If you take any interest at all in food trends, it’s certain you’ve heard the term “sustainable.” Sustainability is the latest fad in the foodie world, and it has spread out into the various liberal-chic and progressive neighborhoods and social circles. It’s broken past those little islands and made it into the TV-food world, where all the budding celebrity-chef-wannabes use the term to extol the virtues of the ingredients they use and the food they sell. It’s often used in tandem with “local,” a term used to indicate that the food you’re served was grown or raised dozens of miles away rather than hundreds or thousands.
As a voluntary movement, I have no issue with sustainability. In fact, I respect both the intent and the act in most cases. Just as it’s better in the aggregate to harvest lumber selectively from a wild forest than to clear-cut it, it’s better for all of us to be judicious in harvesting resources. If a particular species of fish is being over-consumed, we serve ourselves and our descendants better if we switch to a different species, one that’s abundant and one that’s being harvested at a rate that doesn’t exceed its self-replenishment. Sustainability as a marketing tactic can serve to counterbalance over-consumption caused by other marketing tactics. As an example, consider the Patagonian Tooth Fish. Many of you have probably never heard of it. But, I bet many of you have eaten it. Back in the 1970s, a fish importer came up with the idea of renaming it, and within a few years it became immensely popular and eventually became a gourmet and high-end restaurant staple. By the 90s, it was terribly overfished, and declared endangered, and the sustainability folks moved on from it. You probably know this fish by its new name: Chilean Sea Bass. No matter that it is neither a bass nor from Chile. As an aside, other fish have become popular through renaming. Slime Head became Orange Roughy. Muttonfish became Snapper. Dolphin (the fish) became Mahi Mahi. All have skyrocketed in price due to high popularity. And, in a different category, rapeseed oil is now canola oil.
Back to sustainability. Yes, it’s a notion that’s been embraced and co-opted by marketers, and as such it runs the risk of being diluted or misunderstood or re-defined. But the core idea is a good one. It reflects an awareness of the consequences of one’s actions, of the negative effects of excess, of recklessness, of willful ignorance, of head-in-the-sand consumption.
So it seems odd to me that the people who most embrace sustainability in food, and in such areas as energy generation and hardwood harvesting for that matter, are so indifferent to it when it comes to government borrowing and entitlement programs. The national debt is growing by leaps and bounds, Social Security and Medicare are vast unfunded liabilities, government spending continue and grow regardless of their effectiveness, yet the progressives, liberal-elite, hipsters, and cooler-than-thou crowd have nary a peep to say about any of it, apart from viscerally attacking anyone who dares point out that none of these activities are sustainable. How can we explain this dissonance? How can people who invoke the long view in their personal consumption habits have a totally disinterested and aloof attitude towards such massively relevant and pervasive components of our society?
The obvious answer is the same one that we come up with whenever contemplating the irrationalities of statism i.e. that the people who advocate for more government and more spending have a simplistic, even childlike attitude towards it all. The notion is “I want things to be this way, and I want someone else to figure out how to make it so.” The power-hungry and self-interested feast on such people, asking for and receiving the power to impose their will on everyone. Then there are, of course, the hypocritical narcissists, the people who feel better embracing sustainability in some things, and utterly ignoring it other things, because the reason for their embrace of sustainability is more about self-congratulation than actual concern for the world at large.
I believe that the last group are those most likely to wear their sustainability on their sleeves, who will trot it out when interacting with others, who will use it as a demonstration of moral and intellectual superiority. In other words, the people most likely to get in your face when arguing for small government politics. So, keep this little inconsistency in mind should you cross paths with such, and ask them, “If you believe in sustainability, shouldn’t you support massive cuts in government spending and overhauls of Social Security and Medicare?” If they fumfer a non-reply and deflect, give yourself a little smile and enjoy their discomfort. It’s little victories that can be the most satisfying.
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