Supersize everything

When we got home from our trip (this home, the other home, the home that is our house in America, I mean), my immediate reaction on coming in the door, apart from "warm" and "not too smelly" and "ceiling hasn't caved in, so that's good", was that this is a lot of space for just us chickens. And that we have a lot of stuff. Why do we have so many saucepans?

I'm sure this isn't the first time I've remarked that everything is bigger here. The houses, so the furniture. The roads, so the cars, so the parking spaces. The plates, so the portions, so the people. The fridges, so the number of things that must be kept in the fridge. (Or maybe that's the other way around.) The ovens, so the cookie sheets. The number of channels; the hours of day or night during which children's programming is available.

And sometimes it makes no difference, but sometimes it makes life just that bit easier. Driving is easy, because the roads are wide and well signposted, and fuel is cheap, and you hardly ever need to reverse into a parking space with only three inches to spare on either side. We do take public transport, but we don't take public transport to the public transport: that is, we always drive to the Metro station rather than taking the bus that stops at the end of our road. I don't even know how often the bus goes past - that's how much we have never considered taking it.

I'm certainly not trying to imply that Americans are lazy; far from it. They work harder than any other people I can think of, with worse conditions as standard - no statutory vacation, no mandatory health insurance, no damn maternity leave at all.

And yet, I can't help thinking it's not good for people - my children, let's say - to grow up with all this largeness. Taking these things for granted and viewing the other, the things they see when they visit Europe, as the oddity; the quaint tinyness of things that are not American. Wouldn't it be healthier to view the smaller item as normal and the Cheesecake-Factory-sized portion as humungous and possibly obscene? (Okay, so most people understand that Cheesecake Factory portions are completely off the charts. Don't they?)

I think it must come down to environmental ethics and small-footprint stuff. Americans have the biggest carbon footprint of the planet, simply by living here, because we use so much of everything without a second thought. Because it's easy, and it's right there, and why the heck wouldn't you? You need a certain amount of leisure time, of disposable income and peer pressure, to implement the other, more environmental option, whether it's composting or hanging the washing on a line, or taking the bus or using cloth napkins.

Not everyone has the luxury of such things: until they (that anonymous "they" who are synonymous with communists, or at least socialists, to a lot of America, in a way that mystifies Europeans) actually make it more difficult and more expensive to live life the other way, by charging for your non-recylable trash - I think this happens in California, actually - or making a Big Mac meal more expensive and harder to find than fresh fruit and vegetables and ethically raised meat and hormone-free milk and HFCS-free everything - until that happens, most things in this country, including our collective carbon footprint, will probably continue to be supersized.