Sunday, May 23, 2010

Five Small Ways To Ward Off The Apocalypse (Part 2)

Step Two: Less Juice For Faux-Foods

Picture it: a freezing railway platform on the outskirts of a large city. It’s late evening, and all the trains have stopped for the night. There’s hasn’t been anyone around for a couple of hours now. But something stirs: in an alcove, just by the ticket machine, sit four brightly lit vending machines, quietly whirring to each other in the frozen night.

Just fifty metres away, across the tracks, are the even brighter lights of a convenience store. Inside, toward the back, are a wall of fridges full of the same drinks and chocolate bars that the vending machines carry. Like the vending machines, the store, as it proudly says on the sliding doors, ‘never closes’. There are another two of these stores within 200 metres.

It’s the middle of winter, and no one has bought a drink from the vending machines for almost a week now; the convenience store is lucky to sell more than a few each day. In that time, they have together used enough energy to heat twenty houses.

This is luxury: having anything you want, any time you want it. Even if no one wants it. Vending machines and convenience store fridges are always on, no matter what the season, or the number of people likely to make use of them. For the most part, they cool products that don’t require refrigeration to remain consumable. Indeed, most of these products are so full of mysterious compounds and chemicals they would likely outlast the vending machines and fridges themselves. We cool them simply because we find them more pleasing that way.

Of all the first world countries, no one exemplifies this victory of convenience over common sense better than the Japanese. In Japan, a country of 127 million people, there is one vending machine for every 23 people. It’s not uncommon to wander down a back alley in a Japanese city and come across seven or eight of them, each selling more or less the same things, lined up alongside one another. So what does all this add up to?

The electricity required to power Japan’s 5,582,200 vending machines over the course of a year is roughly equivalent to Bangladesh’s annual power consumption.^ (As a comparison, Australia has around 110,000 refrigerated vending machines, or one for every 180 people; America around three million, or one for every 100 people.) When you add convenience stores to that figure—Japan, though admittedly an extreme case, has more than 42,000 of them—you’re likely wasting enough juice to power several other countries in the region.

It would be unrealistic, even with the kind of freewheeling dreaming I’m allowing myself here, to think that we might be able to curb the sales or wider availability of the products typically sold in vending machines and convenience store fridges in the foreseeable future. But it is entirely reasonable to think that we might limit the enormous amounts of power they currently account for.

Under this step, all refrigeration and lighting in vending machines would be permanently switched off. (This could be done via simple, and likely very cheap, retrofits to the machines.) The machines would still be able to run, but only with whatever minimal power was required for the machines to take your money and squeeze out your selection. All vending machines would also be fitted with motion sensors, which would enable a machine to minimise its power usage when not in use. If people want cold drinks, they would now have to visit a vending machine in the colder months, when nature will quite happily manufacture their refreshment, or take their fizz home and do it themselves.

In convenience stores, fridges would be significantly downsized to only allow space for things that might reasonably be considered perishables (milk, butter, all-in-one breakfast-shakes etc.). The yawning gap in the stores this would leave could be filled with different varieties of actual, recognisable food. And from there, who knows what might happen.

Kids, turned off by the warm fizz now on offer from the lightless machines and convenience store shelves, could soon discover the abundant, free sources of fructose all around them. Public health authorities, emboldened by the idea that they can actually do things big business might not like, could put measures in place for faux-foods to be taxed, so that their price comes to reflect the great costs both their manufacture and consumption have on society. Eventually, with enough public support, the amount of these products on sale could even be regulated.

Of course, imposing any limits on our consumption of convenience food—even if it was just its serving temperature—would be seen by many people as a direct affront to our freedom as Westerners. Free market ideologues would no doubt invoke the nanny state argument, and tell us that any limiting of consumer choice is tantamount to a limiting of our essential freedoms.

But what they’re really saying is this: We have worked extraordinarily hard to not have to work hard. Both our sophistication and our victory lie in the rich variety of things in easy reach. On a primal level, it’s how our ancestors always dreamed of living: no stockpiling for the winter, no going without food, even if you’re just waiting for a bus.

But this notion of choice that is ritually peddled out whenever our profligacy is questioned doesn’t stand up to even the smallest amount of scrutiny. For one, the overwhelming majority of foods and drinks in vending machines and convenience store refrigerators are more or less the same—calorie dense, diabetes-baiting constructions that bear only a passing resemblance to what is traditionally called food.

Add to that the fact that these faux-foods and drinks are typically manufactured by a small clutch of companies, who also own most of the vending machines and take up the lion’s share of space in convenience store fridges, and the idea that having these foods on every street corner represents some kind of meaningful choice or freedom starts to look decidedly shaky.

Real freedom, I think most people would agree, has absolutely nothing to do with how many readily available means we have at our disposal to distract, console and sicken ourselves, and everything to do with reclaiming the world from the sweaty clutches of the forces that have convinced us otherwise. And it will start with small gestures, not great speeches.

^ Bangladesh/Japan stat based on these figures of Bangladesh’s total energy usage 2006, and this estimate of the country’s population in the same year, against this current estimate of Japan’s number of vending machines and an average energy use, per machine, of around 3900kWh per year.

Photos, from top, by camerafool, The Bonkirasu Brigade, kamoda.

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