Circumventing absolute self-absorption – or maybe just trying to keep things in morbid perspective - as Arlo Guthrie said, when you see someone who’s got it worse than you, it makes you feel better - ??? - i’ve been reading about fuel poverty in Europe and food scarcity around the globe. For the past while, i’ve been on a mission to rid my diet of carbohydrates and suddenly, in at least 30 countries, people are rioting or at least starting to freak out over dwindling wheat and rice stocks. (There’s material for an adbusters graphic in there somewhere: diet-crazed gringo snobbishly passing over what the starving world depends on for calories.) That this is all happening in the framework of meeting energy needs only makes it more difficult to digest (that idiom too offensive?). A sound understanding of how the food scarcity problem could be dealt with also means understanding the energy industry, how best to meet the world's ever-increasing energy needs.
i’ve been finding this impossible to write about. Food is so personal and cultural and preferential - by which i mean that some people have access to lots of it while others nearly none. Not long ago, but before the “food crisis” hit the mainstream headlines, i was standing in line at my little neighborhood delicatessen, which is a bit pricy because they carry a lot of organic produce and what Hungarians tend to call specialty foods: chutneys, Thai sauces, 30 kinds of French mustard and all those delicioso Italian spreads that are 30% olive oil. Ahead of me in line was an American-Israeli woman holding a wad of 10.000 forint bills, buying nearly one of everything, and asking about the little square designer sausages in the counter case. She spoke no Hungarian, so i offered to help translate: are the sausages spicy? Then she asked about the price and mentioned that they were for her dog. “You’re buying those sausages for your DOG?” Of course, she wasn’t prepared for that, and nervously explained that she was training him and wanted something really special to reward good behavior. Immediately i apologized, saying it was out of line for me to pass judgment. What came out was simply my immediate, uncensored gut response to someone spending so much on something for a pet that i would only get for a special occasion and even then, only if i was feeling flush. Was my reaction thus borne out of jealousy that some dog has easier access to good food than i do? i don’t think so, but….
This is what i mean about it being difficult to talk or write about food. For myself, very aware of the many homeless and underfed people in this beautiful, rich capital city, just as i was in San Francisco, CA, and coming recently from Palestine, where food availability fluctuates and prices are relatively high for basic staples, the idea of a wealthy person buying a specialty food item for a pet seemed wrong somehow. Not exactly selfish, but unthinking. Yet, i also understand that someone who has the money to buy whatever she wants for whatever purpose she has in mind has the right to get fancy foods for her dog. i’m not against dogs being well-fed and i knew that she was looking at me and thinking if i really cared about unequal food distribution, i should start by streamlining my own diet - fair enough. So, in this one impromptu, ridiculous interaction, all or at least some of the hypocritical aspects of me or someone like me writing about food were crystallized.
Whatever one person says about another’s dietary choices, eating habits, restaurant preferences, etc. is immediately going to have to be self-reflective, and who among us is above reproach? i like a good bottle of vino as much as anyone, i’m willing to pay for it and if you come to my house, i’ll gladly share it with you so we can engage in bad scarcity-era behavior together. Or is that really bad behavior? Arguably, it is better to have fewer high quality foods than a lot of low quality (and often high calorie) stuff on the kitchen shelf. So i walk out of the wine shop and pass a dirty homeless woman ogling me with that gaunt seriously deprived look the homeless tend to have, i say i can’t give her any money but she knows very well what’s in the slim paper bag i’m holding… yes, guilty as charged.
i’ll end this by pointing readers to a new interactive feature at Global Footprint (open "Your Footprint" link), in which you enter information about your lifestyle and obtain an assessment of how many earths are required to provide you with the resources needed to sustain it. My own results were 1.9 Earths, but of course that’s based on how i’m living now and doesn’t include all the resources i’ve expended driving all over the US, or flying all over the world. Still, it’s an effective awareness-raising tool and left me committed to being less lazy when it comes to carting my plastic to the nearest recycling depot, about a kilometer away. The reduction in resources from vegetarian diets was also substantial, so i’m going to finish up the prociutto now in my fridge and try to steer clear of meat in the future. Or maybe i’ll get a dog before the year’s over, and feed it tasty food meant for humans so that i can just say i’m sharing my dog’s food, rather than buying meat for myself. Certainly nobody cares about the canine footprint.
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