effects. And partly from seeing how talk of techno-fixes almost always defaults to a circle-jerk that's really focused on how we can keep enabling our ongoing stupidity. Another drink doesn't help an alcoholic, another toy doesn't fix our environmental problems. Either we deal with root causes, or we pay down the road. None of the ways we make, sell or trade objects are sustainable. The longer we deny it, the harder it will hit us."

-Paolo Bacigalupi

Amen to that. Nothing to add.

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Burger King Attempts to Conquer the World

Whopper Virgin Documentary

Usually I post things on here that I like. This is something that makes me want to go on a very, very angry rampage. If I were the sort of person who made moralistic judgments, I would be doing so right now- but instead I will go through it point by point. Watch the video first, or this won’t make any sense.

One- This is a very cleverly designed ad campaign. Notice how they select out the few people who, most likely out of context, seem to be friendly with the advertisers, inviting them back to their villages, etc. I imagine just as many people flat out told them no, or spit the burger right back out, or told them to get the hell out. But they chose not to show you that, of course.

Two- The whole premise- that there are very few people in the world who haven’t tried hamburgers, and that this is a wonderous thing, going around and introducing hamburgers to the “whopper virgins” of the world, is presumptuous and condescending. Thank the stars there are still people in the world who have never eaten a hamburger. The implication by Burger King that they are bringing enlightenment to the world in the form of the whopper is a disgusting example of our culture’s mindset that our way is the only way, and those who haven’t yet been exposed to it should be brought around to see the light.

Three- This is demonstrated in how they focus on the way most of the people filmed are unsure as to how to approach a burger- whether to take it apart or cut it up or what- as if this is quaint and adorable in the way a very small child tries to figure out how to use an unfamiliar object.

Four- The simple fact that they developed a portable Burger King grill to take on the road, and complained about not being able to plug it in at many of their stops- well, another example of condescension. I’m surprised a lot of people even had electric outlets to start with, and the fact that Burger King felt the need to go into their communities, disturbing their way of life, and plug in an “official” Burger King grill- I have no words.

Five- In the same vein, it’s interesting that they chose locations as close to Burger King restaurants as possible- clearly this has nothing to do with the fact that Burger King has so saturated the market that they have very little room for expansion, and are looking for ways to bring their products to the last reaches of the earth, because we have a growth economy and this is the only way to increase profit.

Six- Which is really what it comes down to: how can you increase profits when there are already more burgers in existence than people, in theory, could legitimately eat? The advertising expense for this ad campaign must have been tremendous, and you know Burger King wouldn’t put out that kind of money if they didn’t expect some kind of return.

Seven- Overall, I find the entire campaign distasteful and disrespectful to traditional cultures to an extreme. I cheered when they asked one man if he liked the whopper better than seal meat, and he answered that he preferred seal meat. Good for him. Homogeneity in food is one of the biggest causes of global issues- poverty, environmental destruction, destruction of indigenous ways of life, I’ve covered this on this blog many times over. Not to mention that the reason whoppers all taste the same is that the taste is manufactured in a plant, out of chemical ingredients, and basted over the meat to give it that familiar flavor. Nothing to do with the actual meat, which probably tastes like cardboard. At least that’s how I remember fast food burgers in my memory- but it’s been at least ten years since I quit eating them.

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