Monday, March 1, 2010

Food for thought

"Two typical German shepherds kept as pets in Europe or the U.S. consume more in a year than the average person living in Bangladesh."
New Scientist

This comparison isn't really a practical bit of information as much as it is an attempt to pull the average westerner from the Wal-Mart tit. I don't think the point is to make you think by putting your dogs to sleep you will be saving a person's life in Bangladesh. But it supports a perspective that westerners are global gluttons. Imagine what the average person consumes...probably as much as an entire village. I mean, that trip Nick and I took to Gloucester to eat burgers and fries easily could've supported a small village for a few weeks or months. So does it mean that the trip basically condemned a village to death? Well, like I said about the Ukrainian oil fields that are pure genocide in the name of gasoline, yes. We're dealing with a global economy and global ramifications.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.