Resurgence: Consumerism Consumes by Jay Griffiths

AN EGG IS NOT AN EGG. It is not something to be painted, sucked by grandmothers or thrown at offensive MPs. It is only, according to supermarkets, a consumer product. By the increasingly widespread practice of stamping sell-by dates on the very eggshell, eggs are symbolically reduced; their sole characteristic is their sellability. Consumerism consumes; it is a shoplifter, stealing meanings. The free range of associations of "an egg" is stolen by the eggman of consumerism.

Consumerism consumes; a lemon is not a lemon but a billboard, increasingly branded in ink with the brand name of its producer. Its integrity, lemon qua lemon, is quashed by consumerism. At summer sales, there are many faces pressed against the shop window panes, but there is only one expression: all-consuming bargain hunger. Consumerism consumes the variety of human features; the human face, usually a rich register of human emotion, is here reduced to a cash register.

Consumerism similarly reduces the varieties of human encounter. According to British Rail, passengers no longer exist. Everyone is a "customer . Patients are "customers" of hospitals in the health-service marketplace. The cash relationship is privileged over all others. If the story of Eve and the Serpent were invented today, it would be told without reference to experience or temptation, knowledge or sex. The consumer angle would be exclusively portrayed, Eve the first customer, the serpent a Berwick Street barrow boy - "Apples, thirty-five pence a pound to you, darlin'; that's my best price and don't tell the guv."

Consumerism consumes more than we bargain for. In the pernicious practice of blanket advertising using music from our common cultural heritage, that music is effectively stolen. I used to possess, in my head, the priceless rapture of Grieg's music; now in its place I have a cheap little loaf. The integrity of this music has been scoffed by a bread manufacturer. Bruckner has been irreplaceably consumed by a maker of particularly tinselled chocolates. In the art world, the theft of paintings is illegal and publicly damned, but the advertising industry is allowed to steal with impunity from the musical treasures of the nations.

VARIETY COMES IN many forms, and consumerism consumes them all. Take the identikit tick tock of the high street, the big top Mcshop sock rack tack shack. Take Time, and the variety of time.

Consumerism consumes festival time, sabbath time and free time. When businesses have exhausted spatial territories, they expand into time territories, so by the mondial dial of the international stock exchange, it is always McMarket day, and shops, opening twenty-four hours, opening on Sabbath days and on festivals, consume the distinctiveness of time for everyone, and do so to fatten the girth of their profit margins. Consumerism creates a McTime, a McWorld where the McSun always McShines. The creation of this MeTime seems the ultimate confection, but it is actually the ultimate consumption, and it consumes what belongs to us.

Consumerism consumes colours to sell banks: Barclays-blue and Lloyds- green. Consumerism consumes concepts: "the future" is "orange". In a double theft, letters of the alphabet are taken to sell pricey water, dear eau dear. Not one of these things is protected from consumerism, neither the music, the colours, the concepts, the letters, nor the water, nor time. Not one of these things belonged to these manufacturers, but consumerism has consumed them, and then has persuaded society to buy them back, and to pay, furthermore, through the neause.

Consumerism consumes resources: energy, space, time and nature. It is a cultural appetite problem, and bulimia is both the sickness and the symbolic sign of consumer society; this self- destructive monster gobbling materials, forests, oils, and lumbering off to a landfill site for a dump in what's left of the woods.

Mcjunk, for instance, the greatest McGobbler of them all, pretends to be responsible for the wholesome confection of McMom's apple pie, but it is actually responsible for the wholesale McPapping of culture, the loss of local cuisine, the loss of forests to cattle pasture, and the death of tribes which used to live in those forests. There is a

McCon even in the Mcjunk product itself. Its recipes are designed not to satisfy appetite but to provoke appetite; what it is selling is not food but hunger.

THE LANGUAGE OF consumerism is the language of hunger. "Appetite" for products must be created. Markets can be "glutted" or "satiated". Consumer "tastes" must be "satisfied". As "stores" replace "shops", the link with food supplies is stressed. Consumerism depends on persuading customers that their ' wants are actually their "needs" and further that these needs have the force of food-hunger, the literal appetite, for prey. Bargain "hunters" is a telling phrase, but the hunting instinct is revealed in subtler ways. Hunters circle Harrods the day before the sales begin, marksmen marking the marked-down objects, wounded prey to pick off the more easily. Red is the colour of sales reductions but it can be read as Hashes of blood red, alerting the hunter to the vulnerable animal, its price "cut" and "slashed", and the bigger the red reduction, the more bloodied the beast and the more reduced its resistance. In supermarkets, consider the wire shop- ping baskets, little cages to trap mew- ing bargain-cubs. Consider the specific pleasure of bringing the shopping indoors, bringing the prey back home. Trolley-rage happens at the checkout why do people get so twitchy there, if it isn't because, in some atavistic memory, that moment is recognized as the climax of the hunt, the nervous thrill of the kill at the till?

Consumerism taunts society with scarcity: Hurry hurry hurry, while stocks last. Auctions appeal to a sense of competitiveness for limited food supplies. Consumerism mimics the tension of seasonal rarity in its seasonal sales and its end-of-line reductions, and people respond unconsciously to the stress. Every summer and winter shops see outbreaks of sales-rage. The fear of scarcity (itself a manufactured product, made by advertising and marketing) provokes a starvation- anxiety worthy of Hansel and Gretel.

In Hansel and Gretel's house of sweets, food - the gingerbread pretends to be product. Consumerism does it the other way round. The ideal consumer product is one which pretends to be food. The product is wastefully, "taste"fully over-wrapped as if, like food, contact would contaminate it. Like food it is to be hungered for, and like food it is to be perishable. The speed of product decay is an advantage to consumerism; in obsolescence it sees new appetites developing; as for durability, perishable the thought.

The very word "consumer" speaks of products being considered as food. Customers are consumers more often than they are called "purchasers". The word "purchase" has something stale about it, faintly old, a bit off It is a word just now on the point of passing its linguistic sell-by date. Why? Because it has an air of durability, it speaks of things built to last, a sturdiness that isn't welcome any more.

THOSE WHO "KNOW that enough is enough", goes the Chinese proverb, "will always have enough." For consumerism, there is no such thing as enough. Those whose appetites have been satiated must expand their appetites, must manufacture a hunger for luxury, superluxury, and deluxeury to out-Harrod Harrods. But the ultimate consumer is consumerism itself, and the things it consumes are ours: our rich varieties of human expressions and relationships, our music our colours, our letters, our time, our resources, our uses and abuses of eggs. Consumerism preys on our ancient hunting hunger and our fears of scarcity; it persuades us that we are the predator, but we are really the prey. It is consuming us, it hungers for us and it feeds off us. It is a voluptuary on full glut, and it cannot get enough of us. For consumerism, enough is not enough. just as an oeuf is not an oeuf.

Jay Griffiths is a regular contributorto the Environment Page of The Guardian.