Peeking Under the Hood of Our Consumption

Much of what we’re accumulating in the early stages of this experience is awareness. We’ve all probably heard admonishments, directly or indirectly, for unwrapping a package of hamburger from the grocery store without paying any mind to the steer from which it came. For me that becomes an echo in the back of my mind when I’m shopping, though it’s rarely stopped me from buying hamburger. More often, it’s my intention to take responsibility for having killed the steer. I’m a steer killer; it’s a personal thing that I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

But I don’t generally take it any farther than that, to think about the feedlots where the steer spent its brief life, the acres of corn, tons of fertilizer, tankers of pesticide, all the fossil fuel, and the vast amounts of freshwater required to process and ship that hamburger in the neat little packages to the grocery store where I can pick up a pound and drop it into my shopping cart.

As my wife says about it, “It’s just downright depressing.”

If I thought the origin and delivery chain through from beginning to end, I’d change my habits out of the sheer weight of my new awareness of the far reaching consequences my simple, mindless actions bring.

We read a book titled, “Stuff, The Secret Lives of Everyday Things” by John C. Ryan and Alan Thein Durning. It’s a quick read, a sprint, really, at under a hundred pages. It follows the life cycles of a small collection of simple things that are part of our lives and that we typically take for granted. The authors start the day with coffee and a newspaper, then move on through T-shirts, shoes, bikes and cars, computers, hamburgers, French fries, and cola.

It’s astonishing. I really had no idea that the supply and delivery web were so expansive and toxic, that we in the U.S. have it so comparatively easy and cheap being at the end of the consumption chain, and that the real costs of our goods are not fairly reflected in the prices we pay at the store, but are substantially shouldered elsewhere in the world, hidden from our notice.

After finishing the book, my view of everything around me changed. I pause, now, and think about what I’m picking up, how it fits into the web of resources, manufacture, delivery, use, and waste.

Changes in my buying and use habits are following. I don’t expect them all to change at once, but I’m consciously trying to keep things in service longer, buy fewer iterations of things, and stop to think if I really need something before buying it.

I guess we’ll see if that means giving up real conveniences. Granted, it’s only been a few weeks, but so far I’m not missing anything.