By Matthew Abely
There seems to be a misconception among the student body, or at least the ones who wrote in last week's Beacon. Bon Appétit's whole sustainable, local, organic, made-to-order food is not so expensive. Attempting to maintain a certain lifestyle and eat via Bon Appétit is.
We Americans spend as little of our leisure time, money and effort on food, health and fitness as possible. Instead we prioritize spending them on unnecessary - albeit fun - stuff like cellular smart phones, computers, clothes, shoes, television, movies, music, video games, comics or just sacrificing all our leisure to overwork ourselves. This lifestyle is horribly expensive. Fast, take-it-to-go, pre-prepared, pre-packaged food products like burgers and coffees or anything containing meat and dairy will always be more expensive than any sit-in-and-dine vegan chili or salad. This is just how, scientifically speaking, it works.
The issue, as I see it, is that a lot of us, myself included, did not notice this truth of science until we got to University of Portland and Bon Appétit spelled it out to us in the price tags. This is because in larger society most of the costs of it are hidden from us.
Instead of paying for our lifestyle upfront we pay for it in far more subtle, far more damaging ways. We pay for it when our taxes go to subsidizing fossil fuels, the wars to get them, corn, soybeans, meat and big box stores. This is what makes the price tags of all fast food products so much lower than those of local organic foods, and part of why our government always seems to have so little money for vital sustainable infrastructure, public education, health care and social safety nets.
We pay for it when our laws permit business people to treat farm and factory workers like slaves, as well as emit whatever toxins, pollutants and invasive genetically modified species they want into our world.
We pay for it when food and consumer products are sold with violent sexist racist homophobic advertising, instilling further into the mind of everyone that rape culture is inherent to human nature.
Ultimately we will be paying for it big time when this lifestyle finally causes global warming and mass extinction flood, scorch, plague, blight, ravage and permanently transmogrify all of nature as we know it - including human civilization.
I get that it is not easy to change from consumerism to sustainable living. I am both a huge fitness nut and geek-nerd for all art of both high and lowbrow. This transition I am currently making to spend my leisure time, effort and money that does not go to fitness on cooking and dining sustainably over spending them all on art sucks. It is choice that I wish I did not have to make. It is a choice that I wish no one had to make, and yet we do. More power to Bon Appétit and University of Portland for making this choice as well, even if it means short-term pain for us students.
