How ethical can you be?

Date Published:

13/09/2007

Janet Street-Porter loves to talk about food. And she was doing a lot of it for series 3 of the F Word. She tried to convince race goers in Newmarket to eat horse burgers and started a debate about whether force feeding geese to make foie gras was morally correct. In a series of exlusive features, Janet tells us what she really thinks about eating out, eating meat and eating ethically.

When you start to obsess about food miles, you can end up spending a lot of time shopping…

When Marks and Sparks announced that they were kicking off Plan A, a whole raft of environmentally-conscious policies from using low watt light bulbs, recycling coat hangers and reducing packaging, they started putting aeroplane symbols on food which has been air freighted into the UK. Tesco have followed suit. But environmental experts say that this kind of labelling is misleading, and that only 2% of the environmental impact of producing food comes from transporting it to the retailer.

What we should be taking into account, they say, is the amount of land used to grow it, to store it, the pesticides used and the energy consumed harvesting it and growing it. Using these measurements, food grown locally could be considered to have a bigger impact in the environment than asparagus from Peru or beans from Kenya.

Honestly, can you be bothered? This is the most confusing argument I’ve ever heard - in the end we all want to eat food produced by people who are paid adequately, who work in decent conditions. We want to food that has been tampered with as little as possible. We also want to support local shop keepers and small producers. But in the end, life’s too short to start worrying about every bloody bean, lettuce leaf or tomato that we eat, isn’t it?

At the moment everyone’s jumping on the ‘green’ bandwagon and claiming to be an expert. In the end, consumers have limited time at their disposal when they go shopping and a load of complicated choices to make. So it’s between us and our consciences.

Yours

JSP

Do you think Janet's right, or is there an easier way to shop ethically? Let us know in the forum.