In Britain in 2021, one of the most financially rich, infrastructurally developed countries in the West (therefore the World), ‘scarcity’ is an economic and political choice, not a material reality. If all textile factories, paper mills and electronics manufacturers closed down tomorrow, there would be enough clothes, sheets of A4 and cheap kettles already in existence to furnish our bodies, workplaces and homes for multiple generations to come. And if we ran out of fresh commodities, there’s always the secondary market: charity shops, online resellers, plus all the second and third homes. Our obsession with cheap (read labour precarious and carbon expensive) goods is driven by an addiction to mindless consumerism that upholds the magic of smooth and untraceable production, and provides the necessary framework to support insatiable desire.
To peddle a rhetoric of material scarcity within a saturated consumer market is to dangle bait for consumers to gamify their own logic. And to arrange controlled scarcity events like Black Friday lays the track for self-actualising scarcity, illustrated by shoppers panic buying toilet roll in March 2020, recent fuel queues in Kent and Sussex etc etc etc. Go Big or Go Home. Winner Takes it All. Takeshi’s Castle. Supermarket Sweep.
All the footage is painted with apocalyptic stress, end-of-the-world performance art pieces captured by drama-hungry phone-wielders, challenge shows turned violent on live television. All shelves being raided and cleared, flailing physical scuffles over home technology, and patient but irate idling drivers contain the latent charge of the limited quanitity or volume that can be stocked in a shop at one time. No shelf has infinite sandwiches, no rack endless shirts. Naturally, that quantity or volume will be outstripped by the momentous but momentary demand. Stock needs to be exhausted to create the illusion of a wider lack; there needs to be empty-handed consumers to reinforce the bigger image.
In the supermarket or shopping centre, where we are greeted with forever-full rails of clothing or shelves of produce, each purchase-to-be is immediately replaced by militant staff. An empty shoe platform in a sports shop is enough to warrant a sharp tweet of complaint or ridicule. Ha, you call this a shop? The display item is temporarily missing! The turgidity of “stuff” is not only a signifier of material abundance, also of the paradigm of choice: we’re overloaded with options and stick with what we know. When it’s not there, we panic. A minor blip in the commodity matrix can be enough to warrant an existential crisis, outlining an illusion that one’s right to total selection is being impeded. Heidegger’s theory of zuhanden comes to mind: the door handle is only noticeable when it’s broken.
With food the story is different; time-sensitive lifecycles of plants and animals, excessive energy and labour uses, institutional obfuscation of seasonality and movement, arbitrary market value attached to (non)active agents. It’s a Brexit problem created by the Conservative Government, a total Eton Mess of violent immigration policy, bureaucratic dogpiling and abstract future-blaming. Sarah Butler wrote in her Guardian article:
The tactic comes as shortages of HGV drivers and pickers and packers on farms and food processing plants lead to low availability of some items in supermarkets. Problems at ports, where handlers are struggling to cope with a surge in deliveries for the festive season, are also leading to shortages.
Although I’m appalled at the photos of cardboard print-outs of asparagus slotted into empty crates, I’m not surprised. While a supermarket in a regularly-functioning society would have replaced the missing stock with something else or more of another, it’s quite obvious to me that this is dipping the toe in the unhinged visual language of zuhanden. Upon noticing the lack of asparagus in October –which, let’s be clear, is only in season in Britain for eight weeks between April and June– the shoppers are then psychologically prepared for shortages in other parts of the store. To-go sandwiches will have been replaced with scale maquettes, potatoes with convincing, high-density polystryene, bottles of beer with animated hologram adverts. Forever-full rails and shelves of actual consumables are now vulnerable to foldable, hi-res ghouls.
Missing stock renders the architecture of these super-warehouses, usually packed to the rafters with global produce, suddenly very visible. The sheer scale and capaciousness is easy to accept without question when we’re on a mission, looking a few paces ahead with our shopping list in-hand. What about when we can’t collect our groceries in autopilot? What about when we realise the narrowing choice? The flooding of negative space? The echoes of our footsteps in the empty aisles? Once we become aware of the hyperobject we’re submerged in, there’s a chance of rupturing the superfice and becoming conscious of affective roleplay.
The more I think about it, the more pissed off I become, because this is quite possibly the greatest image of political food art I’ve ever seen and I can’t believe I didn’t come up with it first. Poorly-photoshopped rows of asparagus bunches, printed on cardboard and shelved upside-down, is not only a shocking visual indicator of the infringement on consumer’s access to year-round food, but it’s also a shocking visual indicator of the consumer’s uninfringed access to year-round food.
I wonder how long ago the company that makes these came into existence, and who runs it. I think I already know both answers: weeks and
I would like to end this on a positive note, I’m not entirely sure I can. I hope that shoppers will not just look but see the severity of deception and formulate a critical stream of consciousness tracing the lineage of the real asparagus’ journey backwards from the shelf, through the supermarket coldstore to the chillers, the refrigerated van, the regional storage warehouse, the refrigerated airplane, more refrigerated vans and storage, through the hands of low-paid seasonal workers with no rights or on-site accommodation, into the enornmous, energy-inefficient heated greenhouses, into the soil, ravaged and degraded from excessive tilling and chemical use. I hope they think about the seed planted in the soil; a kernel of potential life surrounded by lifelessness, genetically-modified and vulnerable to pests, changes in temperature or moisture content and strong winds. I hope then –then– the penny drops.
Commodification of just-in-time food is a bleak tragedy of neoliberalism. The climate crisis is a necessary part of capitalism’s endless extraction from the earth and from the labour of its people.