By Dr. Robert Thorson
There are two kinds of spam. Both are bad for the environment.
My children know only the new kind: the junk e-mail soliciting their impressionable minds to buy stuff they don’t really need. My elderly parents, from “the greatest generation,” know only the old kind of Spam: the cold, stiff, pink, gelatinous chunks of pork scrap pressed into a tin can. Baby boomers like me are caught between this war of words.
As a kid growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, I loved the old kind of Spam, especially the way my Betty Crocker mom fried it up with scrambled eggs. But to my adult mind, the old type of Spam symbolizes much of what’s wrong with the way we live today. It offers us stick-to-your-ribs sustenance at the price of near- complete alienation from the natural world — food for the stomach but not for the soul. Like most pressed meats, the old type of Spam contains the hyper-processed leftover parts of creatures raised by the hundreds in sewage-oozing commercial feedlots. It’s not the “meat” part that bothers me. It’s the factory feedlot part, a place where detachment from nature is required in order to work.
I think old Spam is dreadful stuff, not because it tastes bad or because we shouldn’t eat animals, but because its low grocery-shelf price doesn’t include hidden environmental costs. For example, torrential rain from a single East Coast hurricane or tropical storm can produce enough hog-feedlot runoff to turn estuaries (such as Chesapeake Bay) green with algae and precipitate massive fish die- offs. The more gentle rains that fall in the Midwest leach chemical fertilizers from fields where corn is grown to feed hogs. The runoff then drains down the Mississippi River, helping to produce a biological dead-zone in the Gulf of Mexico along the Texas- Louisiana coast that threatens Cajun culture. In the Southern high plains, the demand for slaughterhouse workers is drawing poor, non- English-speaking immigrants to isolated factory towns in states such as Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. This demographic trend has created costly demands for specialized state- and federally subsidized services in otherwise out-of-the-way places. All this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The good old days of the environmental movement were frequently about chemical pollution — about invisible substances leaking, migrating, spreading and covertly seeping from one place to another. Now the most damaging new form of pollution, I believe, is information pollution, killing us softly with messages that seep into our minds.
New spam — unwanted e-mails, pop-up advertisements, information websites that are really commercials courtesy of your not-so-local sweatshop or soft-porn producer — is dreadful stuff. It fills us with vague feelings of discomfort about what we don’t have but think perhaps we should. Its relentless messages to buy, buy, buy stream into our homes, one electron at a time via Internet cables and wireless ports that we have installed for other reasons.
To take the good with the bad, we must take the electronic spam with the services. For instance, the e-mail service I use for this column asks me if I want to see pictures of beautiful single people every time I answer a letter, even though I plan to stay married forever. The day I dread is the day when new spam might appear advertising old Spam, meaning that I see an unwanted Internet commercial advertising processed meat on my grease-free desktop.
The environmental arguments against old Spam are well understood by natural scientists. Unfortunately, those arguments are poorly appreciated by the public, which is victim to a powerful agriculture lobby and to new low-carb diets that are creating a feeding frenzy for meat protein. The opposite is true for new spam. The public can easily appreciate its unwanted environmental invasiveness. However, behavioral scientists investigating our electronic environments are only beginning to understand the damaging effects of insidious electronic pollution being pumped into our homes, schools, libraries and children at gigabyte speed.
I’m not sure which type of spam is worse. One clogs the arteries in the brain; the other, its neurons. One is optional. The other, like second-hand smoke, is not. Isn’t it time for an electronic cleanup?