Angst in the Aisle

Evil is at its most banal in the supermarket.

(Image nicked from Banksy, coz I reckon Banksy wouldn’t mind).

(DISCLAIMER: Posts reflect diversity within the degrowth movement, so not all of us supports every opinion expressed.)

I went to the supermarket.

I do that sometimes.

More than I want to. More than I intend to.

I have principles. It’s just hard to stick to them all the time.

I just stood there, stunned. Partly it was the plenitude. Row after row of stuff. Partly it was the bright lighting, the bright packaging, the cacophony of attention-seeking plastic. Partly it was the fact that most of this stuff was stuff that nobody needs, that is nutritionally dubious at best. Partly it was because so much of this stuff is produced and packaged and delivered and put on a shelf because it might draw you or I into a ‘comfort purchase’, a momentary hit of sugar, fat, salt and dopamine.

In that supermarket, with its exhortations to buy, buy, buy; with its lies about freshness; its lies about affordability; its lies about caring for the consumer, the farmer, the environment, I felt like I was entrapped in a great snarl of evil – a fabric of falsity, woven of threads that are designed to conceal, though I fear that the deception is barely necessary, so normal is the violence embodied in all that stuff.

Hannah Arendt wrote about the “banality of evil”. She was writing about the (almost) unspeakable violence of the Holocaust. I don’t want to diminish the trauma of that event with a glib comparison – but I don’t think that I am. The banality on display on the supermarket shelves is as crushingly banal as a 1930’s German functionary accepting morally repugnant instructions because he needs a job. And the end result – the destruction of living ecosystems, the destruction of a planet – is not less than the extermination of a people. It just happens more slowly and seems to happen a long way away. What I think I felt, what paralyzed me in the supermarket that day, was that part of the destruction of the planet was very present and very immediate, because I felt a part of myself starting to die in that place.

All that stuff.

I could go along and put some of it in my trolley. In the end, when I had recovered a little, when I had pushed down the moment of lucidity, I did go along and put some things in. Everything in plastic. Nice clean plastic. Durable, hygienic plastic. The yogurt I picked up comes in plastic. The yogurt will be gone in a day or two. The plastic container will be around for a few hundred years. Perhaps it will be buried out of sight in a landfill? Perhaps it will slowly decompose in the sun, breaking into ever smaller pieces until the particles are so small they can enter the blood and brains of children and small birds. The cows that gave the milk probably didn’t have terrible lives (in Australia at least). But it is true that their milk production is dependent on their producing calves every year, and that the calves were removed soon after birth, causing genuine grief and trauma. My yogurt is infused with a mother’s sorrow. It doesn’t make it taste better, but it does make it much cheaper.

I didn’t buy the bacon. It too was in plastic, but it is the lives, and deaths of the pigs that trouble me here. Pigs are social and intelligent, I’ve kept them on the farm at times, humorous, cheeky and boisterous, I had to give them up because I hated killing them. But the lives of the pigs that go for supermarket bacon? These are lives confined, on concrete floors where a pigs’s strongest urge – to dig – is thwarted. Their pig-ness is irrelevant to their lives. These are not so much pigs as economic units. They are future bacon. Living their short, miserable, un-realised lives before they are forced onto a crowded truck, delivered to an abattoir where they are gassed en-mass, dismembered and soaked in vats of saline. In that saline is a solution of nitrates that will give you and I colon cancer.

One of the things that gets me into the supermarket is peanut butter. True, I can get it from other sources, many of them allowing me to grind my own. But the nuts always seem to be undercooked. I have a favourite brand at the supermarket. The nuts are grown in Queensland. The soil rich red soil of Kingaroy is ploughed and enriched with synthetic fertilisers. It is sprayed with herbicides. The peanuts are sown and grow under the protection of repeated applications of insecticide and fungicide. The only life allowed in that field is peanuts. After harvest they are shipped to New Zealand, where someone knows how much to roast a peanut. Given the strictness of New Zealand’s quarantine, one wonders what the raw nuts are treated with? They are then shipped back to Australia, where I buy them, somewhat shame-facedly. In a plastic tub. The tubs are good. I use them for lots of things. But there are limits. There is poetry under the label (Aren’t they cute, these Kiwi’s?)

It’s Christmas, so the supermarket is full of chocolate. Is there a product in the world (other than some of the minor ingredients of your smart phone), that is more ethically dubious than chocolate? There is the deforestation making way for the cacao plantations, and the deforestation making way for the oil palm that is used in many (most?) cheaper brands. There is the child labour, there is the below-living-wage labour and there is the slave labour. There is the sugar, a vast industrial crop sustained by synthetic inputs that wash into and pollute waterways, a further stress on the already devastated Great Barrier Reef.

The canned veggies and beans seem innocuous enough. But these days, every can is lined with plastic. The cheap Italian tomatoes seem a good buy. But understand that the canned tomato industry is Mafia controlled, and the cheapness come from the exploitation and forced labour of undocumented migrants. Have you ever grown your own tomatoes and bottled your own passata? Then you know how crap those commercial versions really are.

Don’t go down the water aisle! Do you even realise there is an aisle dedicated just to bottled water? Water, pumped from aquifers that are owned by the people, owned by the ecosystem, and put in plastic bottles, with or without sugar, bubbles or colouring. Water brought to you from the other side of the world. Water that costs more than petrol. Drink the water, throw the bottle away. Somebody is prepared to lie to you that the bottle will be recycled.

I could go on. You know I could. But I’ll spare you, and myself. I consider my point made. That supermarket is the focal point and enabler of countless industrial processes that extract value from the world and from people. The value that shapes every facet of every contributing activity is economic optimisation. The environment, the animals, the soil, the workers: there is no room for care of these things.

And we go to the supermarket because? Is it the cornucopia of stuff? Is it the convenience of having everything in one trolly? The easy parking? Is it the cheaper prices and the ‘specials’ that make our budgets a little easier to manage?

Whatever the reason, we go, and in going we participate in a thousand acts of banal evil.