Big Thoughts

I realized a few weeks ago that I hadn’t been doing much in the way of fun things with food. In thinking about why, it occurred to me that I’m a bit … well depressed at the state of the world, and at the state of world food in particular. I’d thought to write about it, right around the time I was trying to figure out why I wasn’t doing the Daring Baker thing this month, but then … well, I put it off. Yesterday morning the need to write about it came back to me, full force, as a new LinkTV video dropped into my feed reader (original video source at Link TV, and embedded to the right.).

So, how do I reconcile playing with food, when people are starving? When there are people in the world literally eating dirt so as not to feel hungry? I mean, OK, we’re not the ones buying bio-fuel – we don’t even own a car any more – and our carbon footprint is only about 1/4 that of the average UK citizen, and it’s only as large as it is because we’ll travel back to the US at some point. But that’s not enough, is it? It’s not enough to buy locally as much as possible, or to buy organic, or to recycle, or not buy packaged foods. Because I cannot control what the rest of the world’s consumers do.

And it’s not even about consumers, really: it’s about the factors driving the entire system, and that our moral decisions are manipulated for profit.

Before we left California, we’d been going to the gym regularly. One of our instructors was a nice girl, and honestly tried to do good. She’d go to the Virgin Islands at least twice a year to “rescue” puppies. She got rid of her 2-year-old car to buy a brand-new Hybrid SUV. Any cause that sounded right, and she was on it … but she just didn’t know how to evaluate what was really the right thing to do. She didn’t have enough information, and didn’t know any better. The fuel consumed in her vacations, plus the price of her ticket, far offset the two or three puppies saved, and could probably have saved hundreds of puppies. The new SUV got worse gas mileage than her old car, plus she’d added all that new aluminum to the world. Net benefit to the world? Quite negative. She’d been greenwashed.

But, overall, she was trying – she wasn’t rationalizing away her consumption, she was just a bit of a dingbat with a good heart. She wanted to do good, and she believed the little bits of fluff floating through to her via the media, so she ended up doing more harm than good, in real-world terms.

Was she wrong to take vacations to the Carribean? No, not at all. Was she wrong to want nice, new things? No – not saying that. What I am saying is that she was wrong because she didn’t think: she didn’t try to figure out how to do right, she merely accepted the media representation of what was right. And that’s where it all goes pear-shaped, because the moral problems we’re making decisions about aren’t simple things, they’re questions which involve not just some present right or wrong (‘should I eat locally / organically?’) but also involve trying to figure out the future (‘is it right to buy ethanol when it means there’s less corn for people to eat? And if not, where does that leave me?’)

One of the problems with ethics is that there really aren’t all that many things which are absolutely good / bad when it comes to trying to figure out what the future holds. That’s frustrating for people, I think, because they try to do the right thing … but then to have to keep on thinking about it, and to consider whether it’s the right thing still, is a bit exhausting. And then to arrive at the conclusion that it was the wrong thing … that’s troublesome.

This issue just seems to touch so many of the things that we’ve been involved in: eating locally if possible, organic at least, not owning any vehicles, and generally trying to minimize our impact on the world. But the food thing … how can I think of playing with food, really, when food is being wasted and people are starving?

I think that I can play with food, I just can’t waste it, and I certainly won’t be changing my purchasing habits (local / organic / vegetarian). And I’ll have to keep on considering these things. But deciding where the boundary is between play and waste: that’s the question, really, and I think that I just need to ask that question more often when it comes to food. So, will I do Daring Bakers? Probably, but I’m going to have to think about it.

And of course I have to think of other things as well, such as what happens to an economy during times of depression, and whether the world food shortage is simply the beginnings of a world depression, rather than anything much to do with biofuels; is it simply a leading indicator, like the canary in a coal mine? But that’s a topic for more thought, and hopefully to be put to someone else!

Edit: Do check out this article by Cynthia Nelson of Tastes Like Home for a first-hand perspective on the Caribbean food crisis.

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