How Humans Invented Waste

Cakeconomics 101

Act 1: The Invention of the Morally Corrupt Consumer

Whenever I order a piece of cake at a restaurant, I always wonder how many more pieces of cake there are back in the kitchen. Not because I’m greedy, but because I’m fascinated by how, from a logistics point of view, the restaurant manages to achieve that perfect goldilocks balance between stocking plenty of cake for customers on one hand, and avoiding financial loss due to unsold units on the other. It must be a constant headache trying to speculate the level of demand as well as variation in this demand between high and low-consumption days, not to mention the shifting demographic profile of the clientele which, I would think, affects which cake flavour they will choose and whether they had any desire for cake in the first place. Ooof. That’s a lot of parameters. How on earth do restaurants do this?

As consumers we never have to worry about how the restaurant manages to have our favourite cake slice in stock, if and when we decide to walk into their premises. How does an entire back kitchen manage to match what is on the menu, at least most of the time? As far as the customer is concerned, the entire menu should be available. Capitalism has conditioned consumers to expect an obscene range of product choice they can select from based on their whim of the day, not what may be available at that time, season or locality. It is a disastrous consumption model that violates every principle of sustainability, biology and physics. Humans have consumed the planet’s resources much like restaurant patrons: ordering what they feel like eating, not what may be sustainably available. How we eat mirrors how our economy works: raiding Earth’s resources with abandon in much the same way we casually rock up to a restaurant and expect an almost infinite choice of foods just because we happen to have a rectangular piece of plastic in our wallet.

The gluttony of today’s society is a result of a grotesque amplification of the most greedy aspects of the human psyche. The industrial era perpetrated the most destructive corrosion in human consciousness: the devolution of humans into brainwashed consumatrons, and the replacement of needs by wants. Capitalism reached peak destructive capacity when it discovered that, while real consumer needs could easily be fulfilled, greed and narcissism were inexhaustible commercial opportunities that could be branded, amplified and monetized to virtual perpetuity. Today all purchases are driven by desire, greed and aspiration rather than need, availability or sustainability. This happens because we are indoctrinated from a very early age with the core values of industrial consumerism: the customer is always right, no product should ever become unavailable, if it breaks just throw it out and buy a new one, and if it doesn’t break, there is a new, better version in the market anyway that you simply MUST have.

It is no wonder that human selfishness has reached a peak. Hyper-narcissism was deliberately engineered by a marketing industry which recognized very early on that selfish and narcissistic people will simply buy more products. Decades of "aspirational" marketing by the Unhappiness Machine atomized and isolated us into self-obsessed consumer units separated by layers of clickbait code. This was great news for capitalism but bad news for the planet and our mental health. Centuries of industrial and post-industrial commoditisation of the human psyche have stripped society down to a cold web of nameless transactions that has completely replaced a community of intimately connected beings. Capitalism successfully isolated us into individual cages like laboratory rats so that we can be studied, targeted, controlled and monetized at the singular level. Most of us can have cake now, but we end up eating it all by ourselves in our tiny cubicles.

Act 2: The Illusion of Abundance

Back at the restaurant, an incredibly complex operation takes place behind the cake counter cleverly hidden from the eyes of the consumatrons. All they ever witness is the cake. Transactions are now virtually seamless, leaving us with the impression of a faultless, effortless and stable system that will be there forever to satisfy all our demands. This deceptively stable system convinces us that we live in an abundant, magical world where nothing ever runs out, however much we consume. The global web of destruction, extraction, manufacturing and transportation relies on the most absurdly complex supply chain architecture just so that it can cater to every desire we could possibly ever have, however outlandish, decadent or unnecessary. We go to the supermarket and there are dozens of brands of cereal on the isles. It is a perverse, gluttonous fantasy made reality. Surely there must be a catch?

It is indeed all a fantasy, because our economic system is built on an impossible illusion of abundance. In nature nothing is ever abundant for more than a few minutes. Supermarkets do not exist. Animals scavenge for food and skip multiple meals. Plants agonizingly reach out for the sun and wait patiently for rain over weeks or months. Even human bodies are designed to last without food for several weeks. During this time they can still function by metabolizing the fat reserves under their skin. This is our normal way of existing and how our bodies were designed to optimally operate. In the ecosystem resources may be scarce, but if one is prepared to wait there is always enough food. Those who are picky, refuse to share or want to order from a menu will starve while they wait for their custom order to arrive. This deceptively abundant world we consider normal won’t be normal for much longer, because it is simply not sustainable.

Our economic system is a house of cards caught in a futile struggle against the laws of gravity. This only becomes apparent when one compares it to the sustainable economy of the ecosystem. Nature’s economy cannot afford to worship and spoil its consumers the way the human economic system does, because this would bankrupt the ecosystem literally within a matter of hours. Humans have single-handedly raided Earth’s resources to virtual exhaustion. The illusion of abundance has come at the biggest price: there is barely any of the natural planet left. The illusion of abundance is the dogma behind the most destructive force on this planet: extractive, corrosive necrocapitalism.

The motto “if the consumer wants it, we will bring it to them whatever it takes”, has been fundamental to the illusion of abundance. The consumer became both a deity and a victim: at no point should supply fail to meet consumer demand, but equally, at no point should consumers stop working overtime to pay for their meaningless acquisitions. The global economy is a depressing conveyor belt of self-destruction: resources go in, nothing comes out. Everything disappears forever into a black hole of extinction.

Act 3: The Fraud That Is Money

The restaurant manager is therefore an illusionist: he convinces his patrons that everything on the menu is available all the while as he plays a dirty magic trick. As he maintains smiles on the main floor, back in the kitchen it is total carnage: slash and burn agriculture, extinction, resource depletion – all of this just to make some cake. As the list of victims and consequences grows, destruction doesn’t stop there. The kitchen’s machinery is beginning to melt down. But the profits are too big to stop now. The illusion must go on. Customers paid their ticket and we made a promise to them. The illusionist must keep the magic trick going for as long as possible, even if the odds are not in his favour. How does he do it?

Through yet another magic trick: money. Money is abstract, invented currency with arbitrary, fluctuating value. It is an instrument of profit capable of responding to variations in supply and demand. If customer demand for cake increases, the price per slice magically goes up. As more people ask for cake, the higher price triggers production and everyone wins: the customer, the restaurant owner, the farmers. Well, almost everyone. These winners all have one thing in common: they are all humans.

Earth is the big loser. The animal and plant species who participated in the cake got absolutely nothing out of this process. Some had to be tortured or had to die so that the cake can be made, others even went extinct in the process. An uninsured, undocumented immigrant somewhere in an industrial-sized bakery not far from the restaurant had to break their back making cake batter all day. Untold carbon emissions had to be released to create the steel industrial kitchen machinery he is surrounded by, which consumes vast amounts of electricity.

As for the consumer, when they got to the restaurant they suddenly remembered that they had some leftover cake back at home in the fridge. It turns out they never needed cake. They just needed to get some fresh air, so they filled up their tank and drove to the restaurant in their heavy steel car to have a cake slice instead of the one at home, which they will probably throw out as soon as they get back.

The plastic card consumers have in their wallet is their own magic trick. The invention of money was the single biggest fraud ever committed against nature. Money is a loan of equity stolen from humanity's one and only lender, Earth, distributed to reckless consumatrons ready to spend it all in one go as they drive around in their gas guzzlers looking for their next cake fix. As with all abstract representations of value, money becomes worthless when the creditor goes bankrupt. The invention of money enabled humanity to maintain its illusion of abundance while continuing to commit ecological fraud on an ever-accelerating scale.

The key to all fraud is deception. Our civilization perpetrated its theft against nature by rearing Michelin-starred financial concoctionists and an army of Harvard-educated economic illusionists proud to study an economic system that fails to obey first-grade math. We amassed a monumental debt towards nature merely so we can keep extending the life of a Ponzi civilisation that never turned a profit and instead bankrupted both its stakeholders and the planet. We have been living on “cake credit” for thousands of years, producing what we need through a process that eventually breaks the cake oven and sets the house on fire. Earth, our one and only lender, is going broke and so are we.

Act 4: The Invention of Waste

But there is one last magic trick that the restaurateur-cum-illusionist must practice and perfect: he needs to coordinate a complex, often unpredictable logistical operation from the production line all the way to the table, so that the customer gets their cake at an affordable price, and the illusionist turns a profit no matter what happens, even if something along this process goes terribly wrong.

For this economic riddle to be solved, one would expect Harvard-educated economists to lead weekly board meetings with the restaurant’s manager using advanced modelling and predictive analytics of cake supply and demand. Sustainability consultants would look into the entire cake process from start to finish make it more energy efficient and profitable, yet socially responsible and sustainable. Environmental scientists would advise on the impact of overconsumption, overpopulation and intensive farming on the planet and how this could affect "the future of cake on Earth”. Union representatives, social scientists and an immigration advisor would support Julio from Guatemala who works long hours in the cake kitchen so that he feels more valued and appreciated, and is better compensated for his back-breaking work. There would be a doctor helping him with his diabetes, a result of working in cake quality control for years. Julio’s employer would provide a healthcare plan.

Instead, there is a much, much easier magic trick which bypasses all of the above complex work and increases the restaurant’s profit in a single, magical step: throw all uneaten cake in a new human invention called “waste” and jack up the price of cake slices. We’ll just make more cake, increase the price per slice to cover our additional costs, and dump whatever cake is left at the end of the day in a place which we will call "trash", which is invisible to our customers. This way the restaurant is always stocked with cake, the customer always gets what they want, and the business even makes a profit. The illusion of abundance has been rescued for yet another day.

Money and waste are fictional concepts engineered by humans to enable and conceal ecological fraud. While money made ecological fraud possible, waste made it invisible. Whenever uneaten cake is thrown in the restaurant's dumpster, work hours are unnecessary spent in the cake factory, plants and animals are unnecessarily slaughtered, and CO2 is unnecessarily emitted to fire up the oven. We may label the dumped cake as “waste”, but it has come at an incredible cost to the planet. Waste is yet another illusion.

Act 5: The End of Illusions

All magic tricks must end sooner or later, when the curtain comes down and spectators return to their normal, real lives. Our psychonomy has invented several magic acts to keep the illusion of civilisation going: abundance, money, and waste being just three of them. But there is barely any Earth left to destroy. The show is ending abruptly. The red velvet curtain comes crashing down on the illusionist, taking the ceiling with it. But that’s not his only problem: a ravenous mob of disgruntled customers is about to eat him alive.

The self-destructive entity of necrocapitalism will push the entirety of Earth to its absolute limits. Maximum profit requires maximum exploitation, maximum emissions, and maximum extinction. This will end in a collapse of both the ecosystem and the psychonomy that is attached to it like a bloodsucking leech.

It takes an incredible amount of effort to kill an entire planet, but rest assured, we have done all we could while maintaining our illusions and delusions all along. The magician will die on stage doing what he loves: deluding himself and his audience up until the very last minute. This will be his last trick, but there won’t be any magic involved.

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