The title comes from a quote in a WashPo article, this diary stems from a Front page video diary and this diary will be short [hmmm short-ish]
The title is a rather short and brutal assessment of the current state of play not only in the with respect to the food we eat but the whole consumer society as a whole. I would soften yet harden it at the same time.
It takes a great deal of will power to ignore a whole way of life that has been created over the last century or so, that consumption is good and that it somehow gives meaning to our lives. We even consume to the detriment of our own health and to the environment as a whole.
The design of our own economy is based upon an ever increasing consumption pretty much fueled by greed and justified by a poorly defined term of "demand". Supply and demand, for the basics makes sense, but the demand can be something artificial. We need food to survive, we need shelter, and we need education to progress. However the whole system begins to rot at a certain point of artificially generated need.
What gets me mad [and you knew I was going to get there] is that often the ignorance mentioned previously is willfully generated and exploited. Somehow our net worth in society is defined by what we consume and what we have, honestly who can say they really need the latest piece of high-tech garbage, just how fast do you need to be connected just how interactive do you have to be, cant it wait 0.1ms longer? Shouldn't you look at least at the processes involved in getting you that infinitesimal increase? The pollution caused by the mining of rare earth metals, even.
When as the front page diary indicates the production of the bulk of our food is apparently best kept hidden because of the potential revulsion it might engender
We are "taught" that cheap is somehow a bargain when in fact the human, animal, and environmental costs can be off the charts. A point in case is the drive to both fracking and tar sands oil, justified by not having to rely on oil from somewhere else we don't like rather than facing the reality that it might just be time to stop using quite so much coal, oil and gas in the first place.
Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory estimate that the U.S. loses more than half the energy it generates. That doesn’t include heating and cooling loss from buildings, just energy that vanishes into the atmosphere from machines, industrial processes and electronic equipment.
We have a self justification system in place that anything we ourselves change is of little consequence in the grand scheme of things, which is supported by the daily plethora of advertisements telling us what we cannot live without. I wonder just how much of the two for the price of one
food items actually ends up in the garbage and the damage it can do to the environment from there
The amount of food lost or wasted every year is equivalent to more than half of the world's annual cereals crop (2.3 billion tonnes in 2009/2010).
In the USA, organic waste is the second highest component of landfills, which are the largest source of methane emissions.
Perhaps the most important lesson is that everything we do has a consequence, yet to know the consequences we have to get through the barrage of willfully generated ignorance, and that is a
very tough task indeed.
Respondents were alarmed about the consequences of high-energy futures, and mollified by images of low-energy futures. Yet they also erected a series of psychological barriers to justify why they should not act either individually or through collective institutions to mitigate climate change. From the viewpoint of changing their lifestyles of material comfort and high-energy dependence, they regarded the consequences of possible behavioural shift arising from the need to meet mitigation measures as more daunting.