Monday, January 05, 2004
ORGANUCKS CONTINUED. When last we left off, Starbucks had just spun off 'Organucks' -- a chic holistic/organic cafe-supermarket which has successfully and cleverly shed the crunchy-granola-Birkenstock image usually associated with the terms holistic and organic. Organucks' target audience is the discerning consumer willing to pay for food products certifiably cleansed and free of pesticides, hormones, antibiotics and other harmful substances. This demographic profile is not to be confused with the socially-and-environmentally-conscious consumer. The Organucks' customer likes the ideals of being socially responsible as long as those ideals don't infringe or crimp their lifestyles. Our Organucks' customer, at the end of the day, just wants the best for moi. In other words: through what massively energy-consuming channels their organic food is delivered or how meagerly a wage the farmers who produce this food are paid is buried safely deep within the sub-conscious of the Organucks' customers' brains. Nor do they particularly care by what energy-wasting means they must go through to get to the product they want. Is it socially or environmentally conscionable to drive ten miles in an S.U.V. to buy that wonderful organic goat cheese Organucks is offering? Who are we kidding here... No our Organucks' customers care only that those wholesome natural anti-oxidant blueberries pulse through their veins.
One now waddles her shopping cart out to her Ford Expedition. She is a perfectly nice woman. She loves her children. She would like to lose about fifteen pounds but just can't seem to do it. She volunteers at the library and takes care of her invalid mother. She carefully loads fifteen double-bagged plastic bags brimming with 'certified organic' food products into the back. Never mind that the high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic bags are a sacrilege to the contents within. Introduced just a generation ago, the plastic bag has descended upon this planet like a virulent locust. An estimated sixty-five million plastic bags end up as litter in Australia each year alone. Plastic bags are consumed worldwide at a rate of almost one million per minute--over five hundred billion plastic bags annually. Social pundits in South Africa have named the plastic bag the 'national flower.'
In this one blip of a moment, this one woman in this one town has thirty plastic bags in the back of her 'United We Stand' truck. Twelve million barrels of oil per year are used to make the bags consumed in the United States plus god knows how many million barrels more so that she can drive five miles in her mammoth-mobile to this store. Not to mention that the HDPE in plastic bags sticks around the planet up to a thousand years and when it does eventually break down it is into tiny toxic bits polluting the very soil, river, lakes and oceans from which the woman hopes to buy her organic food. Well this nice womandoesn't have to worry about it, does she...
Oh but wait I forgot. Organucks, will of course sell these: ReusableBags.com
Repeat after me, "I don't need a plastic bag -- I can carry these couple of things to the car myself."
One now waddles her shopping cart out to her Ford Expedition. She is a perfectly nice woman. She loves her children. She would like to lose about fifteen pounds but just can't seem to do it. She volunteers at the library and takes care of her invalid mother. She carefully loads fifteen double-bagged plastic bags brimming with 'certified organic' food products into the back. Never mind that the high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic bags are a sacrilege to the contents within. Introduced just a generation ago, the plastic bag has descended upon this planet like a virulent locust. An estimated sixty-five million plastic bags end up as litter in Australia each year alone. Plastic bags are consumed worldwide at a rate of almost one million per minute--over five hundred billion plastic bags annually. Social pundits in South Africa have named the plastic bag the 'national flower.'
In this one blip of a moment, this one woman in this one town has thirty plastic bags in the back of her 'United We Stand' truck. Twelve million barrels of oil per year are used to make the bags consumed in the United States plus god knows how many million barrels more so that she can drive five miles in her mammoth-mobile to this store. Not to mention that the HDPE in plastic bags sticks around the planet up to a thousand years and when it does eventually break down it is into tiny toxic bits polluting the very soil, river, lakes and oceans from which the woman hopes to buy her organic food. Well this nice womandoesn't have to worry about it, does she...
Oh but wait I forgot. Organucks, will of course sell these: ReusableBags.com
Repeat after me, "I don't need a plastic bag -- I can carry these couple of things to the car myself."
Comments:
Post a Comment
