28
ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
When we reveal the nothingness of a banana, we become aware of the
truly lethal social and ecological realities that deliver the banana from the Third
World to die First. Most bananas sold in the First World constitute a cash crop
which many Third World countries export in order to repay their debt to the
World Bank or to the International Monetary Fund. These crops are cultivated
on soil which could be used for the cultivation of foods for the local
community itself. Consequently, people across the Third World literally starve
while their land is controlled and converted to export zones for cash crops
such as fruits, vegetables, sugar, tobacco, coffee, and timber. Agricultural
workers are paid slave wages, denied health benefits, and are exposed to
pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers (bananas are one of the most
pesticide-toxic fruits).22 Certainly the agricultural worker, who is poisoned with
over-work and chemical imputs, whose indigenous land was first confiscated
by colonialists, then repossessed by the World Bank, should be given the
moral consideration that many vegetarians would give to the chicken. Yet it is
often easier to reveal the ‘nothingness of meat’ than to reveal the ‘nothingness
of workers’ or the ‘nothingness of cultures’ that are degraded by producing
bananas.
As we recognize the complex and contradictory nature of capitalist
production,
consumption
it
becomes
of meat
clear
often
why
exceeds
activism
activism
regarding the unethical
regarding the unethical
consumption of commodities in general. While animals have been reduced to
a specific commodity that we may eliminate from our diet, commodities in
general thoroughly permeate our social world. It would be impossible to expel
each one from our daily lives. The fact is, within a global capitalist system, we
are largely unable to determine the modes and ethics of production. It is
understandable, then, that many of us focus on areas of consumption (such as
diet) over which we feel we can exercise some control. However, the longer
we focus on the ethics of consumption, as if we could consume morally within
a capitalist system, the longer before we reveal the inherent immorality of the
capitalist system itself.
The desire for ‘nature’, the desire for ethical organic practices such as
food production, must be broadened and deepened to include as well, a desire
for social and political freedom. The desire to spare animals from disrespectful
and harmful practices must be elaborated to include an overall challenge to a
capitalist system that threatens the very survival of people. Once we reveal the
‘nothingness’ of the commodity, overcoming what Marx called “commodity
fetishism,” we will recognize that each commodity, as Adams says, “came from
something, or rather someone, and it has been made into a no-thing,
no-body.”23 In recognizing the fabricated nothingness of the commodity, we
realize that we are not merely consuming abstract commodities but that we are