Practice What You Preach, Mama

Years ago, I started learning about how our stuff was made.  Where it comes from.  Who makes it.  How much those people are paid.  What kind of conditions they work in.  How old they are. The phrase "fair trade" entered my vocabulary.  (Not to be confused with free trade).

I am curious by nature.  When I started getting curious about the stuff I buy, I began research on clothing companies, shoe companies, and coffee.  I started making changes in our families consumption patterns.  I switched from Nike running shoes to made in the USA New Balance, for instance.  I stopped spending my dollars at certain stores.

But I conveniently never looked into chocolate.

Somewhere, lurking around the edges of my consciousness I knew there was an issue with chocolate.  I mean, they sell fair trade chocolate.  And come on, I made the very expensive diehard switch to fair trade coffee, and we are coffee addicts in my house.  When one of my extended family comes to visit we easily blow through one of those 12 oz bags in a weekend.

Besides coffee, I am addicted to chocolate.  As in, I will bust open a bag of chocolate chips in the pantry if I need a fix.

Have I mentioned that I love my daughter's New Moon magazine?  She loves it too, and spent a large part of the afternoon waving the new issue under my nose.  "Look, Mom - vegetarian recipes."  "Look, Mom, this is one of my (chat) friends who wrote this poem."  And then, "Mom, did you know this about chocolate?  You should read this article."

Damn.

This impossibly responsible looking redheaded girl is smiling up at me from the magazine pages telling me all about how she tried to get a certain chocolate company to change their labor practices and how they wouldn't do it. About how little kids slave away picking cocoa beans for terrible pay and such. I look up and see my daughter peering into my soul.  "We could buy that chocolate that comes in the colorful wrappers at Wegman's, Mom.  That stuff is fair trade."

I put chocolate chips in cookies, muffins, and granola bars (and straight into my mouth).  That is going to get quite expensive.

But my daughter is watching.

That's the hard part about trying to teach our beliefs to the younger generation.  Whether feminist or Christian or whatever principles we find important to share, if there is a whiff of hypocrisy about us, it renders our message irrelevant.

Talk is cheap.  Unlike fair trade chocolate.