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Turning our backs on buying things is not the only reaction to the excesses of our hyper-consumerist culture. Some urban youngsters in the US are turning to organic farming (New York Times) –
Steeped in years of talk around college campuses and in stylish urban enclaves about the evils of factory farms, the perils of relying on petroleum to deliver food over long distances and the beauty of greenmarkets, some young urbanites are starting to put their muscles where their pro-environment, antiglobalization mouths are. They are creating small-scale farms near urban areas hungry for quality produce and willing to pay a premium.
We want to reclaim place. We want to steward. We want to feed, and we want to access the generosity of photosynthesis directly—with our hands touching the soil.
Everyone finds a different way into farming. Some start as romantics, some as ecologists, some as tree-sitters, and some as gourmands. Some are lucky enough to be born into farming.
I have already written about the work-watch-spend treadmill in my post on Annie Leonard’s ‘The Story of Stuff‘, but here’s a little excerpt from the annotated script of the documentary very thoughtfully provided by Annie —
So, in the U.S. we have more stuff than ever before, but polls show that our national happiness is actually declining. Our national happiness peaked sometime in the 1950s, the same time as this consumption mania exploded. Hmmm. Interesting coincidence.
I think I know why. We have more stuff but we have less time for the things that really make us happy: family, friends, leisure time. We’re working harder than ever. Some analysts say that we have less leisure time now than in Feudal Society.
And do you know what the two main activities are that we do with the scant leisure time we have? Watch TV and shop. In the U.S., we spend 3—4 times as many hours shopping as our counterparts in Europe do.
Annie starts off by throwing away her iPod in a trash can (really!) and asking if we have ever wondered where all the stuff we buy comes from and where it goes when we throw it out. Then, using a funny stand up script backed up by simple animation, she explains why the text book version that our stuff simply moves from extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal doesn’t work: it is a linear system and we live on a finite planet and you can not run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely.
I haven’t watched TV or read newspapers or magazines for more than a year now, with one exception — twice a month, I stop by at the roadside magazine stall opposite my house and hand over thirty rupees for a copy of Time Out Mumbai.
However, even though I have been buying the magazine for almost two years now, I only started to think of it as a necessity when I started my experiment.
The thing is, when you decide not to consume any paid entertainment, you need to know what free entertainment is available in the city, and, even in the age of free information via the Internet, Time Out Mumbai remains the most comprehensive listing of such events.
So, every fortnight, I pick up my copy of Time Out Mumbai, read the reviews of all the new movies and plays I wouldn’t watch, look longingly at all the live music gigs I’ll miss, and tell myself that the few free events during the fortnight are more interesting than all the entertainment I would have otherwise paid for.
Sometimes, that is not far from the truth.
This fortnight, for instance, I’m almost spoiled for choice.
During my year of being off-consumption, I’m not allowed to watch movies, plays, or concerts, unless they are free.
However, I’m discovering that Mumbai has a wide variety of free entertainment to offer; all you need is the inclination, and a copy of Time Out Mumbai.
But it was not Time Out, but a flier someone thrust into my hand as I walked out of the Alliance Francaise auditorium after watching Godard’s ‘Little Soldier’ that led me to the Little Theater at NCPA on Friday evening to watch Surabhi Sharma’s documentary film ‘Jahaji Music: India in the Caribbean’.
I saw three stories unfold in front of my eyes during the evening.
The first story was the film itself, a musical road trip in which FTII alumnus Surabhi and academic Tejaswini Niranjana follow maverick Indian singer Remo Fernandes as he travels to the Caribbean to explore potential collaborations and create new work. This is the story of young women at an Indian wedding in Trinidad thrusting their pelvis to Bhojpuri numbers, like dancehall queens in Jamaica. This is a story of Chutney Soca artist Rikki Jai worrying about not sounding like an Indian singing Calypso, then asking his mother to write Chutney Soca lyrics for him in Bhojpuri. This is the story of Remo wearing his disdain for Hindi film music like a talisman, even though his most popular songs are from Hindi films.
Spurlock’s film follows a 30-day time period (in February 2003) during which he eats three meals a day from McDonald’s, Super Sizes his meal whenever offered, gives up exercise, gains 11 kg in body weight and experiences mood swings, sexual dysfunction, and possibly permanent liver damage.
Spurlock intersperse his personal travails with discussions on how fast food chains contribute to the high obesity rates in the United States, especially amongst children.
The documentary created a huge amount of controversy, won an Oscar nomination and several awards, and grossed $28.5mn worldwide, making it the 7th highest grossing documentary film of all time.
Given the similarities between Spurlock’s experiment and mine, I should probably target a multi-million dollar movie deal, apart from the book deal.
