Ramblings from an almost informed conspiracy theorist
Earl Dangwa (he/him) // Humour Editor
Kyla Seguiban (she/her) // Contributing Visuals
Over the last few summers, we’ve seen an increase in the amount of wildfires erupting in forests across Canada. Social media has attributed this increase of wildfires to the amount of carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere. While scientists rave about the carbon in the air, and how it’s “poisoning our atmosphere” and “contributing to climate change,” nobody is talking about the carbon in our regular life that is slowly poisoning us.
C-A-R-B-O-N. A chemical element.
Number six on the periodic table. Dangerous in high amounts. You know how oxygen sets us on fire every time we breathe? It works like that, except it’s in our food. In fact, they say it’s the “building block of everything in the universe.” It’s in everything we have: our drinks, our food, our clothes, our bodies and even our footprints. Yeah, that’s right. Our footprints. I haven’t left my house in years.
Now, I know you’re thinking, “That’s not what it means.” And you’d be right. That doesn’t mean there can’t be another definition. You see, as humans we are carbon-based life forms. Which means (obviously) that anything we do as individual people will leave an impact on the environment, even natural things like sleeping, eating and breathing. What else leaves a clear, physical, impact on the environment? That’s right. A footprint.
A carbon footprint.
They tell you a carbon footprint is how they measure how much something affects the environment globally. The so-called “greenhouse gases” something emits. They confirm this with their four-step process, their “peer-reviewed” studies and ingredient-based calculations. As a simple explanation, let’s take … pasta. They measure each of its base ingredients—the noodles, the beef, the tomatoes—multiply the quantity over approximate emission factors (such as geography, farming systems and such) and they get the amount of carbon each ingredient emits. Beef emits about 90 per cent of the entire pasta dish. I’ve seen the data and calculated the carbon myself. It’s not exactly wrong, per se … but there’s something missing.
What they are not telling us—what they are lying to us about—is that someone is artificially putting carbon into the food. You might be asking: who? Honestly, I don’t know. It could be the government. Or aliens. Might be the devil, if he’s real. I don’t think it really matters who. What matters is what we can do about it. I’ve searched high and low for a product or an edible ingredient that does not contain carbon, to no avail. Whoever put the carbon in things, they’ve thought of everything. So what can I, an individual with no conceivable amount of power to change the world, do? Nothing. There’s nothing I can do. Sure, I could gather some friends (if they stop thinking I’m just “doing it for the bit.” Those fools!) walk the streets and protest, but I don’t really want to do that.
At the end of the day, even if the world is on fire, even if there is poison in every product, I still have to eat and breathe. So all I can do is try my best not to eat a lot of carbon-filled products. I used to go foraging. Wild berries and plants don’t have a lot of carbon. Vancouver summers were wonderful for that.