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Free Lunch 2003 Ketchup packets, ketchup
One day's worth of calories (2000) from free ketchup, collected from convenience stores and fast food restaurants, quilted into one giant bag of ketchup |
|
Free Lunch 2003 Ketchup packets, ketchup
One day's worth of calories (2000) from free ketchup, collected from convenience stores and fast food restaurants, quilted into one giant bag of ketchup |
I have always been drawn to free stuff; especially free food.
I am the person who drinks the old, warmed-over coffee in the Jiffy Lube, silted
with Cremora and sugar. Free soda refills, to me, are one of the best developments
of the late twentieth century. I will eat free food at a party, even if I’m
not in the slightest bit hungry and don’t know what the food is. I have
begun to notice nooks and crannies in this consumer world that are chock full
of free resources. This is, after all, the land of the free. Condiments, napkins,
straws, AOL cds, free samples at Costco . . . these things occupy a strange
niche in our capitalist ecosystem, resources that are rarely systematically
exploited. They exist in a sense as bait, for consumers, they allow us to sample
before we buy, and they encourage us to try new things – but they also
create a comforting sense of surplus, of abundance, of living in a world that
is just beyond the basic needs of survival.
Is anything really ‘free?’ These goods are not beneath the notice
of the corporations or businesses that supply them; in fact, many of them make
strategic decisions about when and where to unleash the free sample for best
effect. In the case of the free tools – plastic cutlery, straws, napkins
– it is probably true that simply slipping the cost of these ‘free’
items into the customer’s bill for their food is actually cheaper –
in terms of labor and accounting, than it would be to itemize and bill each
fork, spoon, or spork. But someone always has to pay, right? Would people pay
for these if asked? There is a demand, but there’s not enough competition
to make pricing them worthwhile.
There is no “tragedy of the commons” for condiments. The fact that
most fast food chains can leave out bins of cream, sugar, mustard, and ketchup
and not fear theft is less a sign of trust in an honorable public, than it is
a sign that everybody in America already has enough food to live. If there was
a driving need for caloric intake, a resourceful human could live indefinitely
on the free offerings of fast-food stores, hotels, gas stations. Each has a
different pool of nutrients, a different food group for a scavenger driven to
that length of ingenuity. In other parts of the world, these pockets of calories
wouldn’t last a day – the quick and the needy would consume all
the relishes, the barbecue sauces, the coffee, the non-dairy creamer.
I speculate that this sort of low-key, ubiquitous surplus might register at
an unconscious level, all the time, with all of us who have grown up seeing
it. It may be that whenever we see, out of the corner of our eye, buckets spilling
over with salt and pepper or honey-mustard sauce, we are able to relax, without
realizing it, that part of our brain that takes care of basic survival needs.
Here, in the chain restaurant, flanked by all this free stuff, we can feel safe.
I wonder then, if all this free stuff really does, in some small way, set us
free.
So, here it is: a free lunch for the resourceful – actually, a full caloric
load for the average human, according to most labels – 2000 calories.
It takes approximately 266 individual packets to add up to that necessary sum.
One small problem is that there is an over-abundance of Vitamin A (1576% the
daily recommended allowance) and Vitamin A is not water-soluble, so a consistent
diet of this might cause a problem in the long run. But that’s a small
price to pay, and there are many more condiments under the sun.