Modern horrors

I've just started reading The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton and usually I wait until I've finished a book before I talk about it but I was so horrified by what I read last night in the first two chapters that I thought it was worth writing about now.

I really enjoy Alain de Botton's work - in particular The Art of Travel. I read this before travelling, while travelling and after I returned and will still return to it for its truth and beauty. de Botton is so clever - he just gently points things out, doesn't get upset about it, doesn't rant and rave, just gently draws the reader to the conclusion and, sometimes, if you aren't paying attention, even that can slip by unnoticed.

The first two chapters of this new book describe logistics. Shipping, freight, warehouses, trucks, delivery and all that fairly unremarkable stuff. Only, it turns out, it really is quite remarkable. While I found it physically confronting to follow the journey of a fresh tuna steak from being part of a tuna in the sea in the Maldives to a plate in suburban Bristol, it was in a way also graceful and incredible. This fact, however, did not deter my decision to stop eating anything that did not come from my local area.

The amount of concrete (the worst sort of building material in terms of energy), fuel and waste that went into that tuna steak dinner was astounding. Not only that, the idea that de Botton came across a very familiar label (one he sees in his local Sainsbury's) in the packing factory in the Maldives also shocked me. I thought about all that is in my freezer and where it came from. I just can't be a part of that anymore.

I already try really hard to buy things made here - food especially, but sometimes I'm hungry or there isn't much of a choice or it is expensive, or I'm addicted to bad things that come from elsewhere. But this resolves me to try harder.

There was another part of this section that really got to me, he writes:

That we are each surrounded by millions of other human beings remains a piece of inert and unevocative data, failing to dislodge us from a self-centered day-to-day perspective, until we take a look at a stack of ten thousand ham-and-mustard sandwiches, all wrapped in identical plastic casings, assembled in a factory in Hull, made out of the same flawless cottony-white bread, and due to be eaten over the coming two days by an extraordinary range of our fellow citizens which these sandwiches promptly urge us to make space for in our inwardly focused imaginations.

So really, how can this work any other way? How can we, as the large, industrialised society that we have become, even hope to reject the place we've found ourselves in. There are simply too many of us. This means for our work (the real topic of the book) and for our environment? These are huge questions. Too huge. Too scary to really think about.

I listened to de Botton on Radio National this morning and he was talking about Smith, the economist, who pointed out that yes, it is terrible that we have this huge machine that turns out ham-and-mustard sandwiches and biscuits and tissues but if we didn't have it 10% of our western population and probably a lot more from other parts of the globe would die of starvation. Not because they are eating the ham-and-mustard sandwiches, you understand, just because they are making them.

Fucking scary stuff.