Set your sights a little higher: let the bananas out of the bag

Here is my most recent article for the Free Press as it appeared in their electronic edition today.

ARE you the kind of person who puts bananas in a bag? Do you need them to double-bag your four-litre jug of milk -- you know, the one that comes with the handle? If so, you are the person I want to talk to today.
Bananas, nature's darn-near-perfect fruit, come with their own biodegradable wrapper. So do onions, avocados and dozens of other common produce items that somehow end up in those ubiquitous little plastic produce bags.

I've wanted to confront you in the supermarket before, but I'm kind enough to mind my own business. After all, it's your right to consume needlessly -- that's what this economy was built on, right?

Someday, I hope, the price of petroleum byproducts like plastic shopping bags will become as outrageous as gas is quickly becoming. Maybe then we can get back the option of good old recyclable/degradable brown paper bags. You might even be tempted to invest in a couple of canvas sacks to carry your stuff home in, rather than resorting to the double-bag. That would thrill me to bits.

Of course, you were raised to believe that plastic bags protect your food and provide a convenient way to transport your purchases from shopping cart to car trunk, and subsequently from carport to crisper. You never really questioned it. Just as you never questioned the pabulum you were fed about how buying lots of stuff is good for the economy and your sense of self-worth. But I am asking you to probe this wisdom for just a second. Suppose there were 20 million Canadians who used an average of five plastic bags per week to enclose items they were going to wash before they ate anyway. That's 7.8 billion little plastic produce bags per year, and that doesn't include the millions of larger white grocery bags those produce bags come home in.

What about all those take-away cups you get daily at the Timmy's drive-thru? You can keep your coffee a lot warmer, and our landfills and public spaces less put-upon, by purchasing a travel mug and using it.

Really, counter servants don't mind filling them up, and some places, such as 7-Eleven, will even give you a discount for not using one of their 40-year half-life foamy cups. Even the most outrageously priced travel mug seldom exceeds $10, an amount you can make back in under a month. On top of that, you'll never burn your hands on a coffee again.

You are the throw-away generation -- practising senseless patterns of over-consumption, in order to satisfy the whims of fancy that were cunningly implanted by malevolent multimillionaires. You are the ones who create a market for single-use cleaning products and nutritionally vacant instant food options. Apparently, you have no time to wash a rag or cook with ingredients.

The really sad thing is that you have given up your most spectacular gift as humans -- the ability to be resourceful and creative, building a better, smarter world through ideas -- in order to be convenienced.

You have been sold on the notion that we are here to gorge ourselves on luxury and entertainment, like some kind of latter-day Roman gentry.

Perhaps you believe, as the American president and his cronies do, that Armageddon is nigh, and that we might as well use everything up before God comes to smite this sinful world. Or maybe your mantra is as the bumper sticker has it: "S/he who dies with the most toys wins."

But I don't see things that way. I believe the only doomsday on the horizon is the one we create for ourselves. I believe that toys ought to be for children, and that adults should set their sights a little higher.

I see future people, our descendants, dealing with the consequences of our thoughtlessness and greed. I see your disposable culture luring the rest of the world into greater self-destruction and it makes me sick. I, for one, am proud to be inconvenienced from time to time, to use my brain instead of my wallet to solve a problem. I'm not too big on the salty, microwavable junk that passes for food in a lot of places, nor am I keen to buy a new video game console every two years to stay hip. That plastic shopping bag that's caught in your treetop is not mine.


Ryan Kinrade will now return to his rustic cabin on Walden Pond.