Ranthropologist

Tag: capitalism

  • Shifting Perspective: The Efficiency Trap

    Shifting Perspective: The Efficiency Trap

    A few months ago I wrote about the privilege of having the time and money to make homemade bread. I haven’t stopped thinking about the changes that have occurred in the world, and in modern capitalist culture in particular, that have made what used to be a basic daily task into something we no longer have the time and/or money to do. It’s been on my mind more heavily recently as I ventured into experiments with making my own soap. It’s not hard; on the contrary, the basic process involves simply combing sodium hydroxide (lye) and water with oil, stirring until it thickens (a process called saponification), then pouring it into a container of some sort to harden and eventually slice into bars. I mastered these basics on my first try and have now made four separate batches, all sliced and now spending a few weeks curing before they can be used. And how much money have I spent on the tools and ingredients to make this soap? At least a few hundred dollars for a digital scale (for precisely measuring proportions of lye and oil); a steel pot dedicated to soap making; a stick/immersion blender; a few thermometers (turns out the temperature of your lye water and oils is important); various oils (palm, coconut, and olive are the basics); various essential oils for scent; a container of lye; a steel soap slicer; and silicon molds so the soap has a nice uniform shape and releases easily when it’s ready for slicing (see the photo at the top of this post for some of my nice, round, molded soap). Of course, some of these are fixed costs that I won’t incur again; but the cost of the oil alone adds up fast.

    When I mentioned this new hobby/science project to my dad, he told me that Grandma G. (already chronicled for her bread making in the homemade bread post) used to make lye soap for laundry. Daddy and his siblings would take turns stirring the big pot full of cooking grease that Grandma had saved throughout the week and combined with lye. Since they weren’t lucky enough to have a stick blender to make the process quick, the kids would stir for hours until Grandma deemed the mixture thick enough to pour. This wasn’t a science experiment or a hobby; it was a household necessity if Grandma, Grandpa, and their six kids were going to have clean clothes.

    What happened to our culture that led us to eliminate homemade bread and soap from our list of things to do? It started with things like cheap bread and soap that you could buy pre-made at the store. Buying these staples instead of making them was more efficient. It made running a household easier. It freed up time. But where has that efficiency led us? Somewhere along the way, people bought into the idea, peddled by companies with something to sell, that we had better things to do than make our own bread, formulate our own soap, grow our own vegetables, make and mend our own clothes, cook nearly all of our own meals… I am tempted to go on and on with the list of things we used to do for ourselves.

    What has the efficiency of the capitalist marketplace done for us? Many good things; but when you shift your perspective back to a time when we were more self-sufficient, you might start to wonder why efficiency has ended up making us busier than ever before. We end up being grateful that we can buy soap and bread at the store now, because who has the time to make their own? (For that matter, except for people like me who are privileged to have the time and money to engage in these DIY projects, I doubt anybody is consciously grateful for the store-bought staples we now all take completely for granted.) We are happy for all the fast-food outlets and “quick casual” restaurants and the recent proliferation of online services that will deliver pre-chopped vegetables and other ingredients to your door so that if you want to make a home-cooked meal, you don’t have to waste time on prep. Cooking from scratch has become a high-status hobby – we litter our Pinterest boards with gourmet recipes and fancy tools because cooking this way is aspirational – if you can afford artisanal cheeses and locally-sourced charcuterie, and hand-craft little cards identifying them at your wine party, then you’ve made it, by God! And we forget that there was once a time when the Sunday chicken dinner was considered the luxury meal to reward a week of hard work.

    Of course, it can always be worse. Most of us are part of the significant proportion of the population that has nothing to sell but its labor. For a big majority, that means working for as low a price as your employer can squeeze out of you, which means that maybe you can’t afford to buy enough fresh groceries to cook for yourself every day or have the time for anything but a quick stop at the drive-through. If you have kids, maybe you and your spouse each work more than 40 hours a week trying to support your family, trying to achieve the American dream that is the hope of so many, the one that is built on our addiction to efficiency, the one that has led to lower wages and higher prices in the service of shareholder profit, the one that allows us to buy $20 jeans and $10 shirts and cheap jewelry that we stop wearing after a few months, the one that entices us to fill our houses and our lives with mounds of completely unnecessary things like battery-operated nose-hair trimmers and commemorative Princess Diana plates, the one that says BUY! BUY! BUY! at every turn, the one that won’t tell us that none of these things will ever truly satisfy us.

    Isn’t that really what efficiency is about? The capitalist system is based on the majority of the population selling their labor to a tiny minority that will pay them for it, and then trading that pay for the endless conveyor belt of things that we have been tricked into believing we need, as well as the things like bread and soap that we actually do need, but no longer have the time or the resources to make for ourselves. Don’t mistake me – I am not 100% anti-capitalism; in fact, I acknowledge many of the benefits of this mode of production. But the trap of efficiency is one of the drawbacks. When people controlled their own labor and were able to provide for themselves and their families without having to rely solely on wage labor, I believe society was better for it. But now it’s all about production and growing the economy, and there seem to be few, if any, alternatives. The marketplace proliferates with new products that, when you assess them objectively, are totally unnecessary – but hey, they might make our lives easier! What’s easier than having paper plates that you can throw away instead of wash? What’s easier than a pop-up paper towel dispenser in your bathroom or kitchen instead of cloth towels that you have to launder? What’s easier than having 50 pound bags of dog food delivered straight to your door so you don’t have to make a trip to the store? With all this efficiency, why does it seem that we are busier, and poorer, and more trapped, than at any other time in human history?

  • The Evolution of Pink Slime

    The Evolution of Pink Slime

    So-called pink slime has been all over the news lately. Friends have posted links and comments about it on Facebook, I have heard stories about it on NPR, and I’ve heard people talk about how they can’t believe our government would allow the meat industry to sell the stuff as food. Pink slime, known formally as lean, finely textured beef trimmings (LFTB), is certainly not a food product that is likely to provoke anticipatory salivation. The term pink slime is itself deliberately crafted to instead provoke a reaction of disgust. And, the associated news that the stuff is treated with ammonia to remove potentially harmful bacteria just adds insult to our collective sense of injury. But there’s a problem here: making decisions about what to eat based on a visceral reaction to something that has been uncritically dubbed with a description designed to elicit just that reaction is not a way to make choices about what we eat.

    I find the whole uproar rather silly, myself. First let’s tackle the linguistic angle: the name pink slime. Some might argue that it’s misleading to relabel this edible meat substance with a name that does not reveal what it really is. The name “lean, finely textured beef trimmings” does not evoke the actual cow parts that are used to make it. The stuff is made by combining fatty trimmings and ligament material from the cow and spinning it in a centrifuge to separate the fats. It is pink and looks slimy; hence the media-friendly and consumer-alarming moniker “pink slime.” One thing to note is that this stuff is not sold as-is; it is combined with regular ground beef as a bulk additive, and can be up to 30% of the final ground beef product (whether raw, bulk meat or items such as hamburger patties). So we are not unwittingly consuming unadulterated pink slime; nor is it being fed as-is to kids in school. A second thing to note is that we use all manner of euphemisms to describe the things we eat, especially when it comes to meat products. Filet mignon sounds much more appetizing than “hunk of cow flank.” Bacon cheeseburger stimulates the appetite in a way that “salted fatty pig belly cheeseburger” does not. In fact, when raw, most meat is pretty slimy, so we might as well add that adjective to all our meats. The point is that these are subjective reactions. Call things what they really are and lots of people might think twice before eating them. It reminds me of the failed “toilet to tap” initiative that was proposed in San Diego several years ago. Once the descriptor “toilet to tap” caught on in the media, there was no way the public would abide this water treatment program, even though the reclaimed water from the sewer system was just as pure and clean as regular municipal tap water. The name killed it because people could not reconcile themselves to water that came from the toilet, no matter how much scientific evidence there was that the water was clean. I find this fascinating in light of the fact that municipal tap water is held in reservoirs before treatment, in which people drive boats, fish, and probably urinate, and which is filled with all sorts of animal and plant matter, both alive and decomposing.

    My second issue with this uproar has to do with food supply in general. There are seven billion people on this planet. They all need to be fed. In many places people subsist on foods that we here in the US would find appalling, and not merely because of cultural differences, but because some people are so poor that they will eat whatever they can. Our objection to LFTB is a beautiful example of a first-world problem. I know many people are rethinking where their food comes from and signing on to local food and slow food movements, and that’s all well and good, but within a country like the US, that is (for the most part) an upper-middle class movement. Poor people in this country do not have the luxury to worry about where the food comes from, much less exactly what is in it. For a poor family, knowing the kids will at least get lunch at school is a bigger concern than whether or not that lunch may contain pink slime.

    When agriculture arose 10,000 years ago, humanity began the evolutionary road towards pink slime. Agriculture allowed previously nomadic people to become sedentary. Sedentism led to expansions in technology and booms in population. Ultimately, agriculture allowed for centralized cities ruled by top-down leaders, supplanting the egalitarian cultures of hunting-gathering and small-scale agricultural groups. Technological innovations continued to abound and populations continued to boom, and to feed all those people, intensive, factory-driven, and mechanized industrial agriculture became necessary. Can we really turn back that process now, and all start growing our own gardens and raising and slaughtering our own livestock? I’m not talking a fancy herb garden, heirloom tomatoes, and hobby chickens; I’m talking feeding yourself and your entire family by the products of your own labor. We do not live in that world any more. We live in a world where a beef supplier will use every part of the cow. Our industrial food complex has grown so efficient that almost nothing goes to waste.

    I’m not blind to the fact that the beef producer is also trying to turn as much profit as possible; this is capitalism, after all. But I have no objection to seeing otherwise wasted parts of the cow get turned into an edible substance. As for the ammonia gas issue, it is simply a way to make the stuff safe. A chemical like ammonia is certain to provoke another knee-jerk: it’s in glass cleaner! It’s a poison! Well, yes; but without understanding how the process works people somehow conjure a picture of the pink slime getting dipped in a bright-blue Windex bath, which is far from the case. I can see the other side of the coin if the stuff didn’t go through this process: how dare the government allow us to eat beef that has not been treated for bacterial contamination! (Which reminds me of another rant I have against what I see as a massively over-reacting food safety process in this country; I think it’s ludicrous to destroy thousands or even millions of pounds of a food because a few people got food poisoning – but that’s a rant for another day). In fact, much of our food goes through similar sanitizing processes to prevent illness. As far as I can tell, no one has ever died from eating ammonia-treated LFTB, but they have died from food poisoning caused by the very bacteria the ammonia treatment is designed to prevent.

    I can understand, to a degree, the people who argue that we have a right to know what is in our food so we can make an informed decision about whether to consume it, and I don’t object to the idea of more comprehensive food labeling. However, I still think this is a first-world and middle-class problem. How many people actually read food labels? Yes, the information should be there, but then the consumer does have some responsibility to think critically about what they see on the label if they decide to read it. I would bet that many of the people upset about pink slime have never bothered to really research what is in the other foods they buy at the store. Some people make it a point to not buy food products with lots of chemical additives and unnatural ingredients, but that is a tiny minority. Most of us are happy with the “ignorance is bliss” approach; and I would argue that if we didn’t take that approach then we might be paralyzed with largely unnecessary worry. Does anybody ever really stop to think about how many other people’s mouths have been on the fork they use at a restaurant? Wow, that’s gross, isn’t it? Of course the dishes at the restaurant are cleaned between uses, but to me, pink slime is no more dangerous than using a cleaned fork that has been in 1,000 different mouths. It’s gross if you think about it – so, don’t think about it!

    This controversy will fade as other things grab people’s attention, but what I fear is that whatever the next issue is, people will still have the same knee-jerk, uncritical reactions. Sometimes those reactions turn out to be completely justified, but that is irrelevant to the initial reaction. People need to come to conclusions that rely on more than a sound bite and an unappetizing label or picture that is designed to grab attention. Thinking critically means gathering facts and forming a provisional opinion that may be modified in light of future information. Being grossed out is not a good reason for objecting to a food product.

  • Economic Maladaptation

    Economic Maladaptation

    Near the end of the semester in my Human Origins course, I teach about two concepts: the epidemiologic transition, and the demographic transition. Both of them have to do with overall improvements in quality and length of life in societies that have reached a certain level of knowledge and wealth. In the epidemiologic transition, knowledge and innovations regarding health and medicine combine to reduce the incidence of infectious disease, and generally increase the overall health and longevity of the population. Mortality from non-infectious diseases such as heart disease and cancer increase as life expectancy increases. So, instead of dying young of an infectious disease, you live longer and ultimately perish from a disease or condition linked to old age and/or the consequences of a Westernized lifestyle (such as poor diet and lack of exercise). Combine this with the demographic transition, which sees life expectancy increase, and a drop in death rates followed by a drop in birth rates as societies industrialize and modernize, and you have a perfect recipe for booming population growth. Not every society in the world has gone through both of these transitions, but enough have that what should have been viewed as benefit is now becoming a detriment. Put in evolutionary terms, what was once adaptive is becoming maladaptive. I hypothesize that it is not these two transitions themselves that are to blame, but yet another transition, which I am going to call the economic transition.

    So what is the economic transition? As the world has modernized, starting at least four centuries ago with the age of European exploration and colonization in the 16th and 17th centuries, the global economic system that we know today as capitalism has taken hold. Capitalism, and the quest for profit through the exchange of material goods, is in many ways a beneficial and adaptive system for human groups. However, link it to the natural human desire to achieve status, and then link status to the ownership of material things and the symbols of exchange that make that ownership possible (i.e., money), and add in the longer-lived and massively expanded human population we are dealing with today, and you have a recipe for maladaptive disaster. Capitalism, superficially, is extremely similar to biological evolution and natural selection – call it economic selection. Left to its own devices, the natural consequence of capitalism is to concentrate wealth in the hands of a very few people or groups. This can work in some circumstances, especially when the social group affected is reasonably sized. Competition can lead to greater resource acquisition for the overall group, which is then redistributed by the leaders who had the greatest hand in acquiring it. This is what happens in the Big Man system that used to characterize many native economies in places like Papua New Guinea. The Big Man worked hard and gained followers who worked on his behalf to grow the biggest garden and the largest herd of pigs, and as harvest or slaughter time came, he rewarded his followers for their hard work. Those who worked the most gained the most, but nobody went without basic necessities. Why? Because in small groups, the well-being of the group depends on the well-being of the individuals who comprise it. The Big Man, for his part, was well compensated for his leadership efforts, but he did not end up with portions that were much larger than those of his workers; his gains instead had to do with status and leadership power (which from an evolutionary standpoint tends to correlate with greater reproductive success – to me, this is the underlying impetus for the development of these sorts of systems).

    The Big Man system is a sort of proto-capitalism. Anybody could aspire to be a Big Man, and with enough hard work and charisma, individuals could work their way into the top status tiers of these groups. The key difference is that the Big Man did not keep the majority of the wealth for himself, and he did not attempt what true capitalism attempts today: gather the most wealth possible while paying as little as possible to acquire it (whether for raw materials, workers, overhead, or what have you). The capitalist world system is designed to concentrate wealth. It is theoretically true that anybody can compete in this system, but with 7 BILLION competitors, success is anything but assured, and the structural obstacles to reaching that success are more numerous and complex than I can possibly attempt to explain in one post.

    I still haven’t really explained the economic transition yet, because at least a basic knowledge of economic systems is important. Nevertheless, I can describe it simply as a transition from small-group based competitive yet redistributive systems to a system based on personal financial gain that thrives on the perpetuation of class inequality. In a survival of the fittest economic system, inequality is the only possible outcome. What’s even more insidious about this transition is that even those at the bottom of the class and income scale believe that this is the way it is supposed to be, and that the only way out is through acquisitiveness and consumption. I have already written on this at some length in posts discussing hegemony. This is hegemony in a nutshell. The economic transition is maladaptive because it relies on continued resource consumption, and it is linked to the large and long-lived global population that consumes those resources. The economic transition, if it continues to its logical conclusion, ultimately means the ultimate biological maladaptation for the human species, to wit: extinction.

    I actually didn’t mean for this post to be a treatise on my view of our world’s economic problems, but these things just come out as they come out. This is the starting point for many more specific posts to come. What started my ruminating on this particular topic (other than the fact that I ruminate about it just about every single day) was thinking about our obsession with material things, and wondering how in the world we can save ourselves from ourselves. How can we modify the system so that status comes from the person you are rather than the things you own? How can we actually slow down the economic engine, and adopt a philosophy of economic balance, instead of constant growth? When will we realize that the values of our lives come from experiences, rather than possessions?

    Let me end this post with a question for my readers: what are your fondest memories? What makes you smile when you need a boost? Do these memories revolve around things, or people and experiences? One of my favorite memories, one I call on when I want to feel happy, is from 2001 when I surprised my mom by coming home from Albuquerque for Christmas one week early. I called her from outside her front door. As we spoke, I made it sound like I was still in Albuquerque. I knocked on her door and laughed to myself as she said “Hold on sweetheart, there’s someone at the door.” She opened the door and saw me, and I will never, ever forget the look on her face or how she dropped the phone and grabbed me into a hug of joy. This is a memory that I could never buy, yet it makes me happier than any material thing I have ever owned. I think that if we consciously remember what truly has given us joy in our lives, it may lead us out of the materialism = happiness lie that so many forces are leading us to believe.