An orange by any other name...

Before I left the UK, I recall trying to buy fruit from a garage forecourt convenience store. They did not seem to have any fresh fruit, until I noticed a shrink-wrapped extravaganza bearing the label 'healthy citrus snack'. It was an orange in a moulded polystyrene tray shrink wrapped in clear plastic. It occurred to me that an orange already comes in its own convenient packaging, and in any case what kind or world do we live in where an orange has to be individually shrink-wrapped and lablled 'citrus snack'? Have we neglected the education of your young to such an extent that they may take an orange to be an enormous gobstopper?

An article in the Observer pursues this theme by telling the story of the shrink-wrapped coconut in Morrisons. I cannot even bring myself to tell my Indonesian friends about the fact that in the UK we find it necessary to wrap coconuts in protective packaging, which must be the very zenith of superfluity.

The newspaper asked some families to save all their packaging for a month, to review its impact and utility. One thing that struck me is that the energy required to generate all this (arguably surplus) packaging was an average of around 200KwH per family, per month. I estimate that this energy, from just one small family's monthly shopping, could supply five families in Flores (about 40 people) with their entire electricity requirement for the month.

I am reminded of being told as a schoolboy to finish my plate of glutinous slop the institution called food 'because some people in the world are starving and would be grateful for it', which struck me as ridiculous because I knew for a fact that the scraps were all tipped into the huge hoppers behind the kitchen block, and collected every week to be turned into pig food. So by eating the food I was denying the poor hungry pigs, rather than insulting the world's poor and famished.

I am therefore not suggesting that by cutting down on your packaging the power saved will mysteriously arise in Maumere. However, I do believe that the arguments in the UK about nuclear power versus renewable energy are entirely irrelevant until each household learns how to reduce their power consumption (and actually cares about doing so). As power demand reduces, so does reliance on fossil fuels, which in turn takes the pressure off crude oil prices and alleviates the suffering of poorer countries who are currently paying energy prices bolstered by the demand of the wealthy.

So, the next time you see some superfluous packaging, rip it off and leave it in the supermarket. Or carry a large marker pen and write 'set this orange free' on pre-packed 'citrus snacks'. You will probably be ostracised by civilised society, but any society that is so careless about the resources it consumes is, frankly, not that civilised.