Making the world a better place...

...is so easy when you have this book!

The Better World Shopping Guide has turned me into a more empowered shopper. It has also had the added benefit of eliciting groans of protest from the teenagers when I remind them that Coca-Cola is far and away a more evil (and therefore unacceptable) choice than Pepsi. (Not that they don't like Pepsi, mind you. They just like to groan in protest about everything dictated to them from authoritative sources.)

The book's author, a professor of Ethics at UC, Davis, has taken all possible available data from the past 20 years on hundreds of companies; plugged them into a complicated database; and has come up with a simple, yet comprehensive, format for you & I to determine which of those companies deserve our dollars. These suggestions are based on each companies' records on 5 key issues: Human Rights, The Environment, Animal Protection, Community Involvement, and Social Justice.

For example, before I got my handy dandy Shopping Guide, I never thought to question why my chocolate bars are so cheap (except at the theater concession stands). The reason? Because up to 40% of the world's chocolate is currently produced using child slave labor! Yes, children are being lured or sold from Mali & then traded or sold to cacao plantations along the Ivory Coast, where they are denied school, forced to work for little or no compensation, and brutalized if they try to leave. (Try as they might, my kids didn't succeed in trying to convince me that this sounds like our house; I encourage them to go to school!)

In the name of research, I quickly ran out & bought chocolate bars of every kind from several fair-trade and organic companies (Endangered Species, Newman's Own, Dagoba, and Equal Exchange). I encourage you to do the same research yourselves. I won't post the results of our research, though I can proudly say that new jeans were NOT involved!

Comments

[vanessa]

Must. Buy. This. Book.

Let me know what you think of these chocolates... some of the fair-trade ones I've tried taste a bit stale.

[RedMolly]

Dagoba chocolates are yum-yum-yummy.

And both Coke and Pepsi are equally gross, even if Coke is more ethically tarnished.