The superficial consumer

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We are going shopping, spending up, emulating the carefree hedonism of the rich, buying almost anything that takes our fancy.  This is the nearest we get to living ‘life to the full’, as we do sometimes when on holiday.

Spending-up gives no thought to ethics, environment or health; this is care-free shopping.  And today, we are buying ‘animal’.  On the shopping list we include chicken wings, yoghurt, a new blanket, some work-shoes, and much else besides.  Today we’re going shopping.  Going shopping is a favourite sport. It’s fun.

Hold that feeling.

         

And now contrast that feeling with another, from seventy years ago - here are people, not dissimilar from us, who are meat and two veg people, and sometimes people who loved to buy big, for grand occasions, where tables would be laden with food.  Same as we do today.

And yet there were differences.  They would have been horrified at the thought of putting hens in tiny cages for their whole life in order to produce eggs.  They couldn’t imagine encasing a pig in a sow stall or cutting into the raw flesh of a sheep to prevent fly-strike.  To treat an animal in this way would have been considered diabolical, unthinkable.  And yet today we accept it as ‘essential’.

What happened during those seventy years?  Perhaps the competition for market share became more cut throat.  The consumers, demanding low prices, turned a blind eye.  The farmer gradually began to regard animals as objects.  Cruelty became acceptable.  Farming was done behind closed doors.  The public asked no questions.

Out of all this came a generation of protesters who were willing to forego the pleasures of care-free eating, and boycott the whole shebang.  Animal-derived foods were cruelty foods.  The Animal Rights Movement emerged.  The term ‘speciesism’ came to be used to describe those who didn’t care about the non-human.  Those who did care were prepared to observe vegan principles.

But that became a springboard to a much deeper principle that could be applied to much more than food and animals – it was the principle of non-violence.  Those who don’t care enough, who are the non-thinking consumer of whatever they want, will have nothing to do with this ridiculous notion of non-violence.  They’ll continue to subscribe to the ‘hard’ code of behaviour, adopted by animal farmers and the Animal Industry in general.  These ‘un-thinkers’ will continue to eat eggs and products containing eggs, and think nothing of the conditions under which hens are forced to live.  If the ‘un-thinker’ thought about the ‘rights of animals’, they would have to question their own humanity, and the prospect of that is never going to be attractive.

Most of us have been brought up with the idea that we have rights - that if we want something badly enough, and it’s available, and if we can afford it, then we have the right to buy it - no questions asked.  Those of us who have broken away from that rather selfish mind-set have chosen to voluntarily restrict our choices.  We are raising some important questions-to-be-asked.

As soon as we’re clear about these questions (and can live according to our principles) we need to get the consumer to enquire what these questions might be.  Then they can decide for themselves whether to put those questions to themselves.