Selfsufficientish.com

Hi all, been quietly following on and off for a while now, and have a question to share/ask....

I havent brought groceries or anything from the 'Big 4' for several years now, deliberately for ethical reasons. I live in a small town with a Booths and Co Op and a medium quality local veggie shop [which my partner doesnt much like, but is being encouraged to use] We tend to manage locally, more with Booths than local veg shop these days, with the odd Aldi shop in nearby town, once a month or so. I have suggested to him I want to use local shop more and he is ok with this in principle, but he does like his luxuries/treats. We grow some veggies and fruit, but not a lot.

Soooo, anyone got any comments regarding ethical choice of stores ? How does Aldi fit into the picture ? And Booths ? Any other suggestions ? sadly the veg box scheme I used to get no longer comes out this far, I have asked several times, but no.

Thanks in advance

Sarah

Have you heard of these people http://www.northernharvest.co.uk/, just a quick google. Some suggestions are find a buying group, maybe your local Friends of the Earth Group may know of some, or start your own buying group for good, you can get organic and ethically sourced goods from Infinity Foods or Suma Foods. I used to buy from Infinity and would get a few people together to make up the minimum order, most of the stuff I ordered was for us so we would get a good order twice a year. With what I grew it kept shopping outside to a minimum and we got the milkman to deliver our organic milk in bottles so we didn't have to go to the shops very much at all.

Thanks for that, I do also buy from Suma with a few friends. Will look into the box scheme later on.

Much appreciated.

Blimey, we used to shop with them before moving up here. Not cheap but lovely quality - mind you we've not bought from them since 2007!

All shops have to cover their costs and make something extra (profits) to stay in business. How they do that is always open to question and they will all quite regularly get caught doing something that isn't environmentally friendly. Problem is that most of the population just wants cheap not ethics. Until society changes big time most shops are going to go for any option that keeps up their sales.

So if you can buy directly from a supplier (eggs from someone who keeps hens, meat direct from the farm gate where you know that the farmer has bred the animal and how he has kept it, vegetables directly from the grower) you really have no idea what you are buying in the way of food. Food miles are another mire.

Clothes are a far bigger issue as we make so few in the UK. Although the cheap clothes from abroad provide employment in places where there is a lot of poverty, the conditions are usually from bad to worse. Same goes for the material from which are clothes are made. If you can buy second hand then you are making things slightly better but second hand is getting more difficult.

The only thing that you can really do is to buy as little as necessary to live in a way that you call comfortable.