I calculate that for the last seventy-five years I've eaten a box of raisins every month (I'm a big fan of raisins and of dried fruit in general). A box of raisins is about 5 inches tall, 4 inches wide and 2 inches deep, or forty cubic inches. In a an average year, I eat 40 x 12 or 480 cubic inches of raisins. If I maintained my raisin-eating pace, it would take me four years to eat through a cubic foot of them. And it follows that in the last seventy-five years I've eaten approximately 19 cubic feet of raisins, which amounts to a stack or block of raisins three feet long, three feet wide and two feet high. That's a heck of a lot of raisins. And that's just raisins -- I'm not even counting table grapes, also eaten plentifully over the decades. And wine.
I myself did not breed, plant, trim, fertilize or harvest the Thompson Seedless or Flame grapes. I did not fence the deer out of the orchard. No did I process the grapes. Nor box, ship, load, unload, or stock them in the market. Someone else made the boxes from wood that another person chainsawed to the ground. I just brought the raisins home from the market and sprinkled them on my oatmeal. Someone else, many someone elses, did all the hard work.
I wonder how many people and how much accumulated skill it took to provide me with 19 lifetime cubic feet of raisins.
Then there's milk. I've drunk many many cartons of milk. I'm too lazy to do the calculations, but I'm going to guess that I've consumed a hundred times more cubic feet of milk than I have of raisins. Probably a spacious roomful. And once again, I did not domesticate those fearsome wild European cattle, nor did I breed or milk them, or pasteurize the milk, or ship it. I did not invent refrigeration, nor did I manufacture or install the refrigerators. I did not drive the milk truck (itself the creation of many hands). I hunted and gathered by walking to the market and plucking a carton (whole milk, vitamin D added) from the case. Easy as pie.
And what about potatoes? And pasta?
I don't think I need to go through any other of the commodities I consume. My point is simple: that it takes a titanic effort by society to keep me me me going. That I am borne on the shoulders of farmers, truckers, engineers, mechanics -- not to mention our neolithic ancestors who first looked at a cow and thought "glass of cold milk" or at a wild grape and thought "those would make good raisins if we could just get the moisture content down."
So to all those people who think they are "independent" and who assert that they can fend for themselves, I say bullshit. If you eat anything at all, you're part of the great web of humanity that stretches around the earth and also extends back 65,000 years.
So when you sit down to eat, and offer a prayer, don't thank god. Thank your industrious imaginative fellow humans.
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