Unconfirmed Reports

I feel sick. I am fighting against a desire to vomit - fighting it, because I’m walking across town, maybe 20 minutes from my hotel, and I feel better about vomiting in the hotel bathroom than vomiting here in the street in a strange town.

The problem is food, USA style. I haven’t really enjoyed any food since I arrived here three days ago - in fact, I still haven’t finished anything I’ve been served. Everything is so overloaded with cheese, cream and meat. But tonight was the worst: a business dinner in a supposedly “fine” restaurant, the contractors who sell us stuff trying to please us by indulging us in their idea of a great meal. I tried to get out of it by just ordering two “appetisers”; but even these dishes came bearing unexpected calorific content. “Clam chowder” turned out to be a bowl of cream, with deep-fried clams floating on top, and constellations of bacon swimming throughout. “Fried zucchini flowers” were indeed that - but the battering was extra-heavy, and they came lying on a bed of some kind of cheesy-potato mix that would be capable of clogging up any sort of system designed for fluid passage. Plus, when mains came out and I hadn’t ordered one, our hosts began foisting bits of their implausibly enormous servings onto me.

The food wasn’t even particularly tasty. It was so rich that it tasted of nothing but fat.

What percent of the world’s total calorific resources are eaten in America? Actually - what percent is not even eaten in America, but simply served here, excess to capacity, then thrown in a bin and back eventually into the earth? The level of resource consumption here is mind-blowing.

On the other hand, I love it here. I leave the restaurant, feeling sick and needing to walk it off. Next thing, people in the street are talking to me like they’ve known me all their lives; I’m reminded of all the moments in the last three days when I’ve been totally inspired and awe-struck by the casual, creative energy of the people we’re working with here.

Even stranger: it’s not like they don’t realise what’s happening. Minutes before tucking into an obscene serving of “lamb chops on creamed polenta”, the Interaction Designer here was talking very knowledgeably about the depletion of the world’s wild fish stocks. But nobody seemed to notice a tension between this talk and action, as if extreme consumption is so deeply ingrained here that they don’t even notice it. And soon after that they were talking about dessert.

Earlier in the day (over a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, cream in the coffee, and other stuff we didn’t need), one of my British colleagues explained to me the theory that people will not destroy the planet through ignorance, but quite clear-sightedly. That we will know exactly what’s happening, but no-one will be able to stop it. We just won’t have a high enough level of organisation, or strong enough sense of the common good, to hold ourselves back from collective suicide.

A little later in the morning, I read in the newspaper about a new climate-change model, produced by MIT, which predicts temperature rise of 5.2 degree celsius by 2100. If they are right, then the world will be changed beyond recognition, and mostly for the worse, in the lives of my hypothetical grandchildren.

But the newspaper (a free copy of the “Metro”) only contained about five minutes of reading material. After that, I conscientiously threw it in a recycling bin, so that it can be re-chewed, granulated, washed, reprocessed, and turned into another five minutes’ worth of reading.