Going Green

Going on my 8th month as an employee at a New York City natural food store, I have become very familiar with the elitism of health foods and eco-friendly living. Shopping at a store where one organic lemon can lost almost $2 is a privilege not many have. While the costumers at the store vary from conspiracy theorists, Brooklynites, celebrities, food stamps beneficiaries, and juicing fanatics- the dominant crowd at the store comes in and spends upwards of $100 dollars on just one bag of groceries…and they are back later in the week to do it again.  But the wealth of the shoppers doesn’t indicate anything terrible about them, in fact, many of them bring their own bags rather than wasting plastic. Wonderful! The question is now ”bag or no bag” instead of “paper or plastic” so we are certainly making some progress.

More and more recently though (post Leonardo Dicaprio buying a hybrid, perhaps?) I’ve seen designer bags stroll down the isles of Integral Yoga Natural Foods that literally say on them “I am not a plastic bag!” (These bags, I just discovered, are designed by some fancy label and selling on eBay for $400!) Maybe I’m fashion challenged or just stupid, but I don’t get it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic if shoppers are using reusable bags–no matter what money they spent to get them. Every little bit of action helps. Replacing a plastic bag with a canvass one hardly calls for applause, though. We should all be doing this by now. This article in Slate aptly points out the ridiculousness of the Green trend as it is manifested in a new cable network about going green.

This popular idea of environmentalism is just plain silly. Watching a TV show about a celebrity taking showers with recycled water is hardly one step for man kind. Perhaps turning off your TV is the first step?  How “green” is it really to encourage people to sit in front of their TVs? Granted television is a great way to reach people about pressing issues, but according to the Slate article, it seems like the station does a poor job at even that.

We have to re-learn what it means to be environmentalists. On that same note, we have to relearn what it means to be healthy. The other day I was talking to a friend about Pinkberry frozen yogurt, the New York City lo-cal fro-yo craze. “It’s good for you!” she told me. The snobby, health food store employee in me corrected her–”Just because it has few calories doesn’t mean it’s good for you.” Actually, Pinkberry is not good for you, considering there are no health benefits and the refined sugar and chemicals it takes to make something out of nothing are damaging to the body.

We have learned to replace the terms ‘fat-free’ or ‘low-fat’ with ‘healthy.’ All the false advertising and popularizing of terms like “eco-friendly”, “organic”, and even “healthy” are misleading us into thinking we are doing more than we actually are. It’s easy to feel like you are doing something good for your body by eating Pinkberry and doing something good for the earth using a $400 canvass bag for groceries. If we aren’t doing something outright bad…isn’t that good? Well, it’s not bad but I don’t know that it is necessarily good.

There are serious economic, ecological, and environmental issues that face our planet and I’m not sure we are using the resources of the upper/middle class effectively to combat those issues. But who am I to even say? Last night I spent $11 at the Film Forum to see Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog’s new doc on Antarctica that had a very dark message about the future of our planet. It was a great film and it made me think a lot about the climate crisis we face, but I wouldn’t go ahead and call it a night of activism.

I’m not saying I know what is right or wrong or that I have any answers–I’m just saying that there might be something wrong with glamorizing the looming melt down of our environment with celeb eco-tainment and fancy shmancy hangbags.