BC is a surreal place. Our food issues are handled by the ministry of healthy living and sport; our cultural interests are smothered by the skirts of tourism. This probably makes it easier to dismember funding, since the arts are so inextricably entwined with visits to the Ogopogo and whale watching.

I guess it’s easy to get confused about the relative value of something like the BC Arts Council, when having to weigh its funding against that of community torch relays and resort development. And as UK arts bodies have been finding out for some time, when the Olympics is on the horizon, a lot of money gets siphoned away.

Whether that’s what behind the 40% cuts to the BC Arts Council, it really beggars belief to hear the minister quoted as saying he thinks the arts community is happy with what he’s done. On the other hand, it’s an easy call to make if you don’t receive letters of complaint. If you’re in BC and you’re bothered by the cuts and the attitude, here are some suggestions from the Alliance for Arts and Culture on how to make your feelings known.

If you didn’t catch this article in the weekend Globe & Mail, by Leah McLaren, about

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, a fascinating new book by U.S. writer and analyst Ellen Ruppel Shell, who examines the ramifications of what she calls “our relentless fixation on low price.”

it’s worth a look. It has everything to do with food. If we wonder why the quality of food produced and sold to us has been diving, while food-related illnesses skyrocket, read on:

Examined in a broader, historical context, our hunger for cheap merchandise has been a destructive force. Sure, we can buy our Costco family pack and eat it too, but at what cost? The culture of cheap has driven down wages (by outsourcing manufacturing and ushering in an era of big-box mega-chains), driven up personal debt (by tricking us into spending more on scads of cheap stuff and less on carefully chosen quality) and created the globalized economy in which underpaid developing-world labour churns out disposable merchandise for the bargain-hungry West.

The culture of cheap is why North America is ahead of Europe in these social problems, where prices have always been high and traditions of quality endure. But only just ahead; Europe has the same discount mania, being the home of Lidl and IKEA and Primark.

These figures from the US were also mind-blowing:

From 2000 to 2007, median family income in the United States (adjusted for inflation) dropped by $1,175 (U.S.), while basic expenses grew by $4,655. In the same period, corporate profits doubled.

As explained later, one reason those corporate profits doubled was, in McLaren’s terms, darkly ironic, and very much tied the prevalence of engineered obsolescence and disposability, which have driven out of business most of the manufacturers of items of enduring quality:

Low pricing doesn’t make us spend less. It makes us spend more. As budget-brand retailers from Frank W. Woolworth to Ingvar Kamprad, the multibillionaire founder of IKEA, have long known, low prices equal high profits.

So the message is simple: buy less of everything, but better quality. And don’t be afraid of paying full price. Let the suckers buy the bargains if they must, as they’ll be outspending you in the process.

The New York Times offers another of the seemingly endless guides to sustainable seafood which are starting to make me very uncomfortable. For example they recommend eating anchovies on the grounds they’re low on the food chain and reproduce more readily, but anchovies are known to be endangered.

I begin to wonder if it is right to eat any kind of seafood (I will for the time being draw the line at farmed oysters, however).