Fair trade is a no brainer

You can dismiss a lot of things as pointless or not worth the effort or sacrifice, but fair trade is a no brainer for me.  Making sure that what I buy is not being created/cultivated/made possible by enslaved children and other opressed peoples is important. God doesn’t like it much, either.  With more and more information being made available about what is actually going on in the rest of the world, I think I have responsibility to not plead ignorant to what is going on. Hopefully it will be easier to get a hold of products that are beneficial to producer, seller and buyer all the way around, no matter where you are. 

On this note, I am trying out the new ice cream maker I got for my birthday this evening. With local organic milk and half and half and some (it appears) fair trade chocolate chips (Sunspire chips from Ralph’s Thriftway) I have a preservative and guilt-free dessert. Sunspire is not certified free-trade but their site talks about the relationship they establish with growers and suppliers to ensure fair practices and stability for the farmers.  Is this enough? Should I trust their literature? Should I trust a certification? What other information as a consumer can I rely on?

If and when they build a time machine I will seriously consider going back and killing Hitler

So a friend and I went and saw The Dark Knight yesterday evening.  With the all the hype surrounding this movie I won’t give it yet another review but suffice it to say that I thought it was well done like most everybody else. I was almost determined not to see it given all the talk even though I was looking forward to its release.

The joker throughout the movie presents various moral dilemmas, seeking to expose ”the truth” about the people Gotham- from his fellow villians, Batman, other law enforcement and the general citizenry. It reminded me of the kinds of questions presented by ethics professors everywhere to their perplexed students, albeit as a murderous psycopath.  But I found these questions to be rather stupid, proving nothing, if but entertaining (not the weird ones). 

I think it is more insteresting to consider more practical and realistic moral dilemmas. Here is one we talked about last night. Is it a greater act of mercy to not have children if the world they grow up in is so wrought with problems that they have a good chance of experiencing, or worse, be the cause of great misery? But by explicitly choosing to not have them are you not condemning them to non-existance? Is this worse then misery, if some of their life would not be so? How about eternity?  If there was just a slim chance they would make it, is it worth the chance? Would you want to play the odds if you were them?

What to do with lettuce

Another Thursday, another box from our csa.  Do you like lettuce?  Because I have a lot of it. We have been eating a lot of salads. We have been making a lot of pesto.  We have put some in ravioli and in quiches and tarts. I will be adding it to my fettucini dough. But still there is more. Seems I am not the only one, and here and here.

You’ll never make ravioli alone

Donning my Liverpool jersey, too big jeans and faded camouflage thongs (make that flip flops) I set to work cranking dough through my new pasta maker as my wife takes bits of swiss chard, cheese, garlic and basil and forms the whole lot into soon-to-be-eaten ravioli. My 33rd birthday and my idea of fun is cooking. Well, not for the whole day, and with my back killing me (I’ve got to give credit to Italian grandmas everywhere) I look forward to an afternoon movie and dinner at Bally-Hoo in Tumwater. Do they serve bangers and mash? We shall see.

Back to the big jeans thing. I read somewhere that if you look young (seriously, if you really believe this) and you want people to take you seriously, don’t wear baggy clothes since it reinforces this perception.  So, my goal is wear as tight as jeans as possible all of the time, with black socks, Vans slip-ons and grow my bangs down to my chin. This is sure to get people to take this 30+ year old me seriously.

Old Freezer, welcome home

We just took a giant step towards eating locally during the winter. For the paltry sum of $30 we are now the proud owners of a smelly, old freezer.  I should give it a name like “Old Man Winter” or something stupid like that. Then I can bug my wife and say I need to go fetch something from him or ask her to get some ice cream from the “Old Man…” In a couple of days it will be all cleaned up and ready to be put to work. Add in a freezer alarm, a little gadget that will sound if the temperature goes above a certain point (meaning all you hard work is going to go thaw out and be inedible),  and we will be set. I forsee an upcoming weekend being a freezing frenzy. 

I hope I am not becoming one of those irritating people who start to see their surroundings through some single-issue lense but… as I walked through Lakefair this last weekend I wondered how much of the food being sold at the booths was local. Isn’t that what a local fair is supposed to be about? I know that can get irritating to constantly think this, and I shouldn’t be dogmatic about it. To be fair it’s more a fundraising effort (the food anyways) by a variety of organizations not farmers bringing in their prized zucchini.  The Thurston county fair will be more of the latter, I think.