ethical shopper

In today's mass market economy, where emphasis is above all placed on the speed of production and the profitability of the corporate "bottom line," a world-wide system of efficiency over humanity has become the norm. It is a system that values economy over compassion, quantity over quality, expediency over nutrition, thrift and marketability over substance and sustainability.

Omnivores have conditioned themselves to turn a blind eye to the processing of their food. Ask most people how they feel about beef feed lots or chicken processing plants, and they will hold up a hand to stop you, saying, "I don't want to know about that." It is through such adamant mass denial about the sorry existence of feed lot animals and their slaughter that our current factory farming practices have been allowed to continue and propagate worldwide.

It is through similar learned apathy that consumers allowed genetically modified (GM) fruits and vegetables to enter our food source, where it now accounts for a large percentage of the food we eat. And it is this same unwillingness to hold food manufactorers, growers and distributors accountable for the products they sell that has allowed even the "organic" label to become corrupted and coopted by Big Business.

An ethical shopper must be willing to ask questions about the product he is buying, and he must be willing to see things for what they are, no matter how ugly. He will make choices which will ultimately drive the economy in a new direction. He must be willing to settle for less, if if means that less is more wholesome. He must be willing to spend the extra time and energy to make sure that the product he promotes with his purchase is conscientiously produced. He must weigh the option of organic produce that has traveled from Chile or China with locally produced, non-organic, but sustainably farmed agriculture, keeping in mind the cost of destruction caused by the market's dependence on fossil fuels may be equal or greater than the cost of destruction caused by environmental pollutants, such as herbicides or the limited use of pesticides. The ethical shopper knows that there are not always easy answers to these ethical dilemmas, and he must be willing to consider each case individually and not use blanket judgements for all scenarios.