Where did I go for Breakfast?

It can be quite difficult to understand: “How am I connected to the Great Acceleration, and the processes we talked about?”

But here, already, I’m sitting down for breakfast and trying to think about how I connect to this. I’m having some toast, some bread. The bread comes from Sweden. But we can’t always produce all the wheat we need for my bread- -or our wheat consumption. So when Sweden doesn’t have enough wheat, we import it. Mainly from France, but sometimes that might not be enough. The biggest wheat producers in the world are also the US, Russia, China…

Many of us enjoy a morning cup of coffee. In my case, it’s coffee. So then, it probably comes from…Brazil, or Vietnam. But if you’d like a cup of tea, it has to come from China or India. Our kids might enjoy a cup of hot chocolate. That’ll come from here, Côte d’Ivoire.

When we’re thinking about orange juice, which I enjoy in the morning… If it’s the season, and I pressed them myself, they probably came from Spain, Portugal, Italy- -the south of Europe. If I haven’t, they’ve probably come from Brazil or China. In Sweden, we’re big banana eaters. The bananas, when I was growing up, came from Central America. But now they’ll probably come from Brazil or China. So, actually, before I’ve even left the house in the morning- -I’ve been around the world. Now, what that map looks like, will depend. Some of them, the things that matter… It will depend on my choices. What do I choose to eat, how do I choose my products…

That will affect how these products are produced- -possibly the working conditions of places, also what is on offer. So that will vary for all of us, depending on where we are, and what choices we make. But the point is that most of our days, we are interacting with the world. Be it through our food, the clothes we wear, the mobile phones we use- -we have interacted with the entire planet.