Eating sustainably

I went out with the other night for a couple of drinks and some dumplings, and ended up in this little place where we laid out around 25 bucks for what seemed like several hundred small, steamed and deliciously affordable parcels of dead animal. I say delicious, but that point of view depends a lot on your ability to shut out the small voice inside which is gently suggesting that, at $4.50 for 15 pieces, the cows that went into the beef dumplings probably weren’t 100% bio-dynamically raised. Hell, they probably never even saw the sun.

It’s like eating a meat pie at the footy. You know in your heart that you might as well be eating a packet of cigarettes for all the nutrition you’re getting. But you keep on doing it and, for the most part, loving it.

The same thing happens at the supermarket. When you’re earning the sort of money I am (think of a river of gold, except substitute the word ‘river’ for ‘small stream of piss that doesn’t want to come out’ and the word ‘gold’ for ‘bitter scraps clawed from the table of my corporate masters’), you tend to look around for a bargain. Now I say bargain, as if I’m hunting for something beautiful and worthwhile that has somehow been undervalued by those retailing it, like a first-edition Hemingway that you buy at a garage sale for 50 cents. What I mean though is actually “looking around for the absolute cheapest way to feed myself for the longest possible time”.

When it comes to buying things like meat, this leaves me with a bit of a dilemma. I would like nothing more than to know that the chicken I am consuming lived out its days in a bucolic paradise, scratching around in the fertile soil to its hearts content and growing fat on organic grain and the gentle love of some kind farmer who still cries a little bit inside when the time comes to sharpen the axe.

Unfortunately, spending the equivalent of a week’s wage on a couple of thigh fillets and some drumsticks has not yet made it on to my list of Things I Do When I Go Shopping, so I tend to look the other way, mentally speaking, and buy the poultry equivalent of a pair of Aerosport shoes – cheap, nasty and created in a factory somewhere. I’m not proud of it.

I know the choice is there. I know that I could spend a little more, or just go without, and I wouldn’t have to support the corporations that are trading on the misery of actual living creatures. I’m an educated, informed person who purports to care for the world around him and rages at the mindless greed and consumption of our unsustainable living practices.

I’m also another little part of that same machine, slowly grinding through whatever resources this rapidly depleting planet has left to offer up (or more often have ripped from it), and I am supporting this destruction through my own unwillingness to behave responsibly; chicken is just a small part of it, but it’s symptomatic.

We all want to do the right thing, I think. Well, some of us probably don’t. There’s enough evidence out there that the “my telly’s bigger than your telly” mentality is definitely a part of the national psyche in some way or another. That notwithstanding, I think that on balance we’d all prefer it if our food came to us from a source we could depend upon to be clean and ethical.

But I know that when I’m presented with the option of spending less money, a big part of me just blocks out the reality of where what I’m purchasing comes from. And I’m probably not alone.

It’s a shame. I have a lot of admiration for those who make the right choices about these kinds of things; you might not be able to change the world, but you can change the way you live within it. I just hope I have the strength of conviction to do the same thing one of these days (a pay packet full of something other than reluctant wee will help as well).

Until then it’s lips and arseholes for dinner for me I guess, from animals that probably never knew their mothers. Pass the sauce.

From: HERE: