Shopping with a conscience...

image credit "hippy"

I read an article this morning about the mayor of Sydney Clover Moore (the one who wears dog collars as some sort of foul fashion statement). She has banned Tim Tams and a range of other foods from City of Sydney Council meetings. You can read the full article here.

It is all part of her initiative to serve only sustainable, "cruelty free" foods at Council events.

She subscribes to the belief that 80% of the world's cocoa comes from The Ivory Coast, apparently where there are allegations of child labour... According to the article, Arnotts dispute this.

It got me thinking, how many of us actually loyally subscribe to the "shopping with a conscience" style of living? I don't. And to be brutally honest I'm not sure I feel all that guilty about it. I mean I'm not out buying ivory from South Africa or face cream made from panda testes but I don't always buy organic meat and I usually choose things based on quality and value for money not "green-ness"...

Is it just hard core hairy armpitted, furry browed hippies who genuinely lead these lifestyles? I guess mega rich Hollywood types can sustain it as well. What about regular folk? I was at Macro Wholefoods the other day. Not really by choice. I was actually grabbing some scones from the bakery next door and decided it was easier to run into Macro and buy an overpriced carton of organic fresian cow cream than go to the supermarket down the street and queue up for a regular priced carton.


It turned out to be a $148 carton of cream thanks to a parking ticket I got from stopping in a loading zone out the front. Ooops. While you can park there in the afternoons it is not ok in the morning. Hmmf. Thanks North Sydney Council, you rock. Anyway I was in there looking for the cheapest carton amongst the $10 cartons of rip off cream when I noticed a few people wheeling large trolleys around. Full of groceries. Who does this? Who are these people? I really want to know. I mean a few items is fine but who does their entire weekly grocery shopping at Macro? It would be about a $1000 a week for two people not to mention how tasteless a lot of that stuff is. I like a bit of salt, oil, flavour. Shoot me!



This so called "green shopping with a conscience" thing seems to be a real domino type thing. Where do you stop? What makes the plight of the Indonesian fishermen more important than the poor basket weaving kids in Fiji? You could go on and on until you are left totally naked living in a tree.