Ethics @ Rhodes

Within a capitalist socio-economic and socio-political context, every dollar you spend acts like a vote in favor of the good you spend it on. When I go to the grocery to buy a dozen Chiquita bananas, for example, I implicitly endorse Chiquita as a brand, manufacturer, and distributer of bananas. This phenomenon extends outward from bananas, of course. For anyone that has gone to the grocery, you know, there a million food options, from a million different companies, in all different kinds of colorful, ornamented distribution vessels. Visually and monetarily, navigating the grocery shopping event can be pretty overwhelming and stressful. Personally, I wanna get in and out of the store as quickly as possible; load up the goods on the good ole' Schwinn, and ride home. Because of the rush, I rarely take into consideration the kinds of foods I buy. I don't think, "Oh, I better get the free-range brown eggs that were grown in a woman's backyard down the street in the happiest chicken-den in recorded History," or, "Oh, I better stay away from Monsanto-grown products," no. I think: "these look like eggs, they'll do; these look like beans, they'll do."Of course, more than likely, those eggs came from a highly-hostile environment. If the farmer slaughtering them makes any money, he does so by over-feeding the animals with subsidized corn and housing them in dark, stressful hen houses. If the farm isn't close--which it almost certainly isn't--the eggs have come a long way, the distribution of which causes an increase in fossil-fuel emissions, etc. If the beans are in fact grown by Monsanto, a company that slightly modifies the genetic-code of an organism that has been grown for thousand of years--like soy beans--and patents that code just so that they can then have a monopoly on the bean growers in certain areas--in this country and outside of it. (For those who didn't follow that poor description, Monsanto basically sells drugs; first hit is free, then they charge exorbitant amounts each season, preventing farmers from re-using their seeds, something farmers have done for CENTURIES (?)). Furthermore, monocultures, generally speaking, tend to lower bio-diversity and require high amounts of pesticides that sometimes, but not always, get into the watershed, into your drinking water. 'Lowering bio-diversity' simply means that they simplify the ecosystem, often threatening indigenous animal and microorganism populations, et al. In addition to the impact on the environment, this situation causes a great deal of pain for the farmers who cannot afford to grow crops and make a sustainable living. I could say some more shitty things about Monsanto, i'd just check them out online, where everything is true. To circle back: when I buy Monsanto stuff, I'm overtly endorsing their business model. According to Sartre, whether I know so or not, I am still responsible for this action and the impact it has on all of the people that the purchase impacts. I could go on listing all of the things I knowingly buy that are bad for people/economy/environment, but I think everyone gets the gist. The question I want to raise is, after we've accepted that we are responsible for what we buy, what do we do with that knowledge? In what we do those purchases impact the way we relate to the world and the injustices that they promulgate?