What To Do?

[poliphilo]

When things are cheap in the shops it generally means that someone- somewhere down the line- is being ripped off. A cheap tee shirt almost certainly comes from a sweat shop, a cheap chicken from a factory farm. I was reading about the Peruvian fishmeal industry last night and it's nasty, nasty nasty. Millions of tonnes of small fish are scooped out of the sea to make fishmeal to feed chickens to feed people in the West- and not only are local people being deprived of a nutritious food source, but the food chain in the sea is being disrupted- affecting supplies of larger fish- and the waste product- a fatty, oily slurry, is being pumped back into the sea where it kills everything it touches.

Make things right, farm things right- and it costs money. You have to be rich to afford things that have been made by a craftsman, or meat that's been raised ethically. When poor people demand a share of the fruits of capitalism it's always going to be at a cost to people who are even poorer- not to mention animals and the environment.  I don't have an answer- apart from the blindingly obvious one which most of us either ignore or laugh off.  Yes, we should all become Buddhists or Shakers or Tolstoyans and go and live in communes and whittle our own furniture and lovingly rear our own hens, but we're not going to, are we?

Comments

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

In the olden days food wasn't cheap - it was a significant part of your income and assets - that's why you lived on a farm. 100 years ago, chickens and turkeys were a luxury food, now stores give turkeys away at Thanksgiving and chicken is the poor man's food. I think it's incumbent upon those of us who can to buy the locally humanely raised food, to support that industry. I remember when you couldn't find organic food anywhere and no one thought it was possible to make a living at it, but these days lots of small farmers are doing it, and making money. Industrial food makers drive down the prices, because that's what corporations do, but I'm hopeful that the niche for humanely raised foods will get larger, and as people see more and more of what really goes into their corporate food chain they'll opt out.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It would be good to think so.

Vegetarianism has never been "cool". If it got to be cool- if the president and the Queen and all the celebs became vegetarians then maybe things would change.