I gave up on ethical consumption, and I want to explain why.
I don’t come from a particularly wealthy family, and I work an ordinary job. But when I was a teenager, I spent a surprising amount of time thinking about ethical consumption. I’m not even sure what initially pushed me toward it. We hear about the problems of consumerism and exploitation all the time, and this isn’t exactly a new issue.
Whenever I saw news about labor exploitation in manufacturing, for example in the clothing industry, I obviously didn’t support it. Especially as a worker myself, the idea of someone being exploited to produce something I buy has always bothered me.
For a long time, I tried to buy only from so-called responsible or ethical producers and to avoid mass-market brands whenever possible.
Eventually, I realized that I simply cannot afford to live this way.
I understood this particularly well a few months ago, when I decided that I wanted to become vegetarian for ethical reasons and stop eating meat. I quickly ran into a very practical problem: a lot of the products marketed toward vegetarians are simply too expensive for me.
There is a bio supermarket in my city where I can barely afford to buy anything. The prices are genuinely enormous from my perspective. Looking around, I often get the impression that the people shopping there are considerably wealthier than I am.
I already know someone will want to tell me that being vegetarian can be cheap. I’m not interested in arguing about that. I’m just describing my own situation. I don’t feel properly fed by eating salads, and meat is one of the cheapest and most practical sources of calories and protein available to me. Grains, meat and other basic foods make up the foundation of my diet.
Clothing is much the same. I simply cannot afford to buy clothes exclusively from ethical or sustainable brands. Sometimes H&M is what I can afford, and that’s the end of the discussion.
And I don’t say this to make some dramatic statement about how poor I am. My point is something else:
If you are poor, ethical consumption is often not realistically available to you.
And yet modern society constantly encourages us to feel guilty about our consumption.
Don’t buy this. Don’t eat that. Don’t use plastic. Don’t buy fast fashion. Buy organic. Buy sustainable. Buy ethically sourced. Check where everything was produced.
But why does so much of the responsibility fall on the consumer rather than the producer?
Am I really responsible for more plastic waste than Coca-Cola? Is my decision to buy a cheap T-shirt more important than the industrial system that produces millions of them? Why are individual consumers constantly asked to make morally perfect choices while companies are allowed to structure the entire market around making those choices difficult or unaffordable?
I don’t think ethical consumption is inherently meaningless. I understand why people want to make better choices, and I don’t think exploitation or environmental destruction should simply be accepted.
But I’ve started questioning the idea that the burden of solving these problems should primarily be placed on individual consumers.
Because if the ethical option is only affordable to people who already have enough money, then ethical consumption isn’t really an individual moral choice available to everyone.
It’s a privilege.
UPD: I feel guilty for giving up on it, but I don’t really know what to do with the guilt that society puts on me. What am I supposed to do? Is unethical consumption morally justified for poor people, given the assumption that poor people simply cannot afford to consume ethically? And does what I wrote above imply that ethical consumption has become, above all, a new class signifier that allows us to divide society?
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Quick note about vegetarianism if you still feel like trying:
You aren’t supposed to fill yourself with salads. Try lentils, beans, potatoes, stir fried vegetables and tofu. There’s a lot of Indian and Chinese and Asian recipes that are cheap, filling and tasty.
My personal favorite that I grew up eating was kidney beans and rice.
Yeah being vegan is cheaper and I’ve never eaten a salad lol
OP those meat replacements are aimed and priced for carnists, they’re good once in a while but they aren’t staples. Vegan proteins are things like beans & legumes, tofu, tempeh, textured vegetable protein (TVP), soya curls.
Vegan meals are more filling because the biggest change most new vegans have to adjust to is the higher fiber. They’re also lower calorie so you can intentionally add stuff you would avoid otherwise like more vegan butter or coconut milk to a chickpea curry. Chickpea spread and toast would be more filling than basically any fast food (I like chickpeas).
I run an org that recently went fully vegan and in my experience it’s only marginally cheaper as an upfront cost, the real benefits are in prep time, cleaning, and spoilage reduction (which does make things cheaper over time). I think vegans need to focus on the latter not the former. You could eat only beans but that’s not particularly fulfilling and not a winning argument.
These benefits are big for running an org with extremely variable demand. We can keep some less-requested vegan food for a very long time which allows us to help people with a lot of dietary restrictions.
i was about to say beans and rice are super inexpensive!!! and switching up my meals with different types of beans, veggie, and spice combos always keeps it fresh (but i’m a big chickpea fan cause it’s fiber does wonders for my tummy). wanted to add that dried soya chunks are really cheap and supes high in protein too!!! its just most of the stuff that’s trying to replicate animal products that runs expensive.
Yeah. Meat is way more energy intensive to make than vegetables. For most of history your main diet would be vegetables. Eating so much meat is a modern phenomenon and even then there are billions of poor people who eat little meat because of religion or cause they can’t afford it.
I always find it funny that people say vegetarianism is expensive. My parents are the first generation in my entire family line that could afford to buy meat. And they avoided it religiously. I’m probably the first person in at least 5 generations in my house to even taste meat (and only cause I was rebellious)
I don’t want to argue about this. And it’s not because I don’t know much about the subject or because there are certain products I’m unfamiliar with. First of all, I just find Asian food difficult to eat; I prefer Central European cuisine.
Secondly, I do eat things like rice, of course. But I can’t just eat rice by itself. I don’t know whether your culture has this concept or not, but in my mind, there should be a main component, which is basically some kind of grain or starch, such as rice, potatoes, buckwheat, bulgur, or something similar. Then there should be something that complements it and gives the dish its main flavor, and that part is harder to substitute. Usually, for me, that’s meat.
Then there’s a separate category: salads. They’re served in a separate bowl, and that’s it. Ideally, there should also be dessert at the end.
And, you know, just eating rice by itself somehow feels… well, you know. I don’t want to go into this in detail because I don’t want to turn it into a whole culinary debate. I consider this a very personal matter.
But I can’t just eat rice by itself. I don’t know whether your culture has this concept or not,
“Central european cuisine” enjoyers be like
Don’t want to pile on to OP so I’ll just add this here
Come on
They already deleted their account so rip
not good posting but dambCalling for a complete and total ban on weird bad posting until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
HAVE YOU SEEN A WEIRD BAD POST?
Cornsider this:
- Does the poster seem to have poor social skills and an inability to read the room?
- Does the poster seem to have markedly unusual mannerisms?
- Does the poster seem to have rigid and sensitive habits around e.g. eating?
- Does the poster seem to be ignorant and brainwormed about a lot of topics?
You may be dealing with…
AN AUTISTIC TEENAGER
PROCEED WITH CAUTION!
Some actual thoughts
I was a bit hesitant to make my own comment in the pile-on, and now that the user is deleted I’m thinking, “Damn, did we overdo it? Am I culpable?” — Alas, it can be hard to find the balance between people’s right to be upset, and not letting that right turn into just, like, bullying people. OP was being a self-serving sophist with speciesist and racist brainworms who refused to take any criticism whatsoever por la buena o por la mala, which is a sign that OP probably would’ve just started doing wrecker stuff here if left unchecked, so it would’ve been best for OP to leave Hexbear early anyways; but at the same time, y’know, like this?
I just find Asian food difficult to eat
What does this even mean
First of all, I just find Asian food difficult to eat; I prefer Central European cuisine.
First of all, I just find Asian food difficult to eat; I prefer Central European cuisine.
Are you memeing right now? Gammon spotted
Asian food is like… A huge variety of cuisines
I consider this a very personal matter.
Choices which have victims are not “personal matters”
I’m talking about taste preferences. Chill
Your taste preferences have no bearing on what is ethically justifiable.
By all accounts, humans taste a lot like pigs. If I killed you and cooked you, you would be delicious. Would that justify my doing so?
First of all, you’re talking nonsense. Secondly, you completely misunderstood what I’m talking about. Sorry, mute.
What was the nonsense in Kefla’s comment?
I was going to make some recommendations for various things in regard to ethical consumption but I can see you are not a good faith person. I say this as someone who is not currently a vegetarian.
Don’t go into an ask community and get upset when people call you out. I think you just want people to argue with to confirm your ideas so that you can consume without guilt or mind.
Engaging in the commodification of suffering beings is a preference to inflict more suffering, not just a taste preference. I don’t usually argue with carnists but your arguments in support of eating meat are not consistent.
Secondly, I do eat things like rice, of course. But I can’t just eat rice by itself. I don’t know whether your culture has this concept or not, but in my mind, there should be a main component, which is basically some kind of grain or starch, such as rice, potatoes, buckwheat, bulgur, or something similar. Then there should be something that complements it and gives the dish its main flavor, and that part is harder to substitute. Usually, for me, that’s meat.
The entire comment you’re responding to was almost nothing but recommendations for ingredients that would fit this purpose.
It would appear that the audience has started throwing assorted fruits and vegetables at you. Grab a net and see how much you can save on your grocery shopping!
Have you never heard of vegetables? Herbs? Spices? Unless you are just eating plain meat with no additions of any kind then my friend your dishes “main flavour” is not coming from the meat.
so you can’t be vegetarian because its expensive or because you want the taste of meat? you are contradicting yourself and not approaching the subject with an open mind
I eat a lot of rice and never eat it on its own I always add a protein and some vegetables or gravy
I say this as a carnist - It really does sound like you’re not familiar with ‘real’ vegetarian cooking. Which is fine, a lot of people aren’t, you just should realise it. You’re referencing “salads” and “plain rice” and meat subsitutes as if these are staple vegetarian dishes - they’re not.
My immediate thought to all your objections is Beans beans BEANS.
Significantly cheaper and some are as proteinous as meat. I’ll be amazed if there isn’t some variant of cheap bean/pulse/legume you don’t enjoy. Chickpeas, frozen edamame, lentil, pinto, cannelini, black beans - you can buy all of these, dried, for absolutely bugger all. I love all of them and they’re fantastic food.My latest obsession is dried lentils - Boil 'em down to a mush, throw in various spices, veg if you want, some kind of fat, basically anything else, ugh it’s godly. I’ve basically re-invented the western version of a tadka dahl.
This and same. I did my best to be vegetarian and only really stopped because of health reasons (My copper was above 200 for a bit and high starts at 50. Guess what has a lot of copper? Tofu, chickpeas, etc. It was terrible) and I became the only in a house full of people. Which is a whole thing on top of disabilities to manage. I still when I can avoid meat when I can and certainly don’t touch red meat. Honestly no idea how people aford beef.
I will say back in my propaganda day I thought people only eat salads too. I originally went vegetarian to try and change my eating habits to force myself to try new things. Though, god damn I don’t know how I would of managed back in SE OK if you don’t grow your own produce. Its a god damn fucking meat nightmare down there. I saw someone talk about just walking to your local Asian Market. Unless you are driving 3 hours thats probably not happening unless something changed in that area. When I was in college the Asian Market honestly saved my whole Vegetarian life style at the time. That and Mexican food.
I prefer Central European cuisine.
okay a lot of which is vegetarian anyhow because meat used to be a rare occasion up until sometimes the 70s and a lot of is is also really easy to make vegetarian with no expensive ingredients.
I don’t know whether your culture has this concept or not
My culture certainly does have this concept. We eat rice and flat bread usually with stir fried veggies, boiled veggies in broth, or with lentil/beam soup.
If you categorically rule out entire continents from your eating, then uh, idk what to tell you. In theory you could try to europeanise Asian cooking. It’s basically what I do since I’m living alone and don’t have the time to follow my mother’s recipes to the letter.
I already know someone will want to tell me that being vegetarian can be cheap. I’m not interested in arguing about that. I’m just describing my own situation. I don’t feel properly fed by eating salads, and meat is one of the cheapest and most practical sources of calories and protein available to me. Grains, meat and other basic foods make up the foundation of my diet.
im sorry but this reads like a joke. vegans/vegetarians dont just eat salads.
Bean supremacy!
can confirm. had the most amazing chickpeas yesterday
There’s like an inkling of truth in here about how (for example) recycling propaganda pushed on everyone in the late 90s/early 00s is comically individual when systemic change is needed, but I dunno. I’m literally so poor that I might get evicted month after next, and I still eat vegan. “Bio supermarket”? Comrade I shop at the same stupid grocery store I have for a decade. “Ethical or sustainable clothing brands”? I buy used clothes.
Also BDS btw. If you do not give up on any other treats, at least this.
I feel like your entire approach to ethical consumption is fueled in large parts by ads. Buying second hand clothing from literally whoever probably ends up way more sustainable than buying new patagonia or whoever advertises itself as such. Now sure this might also be hard where you are but it feels to me the approach is all wrong. Same for the veganism, as others pointed out.
EDIT: I feel this might come across as mean-spirited, but I don’t mean it so just to be sure
What I think happened is that you listened to capitalist marketing about what decreasing consumption is, which of course means buying more from them, just different commodities. Of course they want you to go to the boutique zero waste shop that sells a steel tiffin container for like $30 and an overpriced grocery store with impeccable prewashed $8 lettuce or a trendy “vegan” restaurant that sells $15 burgers. Also I gotta doubt you looked into veganism that hard if you think it means you just eat salads.
You don’t actually have to think about it that much re: overall consumption. If you wanted to do it, you buy less often, buy used, avoid complex supply chains, avoid animal products. The Asian or latin market will feed you with grains, pulses, oil, and spices for like $50 for 2 months. You don’t have to be that extreme but global poverty food is already somewhat optimized for lower impact. Tofu is like $2 per lb and has as much protein as steak, just gotta learn how to cook it. For clothes, how often do you need to buy them? Is a thrift store not getting you better for the same price or lower? Going to the thrift shop and buying dry beans is not a privileged position.
Yeah, you see the Tiktokification of “anti-consumerism” tricks people into buying more shit.
Do you have any tofu tips? I mostly stick with cooked beans for protein, because while I love eating tofu from restaurants, I seriously cannot make anything with it that doesn’t end up being a rubbery flavorless blob.
You can marinate it in veggie broth, but also, breading and frying with mostly of corn starch makes all the difference. Like just dusting tofu in corn starch and frying it is a game changer. It crisps up so nice. From.there you can play around with spices and marinades
So many recipes, but I recommebd starting with cultures with hundreds of years of great tofu. Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, all have excellent ways to prepare tofu, often accidentally vegan or trivial to make vegan. Doesn’t even have to be complex. If you get a nice fresh tofu you can just cut it into rectangles and serve it with a good chili oil and scallions. Or do lazy man’s tofu - cut into rectangles, brown in a little oil in a pan, deglaze with a simple sauce like water, msg, sugar, soy sauce, shaoxing wine, maybe a little starch. Soften Chinese chives or scallions on top. There’s tons of ways to vary that last one it’s just braised fried tofu. Can make black pepper tofu basically the same way but add peppers and other veggies. Can use tofu instead of egg in fried rice, add black salt to make it eggy if you want. Salt and pepper tofu. Miso soup with tofu and scallion. Fried tofu braised in diy ginger teriyaki. Tofu banh mi, fry the tofu, make carrot and daikon quickles, add a hot green pepper, use maggi sauce, can’t go wrong.
If you’re struggling with tofu, and it always ends up flavourless, it’s probably because you’re not drying it enough, I used to always make the same mistake. Tofu can be really nice if you can drain as much water as possible out of it, then let it marinate in sauce for an hour or two before cooking. If you want the texture to be a bit different, I’d head freezing it before cooking makes the texture change, but I’ve personally never tried that. Coating it in cornflour and frying it so it gets a nice crispy outside is really good.
A lot of this reads very vibes based, like the eco labels and pivoting to fast fashion to try to save money?
They’ve deskilled you and robbed you of your education and now they’re milking you for profit. For instance, if you’re struggling with cash it’s more pragmatic to learn what nice looking clothes are durable and lasting, learn how to mend them, with a thread and needle. It does not take long and you don’t need fancy machines. You can get yourself a whole wardrobe overtime and be super fancy with your variety of outfits. Warning that this comes with the burden of appearing wealthy.
Nobody is asking you to be perfect, you’d do yourself a huge favor if you rid yourself of Neoliberalism and learn more Class based analysis. Yes they’ve sold you wrapped up exploitation, but you won’t stop it by simply giving up either. If all you gain is more treats to consume eventually that will become the new normal and disappointment sets in.
I buy all my stuff second hand and at outlet stores. Not only is it all good quality but I constantly get compliments on my fit. Granted that is easy when my go to look is cowgirl chic.
Yeah all of this. In a twisted sort of way I personally feel kind of good about not having had that much money, because I had to learn to know how to mend my clothes, had to get really good at cooking from cheaper ingredients. Learnt to forage for berries and mushrooms, to cut my own hair and others. Learnt to fix all our shit. And so much more.
I learnt a lot of the thrifty ways from my prole grandparents who lived really good long lives without much money. They always had homemade jams and juices in a cellar, potatoes and preserves. They never travelled, but they raised four kids on one salary and everyone thrived. They were so thrifty they helped me with my school books and clothes when my family was poor.
I do better now financially, but I feel so much safer because I know I can still make it with a lot less. I also know how little treats I need to be happy and content. Capitalism has less power over me. If my work becomes superiorly shitty, I’ll probably just quit and be unemployed.
It comes back to learning how to use value in life imo. And it comes back to agency and feeling less alianated. I can fish, I can grow food, I can sew clothes, I can bake and cook. I can fix my shit. I’ll be fine.
“My consumption choices aren’t going to single-handedly fix all the world’s problems, therefore I’ll pay people for the corpses of tortured innocents” is terrible logic
You don’t have to solve everything yourself. But you do have to be able to live with yourself at the end of the day, and I don’t know how you could possibly look at the animal agriculture industry and decide that supporting it voluntarily is a choice you can live with. May as well donate to Israel while you’re at it. Not donating isn’t going to stop the genocide, right? So why not?
I don’t feel properly fed by eating salads
I’ve been vegan for a decade and I think I’ve eaten two salads in that entire time.
Have you ever made lentils?
There’s a trick to ethical consumption.
I personally like eating babies every day, they really melt in your mouth
nothing beats an irish baby
The hint of ginger really adds to the flavor
In short, a strong belief that ethical consumption will lead to ethical practices is not warranted – purchasing as voting is a weak feedback mechanism at best and there are other actors who are able to influence the system. The danger, however, comes in believing that this mechanism can make substantial political change. Ethical consumption gives the individual the illusion of contributing to progress; of “doing their part” by making purchasing decisions. This illusion can detract, and probably has detracted, from trying to put forward an avowedly political agenda that seeks to mobilise people collectively to make the changes they support. Instead, it individualises ethics, it individualises politics and it reaffirms us as consumers rather than citizens – it is a part of the profit-maximising, pathologically-externalising neoliberal market system that has caused many of the problems ethical consumerism seeks to alleviate, rather than being an alternative.
If one wishes to “ethically” consume that’s fine for them but as you describe many people have an inflated sense of its importance. This is due to liberal ideology which places a high importance on our individual choices and their “moral” value, believing that those choices will somehow stack up or catch on in a mass way if one just sticks to them.
Of course this ignores the societal scale forces that drive the choices “consumers” make in bulk.
If I take my bike to work because it’s more ethical than driving a car it takes me much more time and effort to get there, of course this will never result in everyone spontaneously taking the bike/bus. They already decided to drive. Am I making an “impact”? No! In fact I’m keeping a car off the road so I’m helping reduce traffic congestion and demand for gasoline which reduces the likelihood of someone else making the same choice. What might make an impact is getting together with like minded people and improving the bike infrastructure or bus service.
Only with a change in (material) conditions will people change their choices. Individual consumer choices don’t change the conditions, the outside forces that push us toward particular choices are the conditions.
Ethical consumption is like voting - Yeah, you are doing something by doing it, but alone it won’t solve anything.
Doing something else to actively change the system would be way better and more worth your time. If you can only do one, do the latter.
As others have said, often the ethical choice is in learning how to consume less and still live an equally cool (if not even better) life. Learning ‘real’ vegetarian cooking is a good gateway to understanding that.
lol. assuming you live in the western world, your taxes go directly towards killing kids in the middle east. coca cola plastic is not even the worst thing you contribute to by simply existing. take it easy.
that’s not how sovereign currency works
True, a more accurate statement would be that our labor goes into it
I live in Western Europe. I forgot to mention that.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂. im from one of the countries your government exploits for cheap labour. dont be hard on yourself. youre not gonna believe this but when my dad was working in western europe he would have a coke after his 12 hour shifts, how evil is that😲😲😲 how dare we proles enjoy a bit of the consumer products we directly take part in creating anyway (our governments dont magically get the money to outsource the labour to china)
