A restaurant menu stuffed into my mailbox the other day offers “1/2 Pound Burger from Authentic, Artisan, Sustainable Cattle Topped with Sustainable Bacon, local Abby Cheese, local Arugula” ($14). For a lexicographer, no evidence is too humble. The hamburger from “Sustainable Cattle Topped with Sustainable Bacon” tells of a word that has vastly expanded its field of reference in recent years.

What the chef means is not hard to explain. “Sustainable cattle” are presumably animals fed on grass, not grain, and raised without the hormones that speed other cattle from birth to a profitable size for slaughter. Pigs do not eat grass, but there must be a similar rationale for “sustainability” in producing bacon. If the beef and bacon do not have to be trucked in from thousands of miles away, the restaurant and the diner accomplish another gain for the environment, reducing the costs of transport, packaging, and refrigeration. But whether eating beef and bacon is a “sustainable” practice at all is another question. It might be sustainable if it were restricted to a small aristocracy, as in the Homeric poems. I am not sure how many acres of pasturage beef cattle require per head, but it is not likely that Connecticut contains enough acres to sustain many “sustainable cattle,” or enough to sustain the state’s population. A food culture that includes regular doses of beef would not be sustainable under the grass-fed definition of sustainable cattle farming. And when the farmer’s accountant looks at the costs of leasing pasturage, or the opportunity costs of holding land in pasture as opposed to selling it for housing developments and shopping malls, the conclusion may be that sustainable farming is not economically sustainable, or not for long. In short, the word applies so generally, and to the objects of so many contradictory interests, as to give us reason to doubt that there is such a thing as “sustainability.”

Another example: the sourcebook State of the World 2010: Transforming Culture from Consumerism to Sustainability, published by the Worldwatch Institute, is full of apt critiques of consumerism but nowhere defines “sustainability.” The term has become a vague designator for a broad set of behaviors undertaken in order to avoid the destruction of natural resources, behaviors that may be mutually undermining but that have the common characteristic of breaking with the model of ever-increasing growth through increased consumption. And as in my menu example, the trade-off between consumerism and sustainability may be no trade-off at all, once sustainability becomes yet another consumer desirable (no less desirable for all that; I have not yet tried the sustainable bacon burger, but I’m sure it tastes better than its mass-produced rival).

So the advertisement may have achieved its purpose after all. But I don't want to close without a cheer for Carlos Fernández Liria, who urges us to forsake the “cult of work” and adopt a “right to laziness,” treating time as the luxury it is and eschewing the behaviors that lead to so much getting and spending. (A tip of the hat to Olga Solovieva, who found the Liria reference here, of all places.)