On destructive development, on food that isn’t food, on two-legged sheep, on the demise of thought and the war for the future

Saturday, May 10th, 2008

It’s often said by the gas-guzzling right-wing elite that greens—environmental activists, the legions of good lifers—hate people. There’s some truth in this, but perhaps so little, and so distorted, as to make it on balance more of a convenient lie to evade responsibility and present having a conscience as disgustingly self-serving. We don’t hate people. At least, nobody I’ve ever met who shares my worldview has expressed a loathing for his or her fellow homo sapiens. But we do hate the way in which people are factory-farmed these days, drip-fed addictive rubbish in the supermarkets and destructive messages in the media. The worst crime a person can commit against him or herself, and the world as a whole, is to not think: to sleepwalk to extinction. Hence the dodo analogy.

Being green—or at least, greener than we once were—is not easy and never will be. Growing your own food is the hardest work I’ve ever undertaken. It’s also the most rewarding. Yesterday, wandering round the supermarket, a place I visit reluctantly and rarely these days, I spent time checking the labels on supposedly fresh food. Increasingly, there is less and less I feel able to buy. Our entire food supply is contaminated with poisons, obscene amounts of sugar, salt and fat; most vegetables and fruit come not from local farms but from Israel, New Zealand, Australia and Africa. Africa, I tell you! How can we buy food imported from Africa with a clear conscience? How can we make excuses and avoid the moral challenge? I managed to find some tomatoes grown in Yorkshire, the local nature hidden away in small lettering on the unnecessary packaging and actually concealed by the tomatoes being called Dolce Rosso. Moreover, these were marketed as the ‘finest’–and therefore considerably more expensive than the lettuces imported from Spain.

I’ve developed a horrible but revealing habit of looking at other shoppers’ trolleys at the checkout. It’s a depressing thing to do, watching as they fill countless plastic bags with processed cheese, processed meats, imported foodstuffs. Entire families spend hundreds of pounds in one visit, and every single thing they eat is either consumed straight out of the packet or when the microwave goes ‘ding’ after two minutes. These shoppers presumably see no correlation between the crap they buy and the immense size of their wobbly bottoms, which mesmerise as you go round the store because they’re invariably wearing ill-advised tight tracksuits that draw attention to the fact that their diets are mostly composed of fat, with lashings of chemicals to add flavour where otherwise there would be none.

And we’re trying, some of us are, to persuade these caterpillars to ditch the convenience culture and start digging and planting. How is that going to be achieved?

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