Every once in a while I find myself making my way through Walmart. It’s normally a decision I regret, in fact, maybe even one I pregret, as it is almost always fueled by some consumerist desire to accumulate an even vaster DVD collection. Anyways, last week I found myself wandering the aisles, when I spotted a young boy looking through the posters. For whatever reason – perhaps I was curious to know his poster of choice, or simply a good Samaritan, questioning where his wandering mother might be – I watched to see what poster he would pick.

The pickings were slim, an updated versions of what Walmart stocked back in my day: modernized Pokémon, ACDC, “Keep Calm Carry On”, Hunger Games [aka Jennifer Lawrence (aka my pick)], and the forever current Elvis Presley. The boy passed them by, even making short time of a One Direction poster. As he whittled down the options, a pack of pre-teen girls shooed him off and had their way with the posters, stopping specifically at the One Direction. Each one of them called dibs on a certain boy, and after swooning uncontrollably, left with a sigh and a giggle. The fascinating thing is that as the boy wandered up the second time, he stared up at One Direction, as if for the first time.

His mother walked up, he asked if he could get that poster, and I turned to walk away. Who knows if his mother caved, who knows if the boy missed the poster the first time, but I assume he had, and the girls changed his mind.

You hear a lot of talk these days. You hear that our attention spans have eroded, that the twitter generation needs a headline in 20 characters or less. We’re lazy; we have music, books, and information at our fingertips, maybe even complacent towards how much the world has to offer us, but some things don’t change. That boy, whether he knew it or not, got what I can only assume marketers are forever attempting to capture: the perfect promotion, at the perfect time – so subtle that he wasn’t sure what happened.

It’s easy to look on the kid and think he’s unaware, but it’s more than that. It happens for the same reason that every time I hear David Bowie sing “Heroes” I want to be in suit and holding a cigarette. Despite all I’ve learnt about their impact on my health and the environment, it’s a pure accident as far as desires go, and I love it. Sometimes there’s nothing else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sP-tjQ71Ei4

(except for this one, this one has two faces!)

In the early 1800s, Thomas Malthus proved that the planet’s resources would be unable to supply a growing population with sustainable food. He used the diminishing marginal returns to explain that as the product of our labour grew less effective, the growing population would be left with starvation. Though it’s easy to look back at him with disbelief, one of his assumptions remains quite true: our labour would have been unable to sustain population growth, had we not made technological advances since then. Better fertilizers and harvesting techniques  but also the disease resistant strands of seeds chemically developed, and the pesticides that make growing in humid climates possible. Fast forward 200 hundred years and there’s a growing trend: a return to the past in our food market. “Out with the processed munch-ables!” scream the people, and to them I say: You guys make no f**** sense!

……

Now I could spend hours describing the plethora of things wrong with these “food-conscious” arguments, but I’m just going to focus on one of the issues: the information they spread, and the general mentality of this generation to remain uncritical of what we hear and consume. There’s two different sides to every coin!

There are so many movements within the food industry that people need to think twice about. The first, I’ve mentioned, is the idea that we should sacrifice the lower prices of processed food in order to eat organic. That’s all fine and dandy, except that charging lower prices wasn’t the original intent of our food experiments – feeding a growing population was. Lower prices are just a happy accident; they exist as proof of the advancements we’ve made. The real sacrifice isn’t the prices, but the ability to produce food on a global scale, in environments that would normally grow callous over time. The real trade off, than, is eating an apple you’re pretending tastes better, so that other people can’t eat the ones that you deem unnatural. What does it matter, if one apple’s better than another, if everyone gets one?

I’m no expert, just a regular chap that holds an issue with the ethical movement behind organic eating. It’s not that I don’t see benefits environmentally to not producing with as many chemicals, but I just don’t see it as a realistic solution to our current environmental predicament. For that matter, I don’t really see the benefit of producing an organic apple in New Zealand, because their climate is appropriate, and shipping it across the world to be enjoyed – at least from an environmental standpoint.

Anyways, as I said, there’s two sides to every coin. If you can’t see the other side, look harder: It has a habit of showing itself eventually…