Waste AM
Errantly Consuming. Buying and having less of everything
2
I’ve experienced chaos and disorder, having moved house three times in three months. It’s an additional strain that’s made me feel fraught and over-stretched, and left me unable and unwilling to expend excess energy. Having no excess will to give, my principles are taking a holiday. More than ever I absolve myself from responsibility and the convenience-based choices I make in the short term. There has been no mental energy left for reducing waste or avoiding creating waste in the first place. I am in slash and burn mode, and if I want something because it makes my life easier, I buy it.
I tried to count the houses I have lived in over a ten year period. It’s more than 15. I moved out of home when I was 17 and in between living with family and renting, people have helped me out when I’ve needed somewhere to live. Although I’m used to being transient, it doesn’t make the change and hassle of upping sticks that much easier to manage. When one lives out of a bag routine is impossible. Without structure and order I can’t function.
With each move has come the burden of coordination, cleaning, and streamlining my stuff. Anyone who has moved so much in 10 years will be able to appreciate the reasons I lack the desire to acquire many possessions. Part of the disruption has entailed living among the physical presence of other people’s stuff as people move in / out, and you try to find a space for your own crap amongst it. Seeing boxes of stuff around drains me and saps my energy for creative tasks. Seeing a car filled up with the random crap I have amassed is a sorry sight. To know that that’s all I have – a car of sad objects - is pitiful.
The most taxing aspect of each move (there were 2 moving-in days and two houses) was dealing with other people’s crap, mess, and dirt that was left behind; I have spent hours scrubbing away the chicken fat and mold ignored by other people. I have spent hours chucking out other people’s rubbish and hoarded crap.
So fraught with the never-ending process, I don’t care about eco cleaning products. I splash bleach around as I can’t do more and give any extra time to eradicate the filth left by people I don’t even know. I chuck out their belongings onto to the street because there is not a trace of energy left to organise it any further to take it to the charity shop. I discard things that could be reused in a million ways because I can’t be bothered. I refuse to take responsibility for the junk of others. There is no will left to pull up their slack for them.
I must be merciless because there are years of crap abandoned by people, spilling out around the house. Objects telling personal stories that nobody can remember. Things nobody even cares about; forgotten, broken things on an outdated inventory and sentimental trinkets left to molder and rot in the basement, which must supposedly be preserved.
Under the stuff and the effort there is a home but it takes time to uncover it. I have seen and dealt with so much crap in the last few months that I have no energy left to care. When I am confronted with the crap of others, I realise my personal actions are insignificant. I can do what I can for myself but there is nothing left to intervene for the sake of others.
In 2010 I went to Nepal as part of a volunteering programme. I feel so lucky to have visited this beautiful country. I felt a connection with nature the whole time I was there. The immediacy of nature thrilled and moved me – on clear days I saw the Himalayas on the horizon, above the fields and rice paddies I would see circulating eagles, and twice I was astonished to witness fluttering black butterflies that were as big as my fist.
I volunteered in a group of ‘young people’ broadly between 18 and 25. Age had nothing to do with the maturity of the young British volunteers among whom I lived and worked. Some of the most ignorant and offensive volunteers were the eldest of the group. They were there to mock and test boundaries. One incident in particular stays with me as an important life event in which I stood up for something I thought was wrong, only to have others chide and reject me for my actions. I write to tell you what happened.
My greatest personal challenge was adapting to life within a group from which there is no escape. I know myself better now and realise that I resist participating in groups. When I am in a group I feel restricted and controlled. I hate fickle, constantly shifting group politics. I also hate having to suffer the domineering behaviour of alphas, who in their brashness, somehow manage to gather around them a gang of followers to whom they dictate every plan. In such environments I feel constantly challenged to follow, even though my soul screams against it. I do not willingly follow others into stupidity and ignorance.
For ten weeks I had had to suppress my true self and throw it over to the group. There was only one more week to get through before the pressure cooker experience came to an end. We were eating our lunch together in the makeshift lunch hut when a familiar topic of conversation came up: HOW FUN IT WOULD BE TO KILL A CHICKEN -LOOLLLL!! WHEN ARE WE GONNA KILL ONE?
I can let an obnoxious topic of conversation go once or twice. I also know the worst thing you can possibly do is feed a troll when they are trying to wind you up. However, something must have snapped in me this time; I’d had enough of the childishness, the posturing, the endless talk and no action.
I remember asking them to stop talking about it and being told by resident alpha Graham, ‘If I don’t like the topic of conversation I should go and eat my lunch somewhere else.’ I think I told them to carry on, but they should realise everyone is sick of listening to their bullshit.
‘So you don’t think we’re going to do it?’ jeered Graham.
‘You’ve been talking about it for ten weeks now…’ said I, not realising it was taken as a challenge.
I happened to be placed in a group of meat addicts who found it insufferably hard to go without consuming flesh. Many of them were of the mindset that it isn’t a proper meal unless there’s meat in it. We were living with rural Nepali families most of whom couldn’t afford to eat meat on a regular basis or were vegetarian. The family I lived with ate meat once a week, usually chicken, river fish or buffalo, but they were better off than most of the other families.
Considering most people in the group had been living a mostly vegetarian diet since we arrived (except at the weekend when it was possible to go on a meat binge) it perplexes me that for them it was so hard to finish the experience the way it started – namely, to just go without meat for a few more days. Especially because meat cooked Nepali-style is something very different to what our Western palates are used to, and puts one more at risk of a stomach bug.
It was the day before we were to leave – a day we had to attend a celebration of our achievements as volunteers (whether anything worthwhile was achieved is a separate issue). Some of the volunteers, including Graham, were performing a dance at the celebration. They had put in a lot of time practising the dance. They had been very busy, working on this dance in their own time.
At the celebration it began to circulate that Graham and another volunteer had in fact killed a chicken. They had gone to the next village the day before, bought a hen, had it stuffed in a cardboard box, and trudged back home over uneven ground with their quarry, which would have taken about forty minutes in the hot sun. They then proceeded to divert themselves with their dance preparations.
The following morning the awoke at sunrise for slaughter, and a bit more dance practise. They killed it in a way that the chicken shat itself (I am told this shows that it caused the bird to suffer); its carcass lie there twitching as they went over their dance moves.
I particularly objected to the fact that killing the chicken was all done for sport. They had no intention of making it a learning experience. Gutting, plucking, cleaning, chopping, and cooking the chicken was not a story they could boast about. The dirty work, you could say, was left to the Nepalis. They ate the chicken a couple of hours later, for breakfast.
After the celebration event, we were sitting around drinking tea. Graham was pumped up, not only was the dance a success, but he had had blood on his hands. He was revelling in the moment, playing to the crowd, reliving his chicken slaughter, when he turned, looked me in the eye and said, ‘See, told you I’d do it .’
I was so enraged. Anger pulsated through my body, all of it directed at this infuriating man whom I wanted to punch and kick for being such a confrontational moron. ‘I hope it gives you food poisoning,’ I snapped at him, as I sat there, fuming with cigarette in hand.
‘I hope you get cancer from your fucking cancer stick,’ he retorted, with the full force of his revolting self.
I saw so red that I leapt up and screamed, ‘you f****** c***,’ as I launched the fag up in the air and at him. I missed but my intention was clear.
A short slanging match followed before I stormed off. In the aftermath I was blamed for everything and ‘encouraged’ to apologise to Graham by the Nepali volunteer coordinators. I felt the whole group sided with Graham; it was clear they thought I’d over-reacted.
But to this day I maintain that I was right and he was wrong. While I respect any meat-eater who rears their own food for the plate, and keeps that connection with the origin of meat by slaughtering it and preparing it themselves, I have no time for people who view taking life as a sport or a mere boast. And more importantly, killing anything is not a thing one should ever be proud of.
Humans have always killed animals for meat; in circumstances eating flesh has been fundamental to the survival of our species.
These days however, we wholly disrespect the sacrificed animals that give us meat. Dissociated from the chain of production, we treat their slaughter with blinkered flippancy, waste their flesh, and habitually over-consume what our evolution should have taught us to value.
The very survival and prosperity of our ancestors depended on the animals they reared and hunted. It made them respect the animal and its carcass, would have imbued them with a sense of restraint while hunting, and on a merely pragmatic level, made them take proper care of their livestock, which they couldn’t afford to lose through either neglect or abuse.
In recent years mainly due to over-population of the planet by human beings, monstrous farming practices have become standard. Over time they have enabled people in Western cultures to grow fat, so fat that around two-thirds of the population is overweight or obese, while elsewhere in the world more than one billion people are hungry or undernourished.
To supply our voracious appetites and keep the multitudes fed, a gargantuan corporate meat industry has developed, and with it, additional ethical questions related to the consumption of meat have arisen. While awareness has grown about the monstrous conditions and maltreatment of animals in factory-farm conditions, the issue of endemic cruelty in slaughter houses, or abattoirs, has not yet attained the coverage it deserves. However, a small band of concerned people are making it their business to alert the wider public to what our brutal system of food production really entails.
Over eighty-five million animals were slaughtered for meat in North America in the year 2000, and since then the rate of production has increased by twenty percent. It is by any stretch of imagination a massive industry.
It is difficult to infiltrate and report on the atrocities committed in abattoirs. It would seem a prerequisite that employees should have absolutely no feeling for animals as sentient beings, as attested in this secretly filmed footage:
Clearly, to gain employment in such a place, it helps to be a sociopathic sadist. The pay is poor; there can’t be much of a financial incentive to work in one of these disgusting dungeons in which it is permissible to openly inflict malice and suffering on fellow creatures.
In a recent high-profile case, in order to save himself the cost of a shotgun cartridge, a pig farmer let his workers bludgeon a young pig. What dispicable behaviour! And what a shock it is to learn that DEFRA offensively and barbarically condone death-by-bludgeoning as a means of despatching sick animals under 6-weeks old.
The whole industry is rife with abuse and corruption and these hellholes would be shut down tomorrow, did we not demand and expect cheap meat for fast food. The organisations are allowed to self-govern and self-certificate, so as long as all the right boxes are ticked, they receive a big rubber stamp to do as they wish, unless of course they get caught on film, and all hell breaks out.
In the case of halal meat, not even the RSPCA is interested in the welfare issues arising from this mode of killing, whereby a mechanical conveyor lifts an animal up by of its legs – be it a cow or sheep – onto a conveyor where it’s neck is slashed, either by an operative with a ‘blessed’ knife or my ‘blessed’ rotary blade fulfilling the same function, mainly for chickens. The animals die in agony, it taking somewhere between ten and thirty minutes to be put out of their misery.
A simple human conscience tells us that animals reared for the plate must be disposed of by humane means, and that any acts of cruelty or abuse witnessed should be punished by law: these animals are after all sentient beings like ourselves. Yet the abuse and sadism goes unpunished or worse, undetected.
Just imagine all the unrecorded events going on, and the cruelty-provenance of your average hamburger.
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