10 times the price and 10 times crappier
Posted by admin on 07 Jun 2008 at 08:03 am | Tagged as: sane words
Some more sensible insights from Sharon Astyk.
Or what about our food? The average bite of American food takes 10 calories of oil to produce a single calorie of American food. The average Indonesian’s dinner comes in at about 1 a calorie of oil (this all assumes that the average Indonesian can get food, but let’s assume they can). And let me clearly reassure you that the average Indonesian’s cheap-ass bowl of laksa – noodles, broth, coconut milk, maybe a piece of fish – taste 100 times better than a Big Mac or a bag of Doritos. That is, we put in all this oil and what comes out – food that tastes like crap, is really awful for us, and can’t even remotely approach the quality of the street food you’d find in almost any third world country on earth.
A managed transition, with people consciously changing their behaviours and working together to develop a new low energy, community owned, local infrastructure could actually be quite a bit of fun, rather than the situation we have now, where people are waiting for the crisis to end, expecting to be able to carry on with their lives without any big alterations. Wise up people. Industrial civilisation and its values that more, bigger, faster is always better, has made many of us sick, depressed, enslaved and lonely. The alternative, using less to benefit more of us in more ways, is a better world, but we have to choose to consciously create that world.
The thing is, right now, using less energy and having less money is making a whole lot of people less happy. The reason, of course, is that we aren’t thinking it through – this isn’t a managed decline, and with the media telling us that the crisis was over yesterday all the time, most people are sitting tight, waiting for the good times to roll again. The great news is that using as much as 10 times less in many areas won’t hurt – but only if we think it through. That is, you can’t magically get to a diet of great low energy, low cost sustainable food simpy by taking the oil out of the supply chain. You have to work it. But it can be done, and helping millions who have no choice do it is going to be a big – and fascinating – project.
