Quotes

"Once I started delving into what it takes to be ethical it got very complicated. I set myself a very, very simple rule: if a product or service harmed the environment, was unsustainable to produce or exploited workers along the way, we didn’t get it.

But it wasn’t easy to find alternatives. If you need to make the right decision, you need to have the information in front of you and if you can’t rely on that information, if you can’t trust it, how are you to make an ethical choice?

If you don’t have the info in front of you, you’ll fall back on what you think is good or your regular standbys which is exactly what brands and corporations want you to do. They want to take the thinking out of shopping. I’m asking you to put the thinking back in.’’

Canberra Times Wednesday, February 27, 2008

“I turn to find the waiter beside me, pen in hand, ready to take my order. ‘I’ll have the free-range pork, please,’ I say. As he turns and takes my wife’s order, I ask him if he is sure that the pork actually is free-range. He says he is ‘pretty sure’ but that he will ask the chef anyway. Two minutes later, he’s back, saying the pork is actually free-range bred.
I have never heard of free-range bred, so I ask him the difference, but he doesn’t know the answer; nor does the chef. But then the waiter ventures that ‘there’s very little in it’ and that it is ‘just as good as organic’.

Now I know that’s a porkie. That’s like saying there’s little difference between Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon, between love and sex, Protestantism and Catholicism – all the world to those who know; very little to those who don’t.

Home again, I get Googling ...”

“First off, we ask the sports-shop assistant where the leather in the trainers is from, to get an idea of whether or not chemicals would have been used in the tanning process. At first, he says the ‘leather technology’ is from Italy; then he says the leather is from India, Brazil and even South Africa. ‘It’s from everywhere,’ he says. When we ask him about the environmental practices, the most we get is, ‘Well, all I know is that they are very good.’”

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