Having returned from my third MGX, I'm thinking about the reverse culture shock I feel when I visit the U.S. I wrote a post similar to this one around this same time last year, but I cannot help but come away with the lingering, powerful feeling that the U.S. is sick with consumerism. I know this is no grand revelation.
Usually I feel an anxiety to stock up on my favorite things in the U.S. that I can't get in Europe, or else can get in Europe but at 3 times the price. This year, I walked into Target and was simply overwhelmed. There are entire aisles that have nothing but granola bars. There was an entire aisle that had nothing but cheesy crackers...Ritz and Goldfish and things like that. An entire aisle of cheesy snacks got me thinking. What is the end to end expense of this sort of pure marketing of empty calories? There are no more products to make. They have all been made. The only thing left to do is change the size and shape and packaging then market the hell out of it.
The main ingredients in junk food are corn, rice (both in flour and sugar forms), oats, cane sugar, salt, food coloring, and oil or some other form of fat. I'm curious what the end to end cost and tax, both to people and the environment, is to sell what is basically poison to Americans. How many acres of corn fields are used in production? How many trees are killed to package these products? How many landfills are stuffed with plastic wrappers? What are the distribution and energy consumption costs to create and transport this stuff? And how many billions of dollars are wasted treating self-induced obesity-related medical problems (diabetes, joint problems, digestive problems, etc) as a result of eating it? What are the total costs for using up land mass to create space to shelves these items? And how much money is spent in marketing them? How much fuel is wasted by Americans who have no choice but to drive considerable distances to these stores to buy these items?
There was also a huge section of microwaved dinners and ice cream. Another section just for frozen fried potatoes, breaded fish and chicken. These frozen foods sections on this scale do not exist anywhere else in the world. What is the cost to the environment having to build thousands of enormous freezers in grocery stores?
Europe tends to have the opposite problem. Stores don't always stay open late enough and sometimes the things you want aren't available when they are open. So as always, the challenge is to find the balance between both worlds. If you look at it from a save-the-planet perspective, one must ask people to modify their behavior in a way that would not inconvenience them. If you try to take away what people are used to they won't go for it.
What if one house in every urban-planned neighborhood or suburb was converted into a grocery store open only during peak hours in the morning and evening so that the majority of Americans could find everything they wanted in a store that was no more than a 5-20 minute walk from their house? Would they go for that on a more regular basis rather than the twice-per-month run to Cosco or Wal-mart? Would they do it even if it cost a few dollars more, knowing that they were saving dollars on fuel costs? If I were President of the United States, I would fund an experiment to see if people would be receptive to a more localized form of consumerism. Would people cook more if they had more time saved from being in a car less often? Would people be willing to walk to a retail location if the time to walk was the same as the time to drive to a bigger location a further distance from their house? Would people bike or use scooters in luxurious neighborhoods where each individual property is too big to make this practical? And in the winter, would people go for a localized delivery program?
I believe very much that there must be a simple solution to this maddening burden of fabricated choice.
