An uncommon breakfast
November 13th, 2008Topic: Discussions Tags: Alternative Economy, Environment, Organic
A story to share from this morning, I’d like to know how often this kind of discussion erupts from your breakfast table?
The scene began with Ale emerging from the kitchen with a plateful of delicious fruits; oranges, plums, kiwi and apples. Sustainability has been an issue on our tongues for the past month now as the My Choice! initiative rolls out.
Suddenly, the colourful plate of fruit before me draws my attention to its uniformity. Every fruit slice, identical to the next especially the seedless oranges. My curiosity overcoming me, I grab one of the uncut oranges an sure enough by hypothesis was correct:
I was sitting in Bangalore, India eating Oranges grown in Australia and my friends were eating apples grown in Washington.
The absurdity of my situation grew into a discussion about food transportation, genetically modified (gm) crops, pesticides and mono cultures.
So I related this story to my friend who had purchased the oranges:
“Imagine being born, to a city where every single person looked identical to you, acted like you, sounded like you when they spoke. How could you imagine yourself in such a community?” Well these are the communities of monocultures that we are growing around the world to feed our desire to have the ‘perfect’ apple or ‘perfect’ orange, completely oblivious to how, and what cost was made to get these ‘perfect’ products to us.
What joy could we have by biting into an orange that is of the same concentration of pulp and juice as the next. In fact, remember the last time you ate Mandarine oranges for Christmas holidays? How bland have they become? I remember my oranges being so much sweeter and juicer as a kid.
The conversation continued on to hair products. Shampoo. Recently, in my rare visit to a super store, I was persuaded to purchase an organic shampoo. It was about the same price as the usual Fructus product I usually buy. I thought; heck it’ll try it! To my amazement, it works great!
Now this particular morning, fully charged on a sustainability epiphany, I compared the ingredients of a fructus shampoo and the my new organic shampoo. Well, needless to say the fructus won the battle in terms of number of chemicals it uses, total of 23, 4 of which were chlorine related, and 1 was perfum. Whereas the organic shampoo had 5 natural extracts, 1 of which was purifed water.
The math is simple, but the question on my mind was why do we need conditioner? Where did it come from? And why are we dependent on it? The answer was triggered by a comment made by William McDonough in an address to Vanderbilt University. The chemicals found in shampoo may clean your hair stripping it of many essential nutrients necessary for its own growth, but it also drys the hair making it tangly and rough, which is why you need more conditioner to make it feel smooth and silky.
What a con.
moral of the story: buy organic (locally)
