Capitalism’s Not-So-Secret Dirty Little Secret
Once, when we were kids, my brother and I accompanied my dad to a new public golf course in town. He assured us we could drive the golf cart. What he failed to mention until we got there was that the course was built on top of a landfill and that there would be “smell showers,” as my brother and I came to call them, all over the place–literally 6″ PVC pipes sticking up out of the ground, taller than a grown man, and curved at the top in such a way as to keep rain from entering but also to literally shower passersby with the noxious odor of civilization’s excrement. I haven’t thought of that golf course in a very long time…
That is, until yesterday when I had the distinct non-pleasure of visiting Vancouver’s Transfer Station. The Transfer Station is not exactly a landfill, but close enough; it is a small (as far as warehouses go) warehouse-like building with a huge garbage pit in the center. Supposedly, trash gets sorted and packaged there to be sold to reclamation companies. Some trash is treasure, but I’m guessing most is still just trash.
The stench made me want to retch; it also made me hope that the guys working there are well-paid. The rope I had used to tie my old box spring to the top of the car for transport there fell in a puddle of trash juice and when it got on my hand, I totally freaked. I’m not a germ-a-phobe by any stretch of the imagination; it wasn’t even the dirt and germs I wanted off my hands so much as the guilt that accompanies participation in this cycle of waste, consumption, and more waste.
Waste pervades our culture; we cannot escape it. Indeed, waste turns the wheels of the capitalist economy. There is so much more money to be made in selling people the same cheaply-made goods over and over than there is in selling a few well-made goods to consumer-collectives. It just isn’t in the interests of the capitalist owner/producer to build his product to last or to encourage it to be shared amongst consumers (think anti-piracy laws). No, he wants each and every consumer to buy his product an infinite number of times (either because it is made to be disposable or because its construction is so shoddy that its use-pattern is virtually disposable); in this way does he insure the future of his business. Does he care what ultimately happens to his products? No; the fact that they wind up in landfills, on beaches, or in the stomachs of unsuspecting marine mammals–and the cost of cleaning all this up–is not accounted for in his books. For all its free market rhetoric, Capitalism’s blatant disregard for true accounting is an abysmal shame.
And yet, it is me who bears the burden of shame. My visit to the Transfer Station, that stinking garbage pit on the south side of town, left me with a feeling, not just of nausea, but of guilt and overwhelming sadness at the thought of every consumer good I’ve ever bought and had break on me far before its time. There’s the lamp I just bought at Ikea the other day, off of which a plastic clamp broke as I pulled it out of its package. (When I go to exchange it tomorrow, there’s no doubt in my mind they will give me a new one and toss the broken one, having never been used once for its intended purpose.) There’s the fancy Cuisinart coffee maker with the automatic timer I got two Christmases ago, the clock-set function of which ceased to work within six months. With some simple math, I could still utilize the automatic timer function… that is, until it, too, stopped working. (There’s nothing more disappointing than waking up to find the coffee you prepared the night before did not brew as intended.) Then there’s the electronics kit my partner ordered to help him learn the basics of circuitry; it arrived with malfunctioning switches (no good for a beginner who spent a full day pulling his hair out trying to figure out why his closed circuits weren’t making the dang light light up). There’s the reusable coffee mug I spent a whopping $16 on to save all those paper cups from winding up in a landfill. I ask you: Whats worse: throwing away a paper cup every day or a heavy-duty plastic and metal mug once every six months? If the “reusable” mug isn’t built to last, I’d just as soon toss the paper–at least its made of a renewable resource.
By far, the worst instance of business-as-usual waste that I’ve encountered in the last year comes from, of all companies, Snugli, the original maker of baby-carrying devices. I was given one of their backpack-style carriers when my daughter was not quite a year old. By the time she was eighteen months old and a scant twenty or so pounds, a snap had broken off the adjustable waist belt. I contacted the company for mailing instructions, assuming I would have to send it back to the factory for repair; in all the two pounds of canvas-type fabric, nylon straps, plastic buckles, and metal rods and fasteners, all that needed replacing was one measley little half of a snap–a single cmponent the size of a dime. Their instructions? Destroy the product, send us the cut-off straps as proof, and we’ll send you a brand new one. Customer service replaces craftsmanship. Un-freaking-believable!!! When I sent in the straps of the hardly-used and hardly-broken first carrier, I enclosed a letter to the company stating my severe disatisfaction with their wasteful policy. Their response? Silence…
And nothing to break the silence but the ping-ping of balls and clubs on a smell-showered golf course…
Organic vs. Local
You’ve probably heard of the “100-mile diet.” It seems it’s on everyone’s lips lately–at least everyone in the high-end natural foods stores in which I work. I frequently do demos in the local Capers markets (I also shop there for some things since there’s one so close to my house) and I’ve noticed that they do a great job of clearly marking which products are locally grown or locally produced. They know that their shoppers want to support local growers and the local economy.
For many people around here, it seems buying local is a social thing and they never stop to think that they’re also doing something good for the environment. They buy Canadian- rather than American-made products to keep Canada strong economically, and therefore, politically. They prefer something made in British Columbia over something made in Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes, or the Prairie Provinces because, in order, nobody likes Toronto, the Quebecois don’t like Canada, nothing comes out of the Maritimes but people, and the people of the plains are way too conservative for the likes of Canada’s “left coast.” None of this comes close to the real reason, the best reason, my reason for buying local: the environment!
For years, health and environment experts have been touting the benefits of eating organically-grown foods. For those who said organics were too costly, they came up with the “dirty dozen” list (I still have my copy mom and I do use it!), which named the top twelve pesticide-and insecticide-laden fruits and vegetables so that we could at least be buying these organic even if we had to buy conventional in other areas to cut our overall spending on groceries. I suppose if your number one priority is your own health and you buy organic for the sole purpose of keeping mysterious chemicals out of your bloodstream, then you’d be doing well to find a grocery store that stocks the widest variety of organics, regardless of how far those foods travel. On the other hand, maybe your concerns are not so much for your own health, but for the well-being of the planet. Environmentalists prefer buying organically-grown foods because their production doesn’t entail the use of deadly chemicals that end up in groundwater, their producers use more sensible shading, irrigating, and composting techniques, and because they generally are grown on smaller farms that have more respect for biodiversity (i.e. because they’re better for the environment).
If given a choice between an apple grown on a small family-run orchard that practices organic, sustainable farming methods and an apple grown on a large industrial farm that has maximum-output-for-maximum-profit as its modus operandi, the environmentalist and the health-nut would probably both go for the first apple. Surely, its production was easier on the earth and it probably has more flavor and nutritional value even if it doesn’t have the blemish-free waxy exterior of the second apple. It would be my choice, too. But, what if the organic, family farm is in New Zealand and the industrial farm is located just 10 miles outside your hometown? Then which apple is better for the earth? The way I see it, there’s just no point in supporting organic agriculture if it requires polluting 5,000 miles of ocean to get the food to market. Of course, if you absolutely can’t survive the winter without tropical fruits and polluting the ocean is the only way to get them to North America, then please do go for the organic ones.
“Food Miles” is a term I’ve heard a lot lately, having recently immersed myself in the local-food movement through my new job; it refers to the distance that a given piece of food travels from field to plate. Processed foods rack up food miles faster than fresh produce because you have to take into account the distances traveled by each ingredient and the fact that such foods are rarely grown, processed, packaged, sorted, and sold all in one geographical region. For example, cranberries are locally in-season right before Thanksgiving and are commonly packaged and sold under the Ocean Spray name. If you buy them directly from a local farmer at a farmer’s market, you’ll spend a little more money, but you’ve saved the earth all the fuel and emissions that are spent transporting locally-grown cranberries to a processing plant on the east coast for cleaning, sorting, and packaging and then shipping those same cranberries in pretty blue and white be-waved bags back to their birthplace. I recently read that the average North American meal travels 1500 miles before it reaches our tables. Isn’t it sad that our food gets to see more of the world than we do?!
Ideally, we could always get organic, locally-grown foods, but that’s just not the case. It wouldn’t be natural if we could. Having come to the realization that a globalized food (or any other commodity for that matter) production system is having an adverse effect on the environment, I’ve resorted to buying local over organic if I can’t get both. Ultimately, though, if we want more local food, we have to get used to a limited variety of offerings, as we have to buy within the bounds of the natural growing season.
Alternatively, and this seems to be pretty popular around here, there’s always the option of growing your own fruits and vegetables in a backyard garden–that way your food miles are zero–and eating less processed and pre-packaged foods. This year, I grew swiss chard in my backyard. I attempted broccoli, but it didn’t do anything. With fond memories of helping in my grandmother’s garden, I will attempt to diversify next summer’s garden. I want fresh herbs and salad greens. Some tomatoes would be nice… mmm…
