Shopping for food

1130:

Meet me in the shopping aisle on Saturday morning.  That’s where I make my big decisions for the week.  This is where I decide how to spend my money.  This is where my food choices are based on taste sensation or ethical considerations.  Many items on my list are routine items like oil, peppercorns, rice, marmalade, etc.  Other items involve a particular kind of choice based on good and bad – is it fattening, is it full of sugar, is it from animals, is it environmentally sound?  Especially when it comes to popular foods, this is where I can either use my money to foster cruelty-free products or spend it on ethically questionable items. 

We all know food-seduction, and we’re all drawn to foods that trigger taste-excitement in us.  These are foods which cause biochemical effects not unlike those of addictive drugs, foods which are not necessarily healthy but which we find hard to resist, especially when in commercially well-known forms, like the sugar content of chocolate, the richness of cheese or the blood and texture of meat.  Perhaps instead of engaging our brains we let our taste buds do the choosing.  As we walk down those familiar aisles, we almost salivate at the thought of certain foods.  We visualise a meal for which we are about to buy the ingredients.

         

If you deliberately go cruelty-free shopping it’s another story.  If you set out to replace animal-based foods with plant-based foods, or if you are looking for shoes and clothing, and replace leather and wool with non-animal footwear and fabrics, again, it’s another story.  There’s an obvious ethical component involved.

Of course, this whole process is made more difficult by the way products are so seductively packaged.  If you can get past that then you are faced with the printing on the packaging which lets you know what you are buying, and that print is often so small that you can’t read it, so some of us have to remember to take our glasses when shopping.  Vegans need to be able to read the fine print on the ingredients list, so we can tell if it contains animal products, and some of these are hidden behind unfamiliar words like  ‘whey’, ‘gelatine’, ‘collagen’, ‘albumin’, ‘casein’, ‘isinglass’, etc.  If we can get past these hurdles, then shopping is a matter of what or what not to boycott ... and if we do boycott, then it’s a matter of trying to find an alternative product.

         

Mainly, when shopping for food, we often hit an ethical dilemma, either we please the body or we decide to ‘screw the animals’.  Who’d have thought something as ordinary as shopping could pose such a test?