Ethics of food

It's been awhile since my fair trade post, and recently in England Fairtrade has made the news again. I saw something of a pulp documentary considering whether Fairtrade is living up to its promise. The first Nestle Fairtrade products are storming up controversy. How can a Nestle product possibly be Fairtrade?

The problem, in my mind, is that many of the Fairtrade activists interviewed for this television programme have conflated the goals of Fairtrade with anti-corporatism in general. They see that big companies are using (read abusing) Fairtrade products in order to make money. They place large premiums on a Fairtrade product because people are interested in buying ethically. Now this certainly happens. Here at Exeter campus depending on where one goes one can pick up a Divine Fairtrade chocolate bar from anywhere from 50 to 90 pence. Its all the same, it is just different vendors setting different prices. So is Fairtrade being hijacked by corporations?

I should think not and the reason is simple. Fairtrade is not a socialist or communist ideal. Its whole point is to improve the standards of living and the pay received by third world produces by appealing to the market. Rather than with normal commodities, the basic prices for ingredients are set to a minimum. This protects the producer. Now for the producer's situation to be actually improved, the products need to move off the shelves. For the products to be popular, public awareness and marketing needs to be in place. Fairtrade knows this and must hope to leverage companies and supermarkets to sell Fairtrade products. Business is business and the profit has to be there. Capitalism is thoroughly wrapped up in this venture. But if companies can make a profit, and the products are popular, and huge producers like Nestle join in, this means that more chocolate, sugar, or bananas are needed. This means more orders for the farmers. And that means a better life for them. The whole point should be for supermarket chains and large food companies to "abuse" Fairtrade for their own profit because in the end this has a demonstrable benefit for the suppliers. As long as we are aware of this reality, I can think of nothing better for farmers than for Nestle to produce Fairtrade goods.

But after having thought about this I thought about other ethical food movements. What about fairtrade, free range, organic food, local food, small farmer food, and seasonal food? It seems to me that the ethics of food has become increasingly problematic and possibly chimerical. Say I want a tomato. Say I live in, Devon. It is the height of summer, and tomatoes are in season. Will the tomatoes at Tesco's be from Devon? Probably not. They will likely have organic and un-organic varieties. Where will these come from? Possibly England, but maybe the Netherlands, maybe Spain, or even Israel. If they are from far afield, it means that a good deal of diesel on a semi-truck or ship or jet fuel on a plane has been burnt getting the tomato to me. Enter the specter of global warming.

Now say I go to a farmers market. There I might buy a locally grown tomato, but it might or might not be organic. In any event, I haven't paid for huge waste in shipping, but I have given my money to a farmer who is likely to be highly subsidized by his government. And doesn't this mean I have worked against fair trade? Does this mean by going local I have gone against fair trade? But if I go for fair trade, because of the the products involved, by default, I have failed to go local and that I am contributing to global pollution. What a mess.

And then there is organic. At first it looks great. No fertilizers to imbalance the local ecosystem, no pesticides to damage the ecosystem. Great. But hold on a second. Isn't there a reason all those hideous chemicals are used. Surely it is to improve yield within a given area of land. Now if we ditch these chemicals, then something has to give. If I am a farmer and want to have a yield of X cabbages to sell and I go organic, then it is likely I will need to increase the land I farm in order to get the same number. This means, if we all went organic, either many more square miles of farmland would be required or a much lower quantity of food would result. Since much organic farming is corporate anyway, and buying organic doesn't necessarily mean supporting local farms, these issues can be set aside. Doubtless having a cleaner farm is a good thing, and I am sure that many farmers overuse chemicals and fail to rely on other alternative solutions. But at the same time, if I could chose between fewer farms (especially hydroponics) and more nature, actual unused land, I would be tempted to opt for more nature.

What I am trying to get at here, is that a good deal of the different ethical food movements offer overly simplistic views of the intertwined technical and moral concerns which actually crop up (pun intended) in the production of food. This is not to say that these ethical concerns are unimportant, but, as things stand now, they lead the ethically minded consumer into a number of unresolved ethical conflicts. More importantly they can be used, in the case of the Divine chocolate above, to empty the ethically minded consumer's pockets of a good deal more money then he should have actually had to spend, were he savvy, for the same principles. Most importantly, I don't think that it is right for me to have to engage in an internal debate every time I try to buy something. By and large, it is probably better to be lead by what tastes well crafted, than what some faddish ethical movement sees as singularly important. It is true that my actions and my decisions have consequences, but I suspect the after effects of each decision I make at a store and over multiple visits to different stores over my life are far to complex to be mapped. There are two many unknown variables for me to even begin to have the presumption that my shopping list has been ethically coherent. Therefore and henceforth, I refuse to play this game. If appears to be of good quality, nutritious and at a price that is sustainable for me, then I will buy the foodstuff of my choice. Otherwise I delude myself, possibly make things worse, and likely spend more of my resources than I should have.

Once more into the breach,

Ben