Thursday is Thanksgiving, the day that Americans will gorge themselves into food-induced paralyses while celebrating a holiday that has lost all meaning.
Americans eat more food on Thanksgiving than any other day of the year, followed by Super Bowl Sunday in second place. According to the American Dietetic Association, the average American will consume 4,500 calories on Thursday, more than twice the recommended daily allowance.
But what a great representation of American culture this holiday is. We have so much crap in this country that we can afford to be some of the most wasteful, improvident beings on the planet.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, nearly one-fifth of this country’s food goes to waste. The Environmental Protection Agency reported in 1998 that Americans produced about 220 million tons of solid waste or garbage. Every day, each American produces 4.6 pounds of solid waste, and in that garbage is an estimated 106 pounds of food waste annually. Only four percent of the 14 million tons of wasted food was composted, the rest was either incinerated or left to rot in a landfill. We spend $1 billion dollars every year to dispose of leftover food.
Despite that waste, average Americans manage to get more than enough food in their faces. The North American Association for the Study of Obesity noted a nearly 30 percent rise in the adult obese population from the late 1980s to 2000. Currently, more than 60 percent of the population is overweight. The National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, claimed that 300,000 adult deaths in this country each year are the result of unhealthy eating habits. In a recent call to action against obesity, the surgeon general lamented that in 2000, obesity cost our fine country $117 billion.
Aside from the 11 percent of Americans who experience food insecurity this year, most of us haven’t worried too much about starvation or where our next meal is coming from. And that is what the whole celebration is really about. After much starvation and privation, the people of the Plymouth Colony experienced a bountiful harvest and they celebrated with a feast. Finally, they didn’t have to worry about food for a while.
So how do you celebrate Thanksgiving in an environment where there’s always a bountiful harvest? We should spend a good, long day away from our crap thinking about where it came from and what it cost the rest of the planet — in terms other than monetary.
The mythology of American perfection is born from our perception of a never-ending well of resources. Our take-take-take lifestyles drive us ceaselessly and ant-like in a selfish quest for luxury. If you don’t buy Product X, you’re a loser. If you don’t use those magical beauty products, you’re doomed to a life of hideousness and loneliness. And, how can you ever survive without the convenience of Product B?
Because we’re so wasteful, we are now taking our insatiable thirst for more to the rest of the world. If we can’t generate the materials to support our needless accumulation of possessions within our borders, we’ll export our me-first attitude and get everyone on the bandwagon.
In our desperate flailing to live the good life, we never stop to consider who we’re stepping on to make our lives so much “better.” We’ve pack ratted so much crap in search of the holy grails of convenience and status that we can’t get away from it long enough to think things through.
And that is why, while everyone else is sweating a gravy funk and dodging flying rivets from splitting pants, I’ll be spending this Thanksgiving cold, naked, shivering and sobbing in my empty bathtub.
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