In May 2007 I purchased a 14oz. can of string beans in British Columbia where we were living at the time. The price was 79 cents at the Safeway. These were very nice beans, carefully cut in lengths to fit the can, along with water and a bit of salt. I saved the label from that can: Western Family. Choice Grade. Whole Green Beans. It also read Haricots vert entiers (French, it's Canada, remember?).
I not only saved the label, I framed it. Sits on a shelf to this day to remind me of when I first realized we were all done for; that the race was over and we did not win it. That can of beans came from China!
Yeah, yeah lots of stuff does. What's the big deal? Well, it struck me that although a can of beans is about as prosaic an item as you can imagine, it represents what has gone wrong lately. Now for this can to get on a shelf in a small town on the coast of British Columbia a lot had to happen to it. Somebody ,somewhere back in China, had to grow and pick the beans and get them to the cannery where they were cut to size and put into cans which had to be manufactured from stuff dug up somewhere and made into cans which the beans were put into, then cooked and labeled with labels on paper from trees that...it goes on...and on.
Don't forget about the carton for the cans and the containership at the wharf and then a zillion miles by slow boat to Vancouver and than by barge 80 miles to our little town or else, by truck, which takes two ferry boat rides before arriving and going up on the shelf. Whew. For 79 cents!
If you're still with me, then tell me how, since Canada, the USA and Mexico all grow green beans and have canneries and are a lot closer than China, this all came to be? My best advise in situations like this is to recall the words of eminent financial pundit Richard Daughty, The Mogambo Guru,
"We're freaking doomed!"
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