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| Erin Lee, thanks for being good company and for taking this! |
If you're going to fail, you might as fail epically. This is one of two double bacon cheeseburgers eaten at Bob and Edith's Diner. There is absolutely no local sourcing involved here.
Have you ever wanted to go rogue? Or better yet, have you
ever had the urge to spectacularly bomb – to fail in a way that rails against
the very skills and instincts that have chiseled out your craft?
It’s more than a drive for failure, it’s a desire to tank so
magnificently that you rip yourself free from yourself.
Let me tell you about this relationship that I have with
bacon cheeseburgers. I know they’re outrageously immoral. Eating one
cheeseburger alone equates to roughly the same carbon emissions as drinking a
two-month’s supply of tap water.1 But
they’re sooooooooo damned irresistible. I try my best not to eat them. I don’t
eat them…don’t eat them…don’t eat them…and then…my world explodes! I don’t just
have a bite or a taste, because that would be sheepish. I rebel with a magnitude
so violent it sends ecosystem shock-waves all the way to the Sahel.
Yesterday, I engulfed the carbon equivalent of a ten-or-eleven-month’s
supply of drinking water by eating two double bacon cheeseburgers at Bob
and Edith’s. Though every bite launched me further from my convictions, it
brought me closer and closer to the truth, the madness, and despair. I love the carnage. The hilarious joke of it
all – environmental stewardship is so impossible in the present day. I could
recycle for a year and destroy my entire effort by eating a few week’s worth of
double cheeseburgers. I could offset my entire drinking water usage for four years
in one road trip to Richmond.2 Only in today’s world can such
beautiful chaos go so vastly unnoticed.
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| The devil is a double bacon cheeseburger. |
Mike Berners-Lee in his book, “How Bad Are Bananas?” has
come up with a figure for determining about how much carbon emissions lead to a
death somewhere around the world. It turns out that an individual could wipe
out a family by taking 30 round-trip international flights this year.3
I love the carnage. It’s truly American. When we fail, we
fail epically. We send ripple effects that tear down the world. Our financial
crisis ripped apart Europe and stoked the fire for the Arab Spring. Our carbon
footprint is submerging Maldives, the Netherlands, the Southwest Pacific, New
York, and San Francisco.
Yesterday, I lost to my impulses, but I loved it as it was
happening. I thought, "Fuck it. Let’s destroy something beautiful.” I knew
about the maladies of the beef industry – the hormone injections, the genetically
modified cow feed, the methane volcanoes, the illegal immigrant labor force, the
pink slime offshoots, the total and utter moral depravity that is systematically
perpetuated by one small sliver of the American lifestyle. But I ordered the
beef anyway. Twice. Sometimes, I choose to be evil. Death in Morocco tastes like
paradise along Columbia Pike.
1 Berners-Lee,
Mike. How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon
Footprint of Everything. A burger releases the equivalent of 2.5kg of
carbon. A year’s supply of tap water for a U.S citizen releases the equivalent
of about 23kg of carbon.
2 Berners-Lee,
Mike. How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon
Footprint of Everything. A year’s supply of water for one person is the
same as a 27-mile drive in an average car.
3 Berners-Lee,
Mike. How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon
Footprint of Everything. Eleven round-trip, first class flights from L.A.
to Barcelona has a climate change impact that equates to the death of one
individual.
