The all you can eat restaurant is a true joy. Although I wouldn’t go so far as to hold it up as the exemplary culinary experience post-revolution, there is certainly a gorging charm to the total binge-worthy derailment of it all. Last night the Third Estate bloggers met (as in, in person, no less) at the Indian Veg (vide vegetarian) All You Can Eat in Islington (at £3.95, an extraordinarily reasonable place – that’s not commercial advertisement, just a statement of fact. For the record, I managed four plates, Jacob only 2.)
But there’s something more to this than meets the eye. What an All You Can Eat represents is a location of excess put to good use. The opposite of this would be Starbucks. Every other evening or so I toddle up to the local outlet of capitalist muffin joy, untie the bin liners dutifully waiting for me, and get a load of sandwiches, cakes and sometimes the odd bag of coffee to boot.
The philosophy of Starbucks is not All You Can Eat, but All You Can Sell. The whole principle is built on the idea that if you over produce, you won’t run out. The ridiculous prices of the food keeps this viable, and the throwing away of the excess makes the consumers forget the absurdity of it all. My favourite things about eating freegan (apart from the financial savings) is telling rabid consumers that I eat from bins – because, I believe, the real subversion isn’t in the feeding on filth, but the recognition that it’s possible.
That’s not to say, however, that waste is the be all and end all of capitalism. Time and again, I hear cries from various sections of the green movement that we just need to stop our food and energy waste, by everyone from radicals to
councils to
Resurgence Magazine (a favourite of Prince Charles). But the abhorrence of waste is very much a capitalist idea, linked in with the drive for efficiency, streamlining and individualist, mechanical asceticism.
The left response to waste shouldn’t be a cry of outrage, but an understanding of where waste really lies. It’s not on
the tills of Tesco that the rubbish really gathers, nor is it even outside Starbucks. It’s in the
garages of the rich and the houses of the famous. It’s the grounded airplanes in the desert and the epic shiploads of water imported into
desert states. Like weeds, waste is determined by it’s lack of use in the grander scheme of things, not an object with an unwavering quality in itself.
The Third Estate, the great mass of society, does not help produce waste, not even in the factories. The useful objects made only become waste when the rich hoard them, destroy them and distribute them with mal-intent. When confronted by the excess production of our age, our cry should not be ‘waste not, want not’, but ‘Let them eat poppadoms!’
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