You know what would vastly improve everyday life in Western nations?
A complete and total cessation of the relentless schoolmarmery that is forever oozing from the state and its corporate collaborators like some foul poop-green algal bloom. I want a lot of things, but very high up on my list is that I want politicians, NGOs, Netflix, television adverts, public health mandarins and random clipboard girls on the street to stop teaching me sophomoric lessons about things. There’s no reason they can’t go about governing, fundraising, streaming video, selling products and improving public wellbeing without acting like a legion of officious pimply babysitters.
I try to avoid pop culture themes here at the Plague Chronicle, but I’m making an exception for this story, because it illustrates like few others the needling, nagging, shrieking nature of the regime that oppresses us. The arc of liberal democracy is long, but it bends towards a legion of overweight box wine-drinking state media Gutmenschen with overmany house cats and intractable toenail fungus kicking at our shins with their smelly battered Birkenstocks and shouting in our ears about the same three tiresome things over and over again, forever.
This week, the German discount supermarket chain Penny (a member of the Rewe Group) has arrogated to itself the project of teaching its predominantly lower-income working-class clientele about the grave environmental impact of the cheap processed food in which it specialises. They’ve decided to do this in the midst of massive food price inflation, which has left 11% of Germans unable to afford daily meals, by… selectively marking up food prices to reflect their ‘True Environmental Cost’.
Their “Wahre Kosten” (“True Prices”) publicity campaign is one massively tedious extended lecture to their customers about why they need to “Make an environmental choice when [they] shop”:
Food has social and environmental impacts from its production to your purchase, but they are not reflected in the retail price. If you want to remedy them, it costs money – the so-called true costs. The University of Greifswald and the Technical University of Nuremberg have scientifically calculated these for our selected products. The following factors were taken into account in the calculation:
Climate
This factor includes all climate-damaging emissions from the agriculture required for the products, e.g. methane produced by cattle or CO2 produced by diesel-powered tractors.
Water
This factor includes all pollutants that have a negative impact on groundwater or other water sources and reservoirs – e.g. nitrogen from fertilisers or the toxicity of pesticides entering the water.
Soil
The use of land for the production of agricultural goods and the resulting degradation of its quality, e.g. through the alteration of natural land for arable use, is important.
Health
This is not about how healthy a product is when consumed. Rather, it is about the damage to health caused by pesticides or the ammonia produced by animal husbandry.
The True Price Soothsayers from Greifswald and Nürnberg have decided that people need to pay €1.55 instead of €0.89 for mozzarella, €6.01 instead of €3.19 for Wiener sausages, and €1.44 instead of €0.99 for a tub of yoghurt. Foul fake meat vegan schnitzel, meanwhile, concocted from a long and baffling list of ingredients, has been marked up only a few cents (to €2.83 from €2.69), and the bio Wiener sausages, which used to be slightly more expensive than the environmentally irresponsible ordinary ones (€3.29 as opposed to €3.19), are in the new True Price Regime suddenly a relative bargain (€5.36 as opposed to €6.01). In fact the whole pricing scheme turns out to be an extended argument that overpriced over-processed eco products are actually a bargain, if only on the higher plane of reality accessible only to academics and Penny marketing consultants:
Let it taste more sustainable! As you may have noticed, the true cost share is lower for organic and vegan food. The reason for this is that organic and plant-based foods are produced in a way that is kinder to the environment. So choose organic products from Naturgut or Food For Future more often.
Anyone who visits a Penny and strays into the proximity of these ‘punishment products’ encounters obnoxious placards with wall-of-text messages about how environmentally bad ordinary foods are. Customers are just supposed to stand there and spend five minutes achieving ecological epiphany by studying these things, I guess.
For anybody who bothers to read to the bottom of the Penny Wahre Kosten website – probably me and three other people – there’s a quiz to test how well schoolchildren customer have internalised these important lessons from their shitty corner supermarket chain:
1. Why is organic mozzarella from Naturgut better for the climate than that from San Fabio?
a. Organic food is produced in a more environmentally friendly way.
b. Organic mozzarella pulls CO2 out of the air.
2. Which yoghurt has less impact on soils?
a. Naturgut organic fruit yoghurt.
b. Penny Future Farmer Fruit Yoghurt.
3. How much water is needed to produce a 300g pack of Lindenhof Maasdamer cheese?
a. Less than 300 millilitres.
b. About 25 litres.
4. Which Wiener sausages cause less damage to human health during their production? (meaning damage that occurs before consumption, e.g. pollution from pesticide-treated soil)
a. Mühlenhof Wiener sausages.
b. Naturgut Bio-Wiener sausages.
If you answer at least three correctly, the website congratulates you for being “obviously aware of the impact our food has on the environment”. If you don’t, they tut tut that “it’s not that easy, but try again!”
There’s a lot lurking beneath the surface here. The notion that there can even be “true prices” divorced from all market forces and determined by the wizardry of random academic environmental gurus, for example, is curious indeed and speaks volumes about current-year German politics. It’s also clear that Penny’s campaign is directed not at the people who actually buy food there, but at biens pensants green-obsessed urbanites who never come within 100 metres of a Penny. “We share your disdain for the rabble who comprise our customer base and hope to join you in teaching them a lesson,” seems to be their message more than anything. State media accordingly loves this – so much that a Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln (WDR) reporter doing a segment on customer reactions inside a Penny supermarket interviewed another WDR employee posing as a random customer so that she could tell him how great she thought it was. After Twitter sleuths caught them out, WDR apologised and said it was simply a mistake, honestly it was, just a “chain of unfortunate circumstances”.
Welt reporters, meanwhile, have noticed that while the ‘True Prices’ campaign is all over the Penny website and fancier outlets in upscale neighbourhoods, it finds almost no mention in the ordinary Penny supermarkets where most people shop:
What goes down well in the media coverage obviously works badly in the shops. “We only get complaints from the customers,” says a cashier …
The reason for this is exemplified by a [Penny] branch in Hamburg. It’s not one of the discounter chain’s showcase branches… but one of the typical old, rather crowded shops in a residential area.
The billboard at the entrance carries the current slogan, “If you want cheap, you have to go to Penny,” and large signs in the shop advertise the “weekly special”. Currently on offer are “Natural pork belly slices XXL”. In other words, the same as always.
In contrast to the website, the promotion is hardly visible in the real world at all. There is only a flexible cardboard sign on the marked-up products themselves… The presentation with the large red price on a yellow background, however, suggests a bargain special at a cursory glance, not a mark-up – as does the large slogan, “At this price, it’s all about the sausage.” …
“Personally, I think the campaign is very good. But customers look at their mobile phones or whatever, they don’t read the information sheets,” says the cashier. “So they only get angry, there’s no praise.”
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Anti-wissenschaftliches Geschwätz (anti-scientific claptrap).
Just another bit of crap..(should it make its way to the UK) I will be taking absolutely no notice of.
It’s fantastically freeing …… knowing you are just not going to bow to any of this shit…
Trallala!!
You sound like someone who is answerable to no-one, who will accept no leader (unless they’re paying you). Anarchic. I like that.
Lol, that’s me … anarchic granny!
I hope I would have the courage to resist any tyranny, but the truth is more mundane…there’s a lot more of us and the big advantage for us is just to say NO!
The climate change push to net zero also started out like this, initially just raising awareness of your carbon footprint and inviting you to offset it voluntarily with carbon credits for things.like flights.
And then they set a date for banning petrol and diesel cars….
There are three words that should be everyone’s motto where government advisors, quangocrats, influencers, retail psychologists, HR employees, council officials, and activists are concerned: ‘LEAVE ME ALONE!!’
Or five words, for emphasis: ‘LEAVE ME THE F*** ALONE!!’
Bugs at cost though.
Not in Italy. No bugs at all there!
To some extent you can say or could say that you get what you pay for in terms of food. It’s also making the effort to learn about good food and its sources in your area. It’s not like you have to go out and hunt it yourself just find local purveyors of high quality food. You support them they support you and everyone is happy and it grows. The vegetables in the supermarket are completely tasteless and are fed with fertilisers that don’t contain vital trace minerals. Look at Selenium depletion in most food sold in the UK and US. And then they try to gaslight you into thinking that it’s just because you’re getting old.
I hope the extra cash they’re charging is going to some sort of very worthy cause and not just lining the pockets of the owners/shareholders – coz they sure as hell aren’t buying the stuff in at the ‘true price’.
As Peter Hitchens so memorably said about Cameron and the people who voted for him “He hates his own party”. Seems like the senior management of “Penny” despise their customers.
Obviously its all bullshit like charging 10p for carrier bags. At this level of systemic decline it is assumed that they shall spin bullshit and we will know its bullshit but we will say nothing because we are out of steam. These forces affect everyone high or low. Yes there are conspiracies but these forces are more like the shared memory of a thunder storm. All kinds of crazy things happened and no one really knows why.
There is a stark admission – that you really are on your own. In terms of a culture and a body of knowledge that broadly supported you and the reality. This is not easy to come to terms with. St John of the Cross pointed out that there are two stages. The long dark night of the soul is the stage where you throw off old beliefs and cease being a normie. But there is a second stage much further on where you are forced to witness the destruction of spirit as it is created. In some cultures this is represented by three colours – white, black, red. This is the testing ground of our society who knows what we have to put on the battlefield but you have to be completely honest and transparent.
Go woke go broke (hopefully)
This stuff really bothers me because I have been involved in this sort of thing for a long time and to put it frankly I find it contemptuous that people around me are being poisoned for lack of wisdom and they really are and I don’t forget. Most of these people are good loving people. Just look at how many millions of them have been killed in the last few years, how many more maimed or rendered infertile. You have a choice – you can either view these people with contempt or you can feel that they are part of the human family and you will provide recompense.
Very few people really care. Those that rise up will be those that do. I would be careful not to lose sight of this. There is no alternative future. If you are going to be a man then you simply have to look at cold hard reality.
Am I missing something? Are these guys really hiking the price of these sausages by just over 88% in order to tell people the ‘true cost’, or is it a gimmick and the real (not “true”) price of €3.19 will be charged at the chuck-out? If not, what’s going on? Do they really have such contempt for their customers? Do they not have competitors? Even Ratner has more sense.
Ah man, not my favourite drummer in the whole wide world ever as well!! Fortunately he’s fully recovered and they’re back to touring.
”The reason I’m writing to you all today is to let you know of a very serious health problem that I have been through. In January I had a stroke, thank the Lord it was a minor one referred to as a TIA. It left me paralyzed on my right side from my shoulder on down, of course I was very worried that my career was over but with the love and support from my wife, Rebecca and family, my doctors, especially Julie my OT (Occupational Therapist), and my Maiden family I was able to bounce back to somewhere near 70% recovered. After 10 weeks of intense therapy it was almost time to start rehearsals for our tour. I feel it’s important to let you know about this now instead of earlier as I was mainly concerned with doing my job and concentrating on getting back to 100% fitness. I’m not there yet but by the grace of God I’m getting better and stronger as the weeks go by.”
https://twitter.com/IronMaiden/status/1687045053338783744
Not sure if he had the jab tbh. Mind you, Bruce did so what are the odds? Just saying…
”The evil that men do lives on and on…” Indeed. Do you feel a tiny bit of a twonk now Bruce??
”About three days ago, Dickinson, who is double-vaccinated, took a lateral-flow Covid test, and it came back positive. “I thought, ‘Oh well, shit,’ ” he tells Rolling Stone, sounding upbeat over Zoom. “I was kind of sneezing a bit. For a couple of days, I felt a bit groggy, kind of like the flu, and that was it. And I’m 63 years old. I’ve pretty much got no doubt that had I not had the vaccine, I could be in serious trouble.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/iron-maiden-bruce-dickinson-covid-positive-interview-1211371/
Just Bud Light them. I walked past a pack of Bud Light in the Co op and just sniggered at it. It was a Jimmy Saville moment.