No hope for fat kids

I heard a thing tonight on the local news that depresses me. Following a very public campaign by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, schools in the UK started to make a concerted effort to cut out junk food and actually start spending money on decent grub for school kids. At last, I thought, we are trying to do something to do combat childhood obesity and bad eating habits.
And are the little buggers grateful? Not a chance!
Some schools have lost up to a third of their children who had previously eaten schools dinners and who now go off to fast food outlets to get their saturated fat fixes. There had been reports in England of doting parents passing chips and doughnuts to their health averse offspring through school railings.
Since taking up my current simple living kick I thought seriously about my diet - for reasons of my own health and the effects of what I consume on others and the planet in general. I have become more and more convinced that the most sustainable and ethical diet I can adopt is a vegan one.
I think that it is a viable diet for most people and a general adoption of it would help a range of social and ecological problems. However, with news like that above, I wonder if I am on a road to nowhere. Are people in general, and especially young people, so shortsighted and focussed on personal gratification that they are unable to adopt new habits that will benefit themselves most of all?

The Politics of Voluntary Simplicity

I have been kicking around the idea for a while of whether living a simple life is enough. I have lived simply in one way or another for several years but, until recently, have not really seriously tried to distil the reasons for what I am doing into a cogent philosophy. Here's what I have come up with so far:

• Taking responsibility: I suppose from the the standpoint of moral philosphy I am a consequentialist because I believe it is important to be aware of and take responsibility for the harm one actions may do - whether to people, animals or the environment. A simple life therefore means minimising suffering to others even at the cost of some added inconvenience to oneself.
• Promoting health: A concern for staying healthy is important for everyone - but often our desires lead us to do things that although short-term are enjoyable will, if over-indulged, will harm our quality of life. Simple living, for me, involves eating better, perhaps eating less and getting more exercise.
  
• Independence: We are told that we must have or do so many things to live a meaningful life by those who wish to sell us these things. In order to get these unnecessary things we sell our time and energy for money. However if we see through the marketing hype we realise we do not need to buy into other people's ideas of what constitutes a good life. Free from the desire to possess these lifestyle objects we see we need less money and so we can afford to sell less of our time and energy.
• A more informed life: Living simply means you have to know more about what impact your life has on everything around you. You need to educate and inform yourself about issues you may never have considered before. You spend less time living a fantasy fuelled by your own desire and media marketing.
• Appreciating life: With more time and more emphasis on see the world as it is that comes with living a simpler life one also comes to appreciate what one has. If your life is spent chasing a dream, living for the future instead of in the present, life can slip buy without ever having been truly lived. Living simply is a decision not to put life on hold.

The above is all fine and dandy but my question is - is it enough?
We live at a time where consumption has put the whole planet at risk and I would go as far as to say that simplifying one's life is no longer a just an option for individuals but an imperative for the whole of society if we wish to avoid the collapse our entire civilisation.
On a individual level, a person living the simple has very little impact on the factors which are leading us into the possible social chaos that global warming and other phenomena will bring. Simple living needs to become a popular movement - not just because it is the best way to live but to salvage our future as a society.
Voluntary Simplicity is no longer just a personal issue but a political one. My thinking on my own motivation is clear enough now that I can try to communicate it to others. There is already a a growing understanding that we need to change our consumption patterns and reign in the power of transnational corportations if things are not to get very ugly in the future. I think I should turn my attention to trying to persuade others of the benefit simple living.
The question is how?

Eating Simply II

So what does eating simply involve in my humble opinion? Well it may well differ for you but here are my ideas:

• Inform yourself about what you eat: This might seem obvious but many people just eat what they like (hence the high rates of obesity, heart disease and food-related cancers in the UK ). Find out what is good for you and what is not. Be interested in what you eat.
  
• Avoid processed foods as much as possible: Get your food in its most basic forms. The less processing has gone into it the fewer nasties such as preservatives, artificial colours, hydrogenated fats, added salt, added sugar etc. will be found in it. Generally, processed foods are heavily packaged, avoiding them will cut down on waste too.
  
• Buy organic: Cut out the amount of pesticides and other chemicals that end up in your food because of industrialised farming processes. Sure it costs more, but the food value is higher and the flavour is much better.
• Buy local: It will be fresher, support your local economy and be better for the environment. Supermarkets will fly in produce from the other side of the world that can be grown locally in order to sell it more cheaply. This is a false economy. Exotic foods might be a nice treat but make them an occasional one. You might even consider growing your own.
  
• Eat seasonal produce: Learn what food is available when and try to eat with the seasons. Buying out-of-season food is a luxury that our environment cannot sustain much longer. When I lived in Italy many years ago I remember that people would simply not buy vegetables out of season. It was idiomatic that they would be no good.
  
• Learn to cook: This is perhaps the most important step. Ready meals and convenience foods have separated us from the food we eat. Many people rarely see their food in its basic form anymore. And if they did they would be at a loss how to deal with it. We need to reconnect with our food again and take control of how it is prepared. Be creative with food - a producer of fine cuisine rather than a consumer of unhealthy slop.
  
• Eat fairly-traded foodstuffs: Most of the tea, coffee, chocolate, bananas and other tropical fruits are cheap for us because of the exploitation of workers in the third world. Do not let your addiction to coffee or chocolate or whatever be at the expense of someone else's standard of living.
• Eat sensibly: It goes without saying that health benefits of a simple diet will be lost if you overeat or do not eat a balanced diet.
• Cut out or cut down on meat: It takes 100kg of vegetable protein to produce 9kg of meat protein. The area of ground it takes to feed one carnivore will feed twenty vegans. We could feed the world easily if we gave up less than half of the meat consumption of the developed world. One could also add the terrible conditions for animals endemic to factory farming, the chemicals deleterious to health and the environmental damage. Meat production is a miserable business. Dairy and egg production are no better.
  
• Buy Quality: Don't go for cheap all the time. Cheap food is usually less good for you, the environment and the producer. I think it is important to try to spend less on many things but not on food.

Eating Simply

One thing I've noticed wth regard to trying to live simply is how much of my thought and practice of simple living revolves around food. For other things I consume, there are few choices. For travel, I can only go on foot, by bike or public transport (I don't know how to drive in any case). For clothes, I generally try to get as much as possible second hand and avoid cheap clothes from chain stores. Books, I try to always buy second hand too. I've gotten my electricity switched over to eco-friendly sources and am working on getting my house better insulated and energy efficient. All of these things are relatively easy and actually cost less than the full-fat alternatives.

Food, however, is a different matter. I reckon I spend more on food than I ever have before. Granted I have been a veggie for many years and so spent less on food than full-blown carnivores but my insistence on trying to eat organic, avoiding supermarkets and processed food is costing more. But that is as it should be. We should spend more on food. Especially in the UK, we care in general less about the quality of our food than in continental Europe. Consequently we have the highest obesity rate in Europe. In some towns in Northern England one third of adults are obese and overall the figure is one quarter. We could be looking in the coming decades at the first decrease in life expentancy in 200 years!

Changing peoples attitude to food I think would go a long way to creating a shift in other areas that we need to make if we are going to survive global warming and alleviate global poverty. The topic of food impacts in so many ways: personal and public health, the environment, animal rights, social justice. Even without adopting a vegan diet as (arguably) an optimum diet for healthy and ethical living people should at least care about the quality of the food they eat. Factory-farmed food is poor-quality food. Convenience ready-meals are also generally made from poor-quality ingredients. Processed food stuffs are generally not made from the best ingredients - or why would you need to process them?

Cookery programmes are common fare on our TVs but it is usually mostly just gastro-porn - like consumers of pornography, people who watch it just like watching it but rarely get to do it for real themselves. Maybe one of these campaigning celebrity cooks like Jamie Oliver or Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall should take up the cause of the horrendous eating habits we indulge in and the terrible consequences for it. Not many supermarket product spin-offs though in that.

Voluntary Simplicity- it's a whole other world

I've blogged before about the perceived weirdness of trying to live a simple live- especially in an urban environment but as I get deeper into my commitment to try to live as ethically, healthily and consciously as I can, I feel as if I am moving into another world. Mostly it has to do with my motivation, many people can see something in it but nearly nobody I know would care enough to try to do some of the things I do.
Refusing to eat meat, refusing to shop in supermarkets, insisting on paying more for food to ensure it organic or fairly-traded or - worst of all - refusing to watch television. But there is a little subculture out there of cranks and weirdos all trying to break free from the consumerist nightmare. It is still possible, if you are diligent, to live outside of the ambit of corporate influence but it is a life very different from the mainstream.
I can see my life becoming more engrossed in this new way of thinking. Maybe working less and living on even less but living a life rich in ideas and in control of the humble necessities of what I eat, what I wear, where I live and how I make my living. Not many people have control in all or even any of these areas of their lives so that the few who are seem strange and possibly dangerous. Voluntary Simplicity is, surprisingly and shamefully, almost an act of civil disobedience. Our society is so centred on the notion of consuming that to wilfully opt out can be likened to entering the cloister.
As someone who spent a couple of years as a Buddhist monk there is nothing new to me about adopt a lifestyle that seems to run contrary to the mainstream but it is also strange to live such an existence at large in the world. I wonder how many other people trying to live the simple life find this strange sense of detachment?

Taking the red pill

In the last few months in which I have been stumbling towards a new way to live my life I have been struggling to put into words what sort of life it is I want to live. I've been looking through the posts I've written and a theme I think that comes up again and again is the necessity not just to live simply but consciously. Voluntary simplicity is an integral part of living a conscious life but not all of it.

There are many factors in our society which wish to influence us to do things that are not good for us as individuals and for wider society. Don't get me wrong, I do not believe in a conspiracy just that in a capitalist society there are business, media and political forces who are forever trying to get one to live a life that suits them - to turn one into a passive consumer instead of an autonomous individual. It is the nature of the beast.

The more I have seen of the way we are sedated by television, socially acceptable (and illegally available) drugs, cheap goods with which to amuse ourselves while other human beings are exploited to make our consumer goods, animals forced to live hellish existences and the countryside poisoned to provide us with cheap food, and our entire plant rapidly approaching a point of no return that will see the quality of life of future generations seriously impaired, I am not longer able to distract myself with what the consumer society offers.

We are drugged by the comforts of our lives and do not see the harm our comfortable lives do to others and to ourselves. Somewhere along the way I, like Neo in the Matrix, seem to have swallowed the red pill and cannot go back to sleep. I think most people who are turning to a life of voluntary simplicity these days are no different. We should be awake to what we do. We muddle along in a selfish dream concerned only with fulfilling a fantasy given to us by people who do not have our best interests (or indeed their own) at heart. It is no way to live.

I found myself weeping...

Maybe I am getting sentimental in my old age but I came across something that made me cry involuntarily during the week. It was to do with the terrible murders of Amish school girls in Lancaster county in the US.

It was not the senseless waste of five innocent lives by a poor, twisted individual, tragic and worthy of tears although that is, it was the story that members of Amish community had opened an account and were requesting donations from within their community for the family of the murderer.

Although the Amish live a form of voluntary simplicity there are probably many aspects of Anabaptist belief which I would not agree with (their rejection of technology, for example) but this act shows that some of them at least have a clear perspective and an admirable understanding of what is really important. Rather than using this tragedy to reject others and justify revenge, they used their own suffering to connect with and reach out to the suffering of others. Whatever religious or secular belief system you hold, if it cannot do this it is not worth following.

I found myself weeping with gratitude that such people exist in the world.

Buying Strategies

This follows on from the last post. Marketing is a way to get us to buy stuff we usually do not need. I am going to suggest a form of "counter marketing", a series of buying strategies that are designed to encourage conscious consuming and a means of undermining the sales strategies that corporations and big retailers engage in - to the detriment of us all.

• Think Small - Try wherever you can to avoid big chains and supermarkets. Use small local retailers. Refuse to use huge retailers on principle - or at least as little as you can. It may cost more sometimes but you are getting more back in value for your community and environment.
  
• Buy Local - Try your best to get what you buy produced as locally to you as possible. Buy seasonal produce. Cut down on exotic products that have to be shipped vast distances. Support producers in your local community.
  
• Buy Second-Hand - There are many, many charity shops in every town in the UK and Ireland. It may take a little more work but you can be sure that buying 2nd-hand books, clothes, furniture, kitchen wares is a winner all-round. It cuts down on waste, the profits are used to benefit society, you know that the producer (the person who donated the goods) is not exploited in its production.
• Shop for Value - buy with an eye to longevity and repairability. Don't fall into the trap of being cheap and buying often.
  
• Shop Less Often - Plan and think about your shopping. Buy in bulk if you can. It is usually cheaper. The most important thing is to think about what you need and leave yourself less open to impulse buying. It is also a big time saver.
  
• Buy More Basic Goods - Especially where food is concerned, buy basic ingredients and fewer processed and "convenience" goods. If you can make your own clothes or travel under your own steam - this too provides a means of shopping at a more basic level.
• Boycott - Simply do not buy products (or from retailers) who do not do meet your ethical standards. The growth in the market for Fairtrade coffee is due to a growing boycott of unfairly-traded brands.
• Buy nothing day - Set aside one day a week or even one day a month when you will not buy anything. And if you can do it for one day, see if you can do it for two. You can plan your purchases so you do not need to consume every day.
• Chart your own consumption - Do what the marketers do! Keep tabs on how much and what you spend stuff on. Look at what were impulse buys and what is stuff you actually needed. Know your own consumption patterns and see what you can do buy less and buy more wisely.
  

In order to live simple, in my opinion, you need to take responsibility for your consumption. You need to consume consciously and not let producers push stuff onto you. You need to dictate what you consume and not let others decide (by whatever means) what you should be buying.

Countering Marketing

What marketing segment do you belong to? According to the VALS market analysis system invented by the Stanford Research Institute there are 8 social/personality types which are convenient market archetypes. Most simple livers would belong I guess to the market segment called Makers who "unimpressed with material goods" and "buy basic goods". There is also something of the Thinker in the typical simple liver as they looking for "functionality, durability and value", and possibly something of the Survivor who are "cautious consumers".

The premise behind this and other market research systems is that we all have values and needs which can be identified and used as the basis to sell us stuff. I have already talked about another market segment LOHAS (lifestyles of health and sustainability) which marketers have identified as a target. I thought I would like put forward a few ideas about how to foil marketers and make your purchases conscious rather than automatic response to marketing stimuli.

A few basic ideas:

• Possessions don't bring happiness - This is the foundation of simple living. An understanding that whatever you acquire can only serve a limited purpose.
• Buying is a moral act - All marketing is aimed at the individual - it's about convincing you that your personal satisfaction is the most important thing at this minute and a certain product can provide that. But everything you purchase has consequences and implications for the producer and for the environment and society at large. Bearing this in mind, you will question every penny you spend.
• Inform yourself about marketing and sales techniques - if you know how a con trick works you will not be fooled by it. Marketing is a con trick. It attempts to persuade you that a product can do more for you than it actually can. The internet has all the information you need.
  
• Buy less - No matter whether marketers are trying to sell you cheap goods in quantity or make you spend more on higher quality goods, foster the determination to buy less - you actually need less than you think. The first question about any purchase should always be "Do I actually need this?". The aim of marketing is always to get you to buy more even if you don't need it and the best thing you can do to counter it, is simply buy less.
• Cut out the propaganda - Advertising comes into our lives in all sorts ways. You can't avoid it. But you can do some things. Ban the TV - even if only from certain rooms in the house or at certain times of the day. It is the main way we receive marketing messages.

We live in a market economy, we need to buy stuff and I suppose we need people to tell us about new products and ideas. What we need though is a shift in the balance where we make conscious decisions about they way we consume and what producers provide.