Feel bad about your appetizers and seltzer
Timothy P. Carney
In the off chance you thought you were an OK person who did mostly moral things, there’s a whole new list of behaviors that you should feel bad about — beginning with the stuff you like to eat.
For starters, take in “A Brief History of a Problematic Appetizer,” a recent New York Times guest essay from an oceans activist.
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The “problematic” dish is calamari. For one thing, enjoying fried calamari makes you basic, and a dupe for marketing — it is just squid, which people used to be grossed out by until some marketing genius renamed it. The New York Times even named its index of trendy foods the “Fried Calamari Index.” Fried calamari peaked way back in 1996 and even the New York Times’s index is now defunct.
But now eating calamari makes you complicit in human rights abuses. Chinese fishermen are now the chief source of squid, and so your appetizer is seasoned with “wage theft, forced labor, severe neglect of deckhands and human trafficking.”
Now the Pacific’s squid stocks are “fast declining” and “that’s everyone’s problem.”
A couple of weeks later, your avocados were declared problematic. “Americans Love Avocados. It’s Killing Mexico’s Forest,” was the New York Times headline.
If you eat guacamole or avocado toast, you are complicit in a “blood-soaked trade … involving threats, abductions and killings.” Also, deforestation in western Mexico “is fueled by the voracious appetite in the United States for avocados.”
And in case you thought it was unproblematic to drink water, Consumer Reports recently ran a piece headlined “Does my LaCroix habit make me a bad person?”
Aluminum cans, of course, are infinitely recyclable, and water is surely OK, right? Maybe.
“Aluminum is a mined natural resource,” the drinker/writer noted, and so she asked experts to tell her whether she was bad for drinking cans of seltzer.
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The answer: Yeah, seltzer drinkers are kind of bad people. There’s “a lot of energy being used — from the canning and transportation processes, and beyond — just so I can get my fizz on,” the writer lamented. Also, if you drink too much, you’re draining aquifers.
Got it? Eat your calamari and avocados, and drink your seltzer if you want. Just make sure you feel bad about it.