Contribution and Consumption.

We are killing ourselves and everyone we've (n)ever met.

It is your fault.

It is my fault.

The lifestyle we've built as an industrialized society is unsustainable - and we are dying the poisoner's death. Slow. Piece by piece. Drip by fucking drip. In my own time as a cook I've seen fish species pushed to near extinction. To this day they are available on restaurant menus. This is UNACCEPTABLE. Several years ago on my first day of a new job there was Chilean Sea Bass on the menu. After service I told the chef I'd be happy to finish out the product we had, but that if he continued to order it for the restaurant I wouldn't be working there. He stopped ordering it after we had a discussion about responsibility as cooks.  It is not only my responsibility as a chef to know what I'm serving, and how it was caught/grown/produced; it is your responsibility to know what you're putting into your body. As the chef of a restaurant it's my job to make some decisions for you when you come to my place - We're serving These things in This way. The other end is on the consumer: To ask questions of the places they patronize and constantly make them do a better job of procuring the most sustainably produced offerings. The trade-off is that these things are often more expensive. We've found a way to increase the yield of crops we grow logarithmically. Fucking HUGE yields. We pay our farmers to set food on fire and not send it to market. That's how much food we have. But what's the price of all this? The Gulf Dead Zone. Nitrate concentrations so high that algal blooms deplete the oxygen levels of the water and everything else dies. It's like trying to breathe in a forest fire. There's too much shit in the air. You die by choking.

The really sick part is that the dead zone is but one example of our folly. Driving home from the pharmacy today I heard another news report about tainted food. People die because of the way we produce and transport our food. Yeah. For real.

You might think I'm just some hippie that should shut up and accept reality. I've never accepted reality as what I'm told it is by someone else. We're all experiencing this through our own lenses of experience and chemistry. My world is different from your world. Not only philosophically, but intrinsically. The point is, we should always be trying to shape the world into the reality we want it to be. Surely you want there to be plants and animals 150 years from now, yes? I mean, I'm an existentialist that borders on nihilism and I want the Earth to stick around with some stuff on it.

So what's my point? You need to focus on becoming a Contributor. Most of us do nothing for ourselves (I am just as guilty as you). We don't grow any food in a huge lawn. We don't have an animal that can provide us sustenance (eggs, milk, etc) in a backyard. This isn't about quitting your job and becoming an off-the-grid farmer. It's about growing a tomato plant. Maybe just some carrots in a plastic bucket.  Something. If you're not contributing anything to your existence,  then perhaps you should examine that. That's one less carrot bunch that has to be transported by a truck, that was grown on a farm 3000 miles away, that was raised with poisonous fertilizer, that was grown by splicing its cells. This shit ain't free, folks.. There's always a consequence. Now, more than ever, we need to pitch in and do something for ourselves. Just a touch of self-reliance. Even if it's one meal out of an entire year that you grew a portion of. Something.

 We had already planned on taking possession of the land behind The Owl to build a garden. It wasn't until we signed our lease that we found out we were actually allowed to. What was someone going to say? Don't use this plot of arable land I'm doing nothing with to grow some veggies?
That's the kind of horseshit we need to address as a people.

"But it's so much work farming!"

If you can't try (and that's all I'm asking here) to grow some chives I don't know what to say. We can't expect someone else to be solely responsible for giving us what we need to stay alive.

This isn't going to happen overnight, and it's not the sort of thing that has to be dogmatic - you can still feel free to buy food at the grocery store. Just maybe you'll make a slight shift toward a better future. It can happen.

Cause right now?

All your great-grandchildren are corpses.

Here's how to start preventing that.