John Zeitler

Essay Week 2010 runs from Sunday, July 25th to Saturday, July 31st. Every year I take a week and write about some topics of interest to me that run slightly more serious than the usual fare on the blog. That’s not to say that games and anime won’t enter into it, but the predominant theme is that this week skews a bit more literary than epistolary. Today I take the metaphor of ‘food for thought’ unusually literally.

I am, as has been noted before, a caffeine fiend. The day that wondrous molecule is outlawed– heaven forfend– I will have to start the day with naught but an egg and a waffle, or possibly cold cereal. At least until sugary cereal is put on the bad books, too. However, in the past few years, a market has sprung up around the quaffing of caffeine in forms other than coffee. As I’m not a big fan of coffee in general, you can see how this would be interesting to me.

One of the leading brands of energy drinks nationally available is Rockstar. Bearing no relation to the video game developer of the same name, it is however just as controversial, as the company was co-founded by the son of a prominent highly-conservative talk radio host. The radio program has often espoused messages which portray disagreeing individuals as unworthy of the right to express their opinion, and when called out on his irresponsible application of his right to express an opinion, the host has not stood by positions that could get him into serious trouble if he indicated that they were his true beliefs. The connections between the drink company and the radio program are purportedly non-professional, but the fact remains that proceeds of the sale of the drink could indirectly be used to further an agenda that I not only find distasteful, but in fact downright harmful.

And yet, this past weekend, I found myself drinking a can of it. I have often tried to stick by my principles in my purchasing decisions, and I occasionally find myself in situations where I must discern the lesser of two evils. I no longer express surprise that these juxtapositions between Scylla and Charybdis can be easily and commonly found on the store shelf betwixt Sensodyne and Coca-Cola.

It is an interesting situation that we find ourselves in these days, where the every machination behind the scenes of a company are exposed and placed out there for everyone to see. As a society, Americans today enjoy a level of corporate transparency that is unparalleled throughout human history. If you want to know exactly how your hot dogs are made, and exactly what goes into them, more power to you, and you shall have your wish– for better or for ill. You see, while hot dogs may be tasty, the process of making them can put you off them for quite a while. In the interests of allowing you to keep your own breakfast down I shall refrain from elucidating on that point.

The problem arises when it turns out that everything we consume today is, on some level and from some point of view, a metaphorical hot dog. Every company has its fingers in politics and policies that someone, somewhere, is going to find distasteful. Starbucks puts local coffee shops out of business. Wal-Mart works its employees to death. Target sells low-quality goods as ‘premium’ brands. Cars are made in Japan, and built in Canada. The United States has a dwindling production economy, and some days it seems like there’s no way for an ordinary citizen to combat this.

A few years ago I recall reading about a family that made an attempt to purchase only American-made goods for a full year. The experiment was rough and difficult, and in the end it turned out that the US-made goods were higher-priced and sometimes lower-quality than the foreign goods; it should be emphasized that the quality disparity was not a universal trait: it averaged out to being about even. The family decided not to continue the experiment once the year was up, but did encourage people to try it for themselves for a certain period of time.

I am not advocating an exclusionary economic policy. I’m certainly not saying that there’s a benefit or a detriment to American-made goods. What I am saying is that everything we buy today– every single purchase you make, be it a lowly bottle of water to a house and beyond– every single thing we buy comes with two price tags attached: the money we spend on it, and the implicit support we give to the producers of that object. Nothing is ‘clean’. Nothing is without politics these days, and there is no refuge in ignorance. The information is out there, and by the way certain people can, will, and feel entitled to judge you by your spending habits, what the producers do with the money is directly and inescapably your fault.

Obviously, I find that position to be ridiculous, to be polite about it, and complete and utter bullshit to be perfectly frank. In cases where a purchase is explicitly mentioned to benefit a cause or charity, the theory has some amount of credence. But even then, it has its problems.

A 1998 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research stated that, in general, consumers were more likely to purchase products that explicitly benefitted a charity when that product was considered a ‘frivolous’ expenditure, such as a movie pass or a bag of M&Ms. The same paper, however, approaches the charity proceeds as a marketing tool, and not as a purely altruistic endeavor. Furthermore, it does not discuss the possibility that the corporation may not be passing along the proceeds in good faith, or that the charity ‘campaign’ is in actuality funding the general, publicly-lauded, lump-sum contributions corporations make. This obfuscation stands at a sharp contrast from the openness seen earlier.

For my part, I view energy drinks as a ‘utilitarian’ purchase, in the sense that the paper contraposes that against the ‘frivolous’ expenditures. It is certainly a luxury, but in my case it takes the place of coffee in someone else’s expenditure budget, and many people would see coffee as ‘utilitarian’. However, with the awareness of the political and social baggage behind every single purchase, it is easy for someone socially conscientious or socially activist to quickly become paralyzed by indecision. Do I support this cause indirectly? But the alternative indirectly promotes views I vehemently disagree with. But this third option is completely unsuited to my tastes or needs!

The answer is not simple. More importantly the answer is not, cannot be, and will never be universal. Though I certainly harbor no desire to assist an extreme-conservative agenda, someone else may find something to agree with in the words of the radio host connected to Rockstar energy drinks. That’s their right, and I won’t stand in their way. The point of this essay isn’t to demonize any one viewpoint, but to simply state the point: Nothing is ‘clean’. Every purchase you make can and will further someone’s agenda somewhere along the line.

In dealing with this awareness, I find it helpful to look at a sort of parable that author Neal Stephenson had put, possibly inadvertently, into his Baroque Cycle of books. At a point in the story, a certain quantity of gold, presumed by the characters to be the fabled Solomonic Gold– the result of transmutation of common substances via elemental quicksilver– is lost track of by the individuals from which it was stolen. Initially this group finds itself in despair, as the gold will likely be melted down, minted into coins, and released into general circulation. It will be impossible to recover in this state. However, the group concocts a plan to start a bank, with the express purpose of buying the gold out of circulation. To do this, they will have to buy all gold they come across, as during the minting process, the Solomonic Gold will have been combined with common gold. Stephenson appropriates the word ‘con-fusion’ to describe this process.

The point being, in our modern day society of liquid funds and digital currency, the concept of money from a corporation’s coffers being directly traceable back to a single consumer of the company’s products is difficult to the point of nigh-impossibility. The $2.50 I spent on the can of Rockstar would produce about $0.25 of profit to the company (if even that– I’m far from being an economist but I would be willing to bet that a nationally-distributed brand such as Rockstar would have the luxury of operating on razor-thin margins owing to the sheer scale of their operations). Twenty-five cents, out of possibly tens of thousands of dollars of profits. Quite simply, it would be as if I had dropped a quarter on the street and the talk show host had just happened to pick it up. I have no control over where ‘my’ quarter goes after that point.

I should note, of course, that the can I drank last week was the first one in about three years, and only because the store was mostly picked-over and I hadn’t tried the cola flavor before. It wasn’t bad, but it’s certainly not compelling enough for me to swallow my morals and become a regular customer.

In the end, it’s okay to lapse once in a while out of necessity. Sometimes, even, you shouldn’t think too hard about what you’re buying. It can be easy to focus on one particular negative aspect of a purchase. That can of Rockstar did give a quarter to a cause I despise, but it also gave $2.25 to a whole bunch of people I’ll never meet, who may need it. Some of that presumably goes to the clerk at the store who sold me the can. Some goes to the company that made the aluminum; some goes to the farmer who grew the corn for the HFCS (which is its own can of worms, but we’ll get into that some other day). We are all only human, and we are all of us looking to make our way. Sometimes that means helping out someone who we disagree with, albeit several dozen levels removed from the process. I worked for a pretty big company for a couple years, too, one I’m sure that radio host that I disagree with used on more than one occasion. In a way, he’s contributed to someone who’d counter his interests, too. It’s okay to lapse, as long as you’re aware of what your purchases are doing, and making a conscious and conscientious effort to mitigate your support for groups against your own beliefs.

Sunday evening, I went to a local chain of convenience stores, looking for an alternative to the energy drinks I’d seen at the supermarket– you can only drink the same thing for so long. On the shelf next to my usual favorite flavors were cans of the store brand, labeled in very large letters, “DRINK THIS, HELP KIDS”. I bought five. The drink isn’t great, of course, but it’s at least tolerable. Knowing the charity, though, and knowing exactly how much of a difference it really makes– well, this can of the drink certainly tasted sweeter than the last time I’d had it.