Re:Beyond Meat S-1
by mikepurvis on Monday April 22, 2019 @04:42PM
(#19722767)
There's a huge argument for how worldwide culture is influenced by what's trendy and popular in Europe and NA. For a heartbreaking example, see the state of the Ganges river, in India— millions of kg of plastic, all of which looks awful and eventually washes into the ocean:
Historically when the people disposed of their waste into the river, it was feeding the ecosystem, but that's not the case any more now that they've inherited disposable plastic everything from the West. It's easy to turn a blind eye and say "yeah well, our plastic trash in North America is being properly land filled, so who cares— this is a problem for India to solve." But it's not that simple, of course: we exported the problem to India, and I think it's on us to figure out what the solution looks like too, and model it in our daily use so that it's reflected in the cultural exports (TV, movies, etc).
You see this same basic pattern for a lot of things, where the emerging middle class in a growth economy looks at their English-language media/entertainment for cues on what their next life upgrade should be, and some is mostly good (cell phones, clean water, organic food), but a lot is bad-to-horrible, at least from an ecological standpoint (single use plastic, personal automobiles, overseas vacations).
https://www.google.com/search?q=ganges+river+plastic
Historically when the people disposed of their waste into the river, it was feeding the ecosystem, but that's not the case any more now that they've inherited disposable plastic everything from the West. It's easy to turn a blind eye and say "yeah well, our plastic trash in North America is being properly land filled, so who cares— this is a problem for India to solve." But it's not that simple, of course: we exported the problem to India, and I think it's on us to figure out what the solution looks like too, and model it in our daily use so that it's reflected in the cultural exports (TV, movies, etc).
You see this same basic pattern for a lot of things, where the emerging middle class in a growth economy looks at their English-language media/entertainment for cues on what their next life upgrade should be, and some is mostly good (cell phones, clean water, organic food), but a lot is bad-to-horrible, at least from an ecological standpoint (single use plastic, personal automobiles, overseas vacations).