Eating Bangladeshi

So I go out to a restaurant the other night with a bunch of people from my work. Nothing exciting I know, but let me explain. The people I am going out with are mainly scientists working in fields involved in feeding the hungry, development and limiting the destruction of natural resources for the advantage of helping and enhancing humanity. These guys and their mates are the ones screaming at the world "GIVE US FUNDING TO HELP AVERT DISASTER IN POOR COUNTRIES!!!!". Their work is helping hundreds if not thousands of people in poor countries to feed themselves and build resilience in food and resources.

So far so good. You might be thinking "wow what excellent company, a bunch of people who are on the leading edge of the fight against poverty and environmental degradation, these guys must be really interesting people!". And to some degree, you would be right. They are very good people to talk to.

But what they don't do is embrace their work in their personal lives.

Cognitive Dissonants

Let me go around the table. Their are 8 others. 2 economists, 2 policy people for food and ecosystem resilience, 1 person performing impact assessment, 1 soon to be marine biologist, 1 expert on fertilization and 1 social scientist figuring out the best social conditions for resilience to occur. 2 of them are married with a new born. Everyone but the marine biologist is paid... well... shit loads. The restaurant is pleasant with attentave serving people and not smokey.

The evening started off well, we share taxis as much as possible to get to the restaurant. We all meet, sit down and have a drink. Then come the menus and we start ordering. At the end of the ordering I am stunned. Flabergasted. Shocked. Why? 6 out of the 8 ordered steak. Grain fed Australian steak to be exact. Big slabs of it. Now I aren't doing an expose piece here or anything but this absolutely shocked me. Here you have a whole bunch of people "committed" to helping humanity, who understand that climate change is upon us and accelerating as we speak, who are trying to build food and ecosystem resilience and yet here they are eating possibly the worst thing they could. I felt like yelling.

I felt like standing up and saying "What the fuck do you think you are all doing?". I felt like saying "Do you know that each of those steaks is a couple of thousand litres of water and 50 kilos of grain?? That water and grain could feed a Bangladeshi for a good few weeks?? That the amount of energy involved in the production/harvesting/transport of the grain, to the feeding/killing/butchering/freezing/storing/transporting long distances (we are in Malaysia) of that food, would probably weigh in (back of the napkin calculation) at about 100-1000 times the calorific value within the food???"

But I was too stunned. When it came my turn to order I scanned down the menu and found... no vegetarian options. This is when the social pressure really struck. Here I was looking at the menu, everyone waiting for me, semi stunned by the rest of these peoples ignorance (cognitive dissonance actually but I want to say something harsher here) and there are no veggie options. So I have to order fish. This pisses me off. But at least it is locally caught fresh fish. Thank god for that.

But you can see what I am trying to get at here. These people all talk the talk, but when it comes to walking the walk - fuck off, that's somebody elses job. I want to live in maximum comfort and should be allowed to as long as someone else pays for it. I know climate change is happening but aren't prepared to change anything about my lifestyle to try and arrest it. I am quite happy that my luxury will kill people in the future and don't really give a shit. Bangladesh can sink under the seas for all I care, as long as I can eat grain fed imported steak. Yum yum.

I sat there during dinner hoping and dreaming that their steak tasted like the flesh of a Bangladeshi.

Maximum disclosure

We are all hypocrites in the west, in some ways, when it comes to climate change, myself included. We have been bought up in safe secure environments where we can have basically anything we want. The majority of us don't really have to worry about food, shelter or clothes.

I myself are a kiwi, living in Malaysia. How did I get here? I flew. But that really really hurt me. I have written off my carbon for flying here and back via a carbon write off company, but that isn't really good enough, I feel. I am here for 2 years plus and will not buy a car (everyone in Malaysia drives everywhere - even across the road to shopping malls!) and are cycling everywhere. I won't eat any red meat anymore unless it's from a pest animal that is causing environmental destruction (like possums/pigs in my homeland). I limit myself to 2 meat meals a week for now but are likely to go veggie in the future. When I eat meat, I try to make it local fish or chicken.

I aren't trying to say I am a model citizen - I still use a lot more energy and resources than I need. I read a lot of books, are an IT guy so have a laptop, work in an air conditioned office, go through clothes faster than I would like (partly because I am so harsh on them - I do a lot of exercise) so aren't some energy efficient saint. But I am using about (back of the envelope calculation again) a quarter to an eigth of the resources that the above Cognitave Dissonants are, who, fly all over the world to "help their cause", fly all over the world for holidays, drive nice cars and have no qualms about eating Bangladeshi.