My major chore at the cooperative where I live is as a shopper. One of my housemates and I make a weekly trek to a store and make an attempt to purchase enough staple goods to maintain a household of 11 for a week. As a community we are vegetarian and try our best to be as sustainable as possible. We try to buy from the Harvest Co-op as they are also a cooperative and we try to support other cooperatives particularly in the area. We buy organic if at all possible in our choices and when there is a choice to be made, buy as locally produced as possible. We have at least one share in a produce CSA and sometimes increase that to two shares. One of the housemates bakes vegan bread on a fairly regular basis and for the bread we buy, we try to shop at the Iggy’s bakery here in Cambridge. We are in the process of setting up an account to purchase many items in bulk quantities directly from a sustainably-minded wholesale distributor.
In the past, I had always tried to be a conscientious shopper but have become even more so in the past year and half since I have been doing the shopping for the house. The problems arise when we have items requested that cannot be bought locally produced or organic. We also try to get as much healthy variety as possible and still buy sustainably. Out latest issue has been centered on the prickly, succulent wonders commonly known as pineapples. We realized that it was imported as is most of the fruit we purchase this time of year. We feel like the purchase of fruits and vegetables is particularly important with vegetarian and vegan diets, so we make sure to buy only organic and free-trade. Sometimes shopping for such a large amount of people is difficult with many different people’s complaints and opinions, but we try to take any legitimate concerns into consideration. The first time we heard a complaint about pineapple being imported I explained that it was labeled as free-trade and we were just trying to bring in healthy variety as conscientiously as possible. Nonetheless we did not make any more pineapple purchases for some time. This week we bought another “free-trade” pineapple and the entire house was sent the following group of websites relating to all the issues around the problems with pineapple production in Costa Rica.
http://www.ecoearth.info/
http://laborrightsblog.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.globalissues.org/
Needless to say we will not be purchasing anymore pineapples, at least not unless we know someone is coming back from Hawaii and has a suitcase full of organic ones they’re trying to unload!
