Erik Drews

SOSComAlt Week 3

Word count:

Triggering passages:

“Although I am trained as an economist, I am not sure how to do it. This is because I cannot account for the spiritual and cultural impacts of everything. I’m not sure that it can be done. Some economists describe this measure as unquantifiable.” (LaDuke 2016, 15)

“Tom Mexican Cheyenne explained in the testimony. We are . . . worried about the crime, accidents, drugs, and other social issues that come along with boomtowns that our Tribe is not equipped to handle. We are being asked to deal with this so that a transnational corporation can make billions of dollars shipping coal to Asia.” (LaDuke 2016, 22)

“Meat and particularly beef, was believed to ensure greater strength and virility. It wasn’t just part of the meal, beef was a part of the lifestyle, conveying affluence and contentment.” (Newman 2013, 93)

News Media Content:

“Beef production is slated to drop 400 million lbs. after reaching 24.1 billion lbs. in 2014. This follows a continuing trend of falling beef production with 2013 bringing in 1.6 billion more pounds of beef than 2014.”(Wyatt Bechtel, 2014)

These passages reminded me of parts of our discussion from week 5. In my group we talked about how members of the wealthy class, throughout history, will attribute value to particular commodities based purely on inaccurate assumptions about a particular commodity. For instance, last week we discussed how sugar was seen as something that is pure, and clean and fit for consumption, while molasses (which happens to be a lot denser in nutrients) was seen as more of a waste product.

This concept reemerged in my head when I read the part in The Secret Financial Life of Food about how the British brought about a demand for beef that was marbled with fat. So while the cattle consumed a diet composed mainly of grasses during their lives they then needed to be finished on corn before slaughter. When the grain that is fed to the cow, the corn that the cow is finished on, the transportation costs of moving the cow to these feeds and slaughter and the ware and tear of the tools used to slaughter the cow, how does one quantify the value of the cow. The task of quantifying a living thing is pretty complicated because if I am the one that slaughter’s the animal, I am at a loss from having undergone the emotional trauma unless I’m completely desensitized to it but the animal is who the consumer is truly indebted to, and that debt is not payable. To attribute affluence, contentment, strength and virility to beef raises the value of the product in an even more arbitrary manner.

This is the type on thinking that coal companies partake in when attempting to weigh the costs of pollution and ecological devastation with the money they will make shipping coal to Asia. Some of the ways that people and places will be negatively impacted cannot be foreseen and are left out of the picture when considering whether or not to move forward in capitalist endeavors.