After coming to the decision to not eat mass-produced meat any longer quite recently, I am surprised and happy, that lots of other people think alike. Two days ago, I talked to a couple of colleagues and customers about the topic and was able to get another great address for shopping meats of animals reared in an acceptable way (next to all kinds of great groceries, as I found out yesterday, when I checked the place out).

Once one is thinking along those lines, further questions arise. How about milk, cheese, butter, eggs? I am sure, there are many more I haven’t thought of, yet. These are all animal products and their origins have to be questioned in the same way.

Mulling such ethical questions over in my mind, I find myself perceptible to every topic slightly related. No wonder, my attention is caught by reports about unhealthy doses of sugar in beverages, for instance. Or the impact of transport on planet blue. The worrisome question, whether it is more acceptable to buy eggs from happy hens, which basically brought their eggs to the basket themselves out of thankfulness for their paradise-like life, but live in France. Thus forcing a huge carbon footprint on the environment because of long distance shipping to Berlin. Or else go for some local, free-range eggs with a more questionable background, as far as the hens well-being is concerned.

It is like an avalanche. There is almost no area in our consumer world, that is untouched. I have to stop this, before I get paranoid. But is it really paranoia? I was rereading some of my posts this morning, thanking my visitors for their kind comments, and stumbled upon the  one about mixing up shampoo with conditioner, because I didn’t bring my glasses to the chemist’s. I meant this to be a funny post about the down-side of getting older. Suddenly it dawned on me, that advertising sanitary and beauty products and cleaning agents with labels like “pure”, “organic”, “bio-degradeable”, “sustainable” and so forth strongly indicates, that the opposite (impure, poisonous for ever, source-wasting …) is the norm.

Drives me round the bend, without even starting on how clothing is produced or what your car producer lies about. Or in which way the production of bio-fuel influences the price of tortillas in Mexico. Or how Monsantos and a few other global criminals try to “posses” the vast majority of all seed and gene-pools in the world. Just shoot me, really. There is no escape.

Unless, of course, I could live what has become a dream of mine: own a substantial piece of land and just grow my own food. Back to my rural roots, back to farming. Which is not possible, for various reasons. Funding aside, I know how hard the work is. I’m not getting any younger. And don’t have a flock of kids, one of which, at least, I could trust to help me out in old age. Plus I lack the skills necessary, lost with my grandparent’s generation, I fear.  Looks, as if I have to live out my consumer generation’s life as it is, forever forced to accept the least dirty compromise possible.