I’ve been thinking a lot about being a responsible consumer
recently. My continuing quest to live frugally keeps bumping up
against my desire to put my money where my mouth is regarding ethically
produced products. For instance: meat. I can buy a couple
pounds of chicken at Wal-Mart for about 8 dollars. However, if I want to
eat a chicken that wasn’t pumped full of hormones to make it
unnaturally big, fed seriously questionable feed, or squashed in to a
shoe box sized crate for it’s entire life, I have to pay nearly 9
dollars a pound. Here I am faced with a dilemma–ignore the part
of me that says “my stewardship of my resources extends to the choice
of whether or not to support disrespectful (if not unethical) treatment of part of God’s
creation” or… eat less chicken. For some reason it surprised me
when I realized that I’m not really entitled to affordable meat.
Or affordable anything really. My choices as a consumer are a
reflection of the values I hold regarding many things: the ethical
treatment of animals (and I’m still going to eat them, so don’t think
I’m going all PETA on you) , child labor, slave labor, unscrupulous
business practices…
Man. It’s 1 am and I can’t type anymore. More later.
mamafish | 06-Aug-05 at 1:51 pm | Permalink
I hear ya, I live that dilemma daily…go broke and live according to my values or sacrifice some of my values and be a good stuart of our money. my solution – if my values come from God, he’ll provide the finances. If the finances aren’t there, I give myself the liberty to do what I need to do.
wingsofdawn | 06-Aug-05 at 2:22 pm | Permalink
It’s a hard line to walk too, because sometimes by being good stewards of our money we end up supporting bad stewardship of earth’s resources…argh.
Spacemonkey1812 | 06-Aug-05 at 4:33 pm | Permalink
“if my values come from God, he’ll provide the finances. If the finances aren’t there, I give myself the liberty to do what I need to do.”
I agree
ndtenbensel | 07-Aug-05 at 2:06 am | Permalink
Well in your dilemma on weather the factory produced fattened chicken is your choice of meat… Remember, Sales are down at Wal-Mart
!
Actually, anything you get at a grocery store that is in business for being competitive will do whatever they can to make things “appear” quality while saving the money in purchasing these products with little quality and unnatural practices. Consumers have a demand and the seller must meet these demands or someone else will. Or if you want, you can eat Olives and cheese sticks for a week and then rotate each week with whatever fruits you can afford the next, mmmmm, cheese sticks
sweet_n_lo | 09-Aug-05 at 1:10 pm | Permalink
This is unrelated, not because I don’t have an opinion on the chicken thing (although I do usually only eat chicken when I’m at someone else’s house) but just because I wanted to say, good book you’re reading there. And what a great followup to the Last Battle. I read those very two (in that order no less) this summer in Europe! Did we talk about that? We should if not.