Shopping for food

It’s in the shopping aisle where we make our biggest decisions – either to stick with the usual food choices or switch to a more ethical eating pattern. This is where we decide how to use our money – to withdraw it from certain products so as not to give oxygen to the producers … or continue sponsoring them so they can continue supplying us. When we give in to food seduction, to foods that trigger “biochemical effects not unlike those of addictive drugs” like sugar, chocolate, cheese or meat, we do so without giving it a second thought. We let our taste buds do out thinking. Our salivation says it all. We savour certain foods on the way home from the shops, visualising the meal for which we’ve just bought the contents.
When we deliberately go cruelty-free shopping it’s another story. We decide to replace animal-based foods with plant-based foods (and that also means replacing leather and woollen goods with non-animal footwear and fabrics). What items we boycott is pretty much straight forward, it’s just a matter of reading the fine print on ingredient lists and then switching over to the alternative products.
If we choose NOT to change, we remain locked into a habit pattern which prevents us from making any genuine contribution to animal rights … we are faced with an ethical dilemma. We either shop with animal rights in mind or we continue to do as we’ve always done, to ‘screw the animals’; we either do the right thing or we do what others do; we either think for ourselves or we refuse to even discuss this subject, treating it like a taboo. Who’d have thought every-day shopping could put us to such a test?