I gave up on ethical consumption, and I want to explain why.
I don't come from a particularly wealthy family, and I work an ordinary job. But when I was a teenager, I spent a surprising amount of time thinking about ethical consumption. I'm not even sure what initially pushed me toward it. We hear about the problems of consumerism and exploitation all the time, and this isn't exactly a new issue.
Whenever I saw news about labor exploitation in manufacturing, for example in the clothing industry, I obviously didn't support it. Especially as a worker myself, the idea of someone being exploited to produce something I buy has always bothered me.
For a long time, I tried to buy only from so-called responsible or ethical producers and to avoid mass-market brands whenever possible.
Eventually, I realized that I simply cannot afford to live this way.
I understood this particularly well a few months ago, when I decided that I wanted to become vegetarian for ethical reasons and stop eating meat. I quickly ran into a very practical problem: a lot of the products marketed toward vegetarians are simply too expensive for me.
There is a bio supermarket in my city where I can barely afford to buy anything. The prices are genuinely enormous from my perspective. Looking around, I often get the impression that the people shopping there are considerably wealthier than I am.
I already know someone will want to tell me that being vegetarian can be cheap. I'm not interested in arguing about that. I'm just describing my own situation. I don't feel properly fed by eating salads, and meat is one of the cheapest and most practical sources of calories and protein available to me. Grains, meat and other basic foods make up the foundation of my diet.
Clothing is much the same. I simply cannot afford to buy clothes exclusively from ethical or sustainable brands. Sometimes H&M is what I can afford, and that's the end of the discussion.
And I don't say this to make some dramatic statement about how poor I am. My point is something else:
If you are poor, ethical consumption is often not realistically available to you.
And yet modern society constantly encourages us to feel guilty about our consumption.
Don't buy this. Don't eat that. Don't use plastic. Don't buy fast fashion. Buy organic. Buy sustainable. Buy ethically sourced. Check where everything was produced.
But why does so much of the responsibility fall on the consumer rather than the producer?
Am I really responsible for more plastic waste than Coca-Cola? Is my decision to buy a cheap T-shirt more important than the industrial system that produces millions of them? Why are individual consumers constantly asked to make morally perfect choices while companies are allowed to structure the entire market around making those choices difficult or unaffordable?
I don't think ethical consumption is inherently meaningless. I understand why people want to make better choices, and I don't think exploitation or environmental destruction should simply be accepted.
But I've started questioning the idea that the burden of solving these problems should primarily be placed on individual consumers.
Because if the ethical option is only affordable to people who already have enough money, then ethical consumption isn't really an individual moral choice available to everyone.
It's a privilege.
What I think happened is that you listened to capitalist marketing about what decreasing consumption is, which of course means buying more from them, just different commodities. Of course they want you to go to the boutique zero waste shop that sells a steel tiffin container for like $30 and an overpriced grocery store with impeccable prewashed $8 lettuce or a trendy "vegan" restaurant that sells $15 burgers. Also I gotta doubt you looked into veganism that hard if you think it means you just eat salads.
You don't actually have to think about it that much re: overall consumption. If you wanted to do it, you buy less often, buy used, avoid complex supply chains, avoid animal products. The Asian or latin market will feed you with grains, pulses, oil, and spices for like $50 for 2 months. You don't have to be that extreme but global poverty food is already somewhat optimized for lower impact. Tofu is like $2 per lb and has as much protein as steak, just gotta learn how to cook it. For clothes, how often do you need to buy them? Is a thrift store not getting you better for the same price or lower? Going to the thrift shop and buying dry beans is not a privileged position.
Yeah, you see the Tiktokification of "anti-consumerism" tricks people into buying more shit.
Do you have any tofu tips? I mostly stick with cooked beans for protein, because while I love eating tofu from restaurants, I seriously cannot make anything with it that doesn't end up being a rubbery flavorless blob.
You can marinate it in veggie broth, but also, breading and frying with mostly of corn starch makes all the difference. Like just dusting tofu in corn starch and frying it is a game changer. It crisps up so nice. From.there you can play around with spices and marinades
So many recipes, but I recommebd starting with cultures with hundreds of years of great tofu. Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, all have excellent ways to prepare tofu, often accidentally vegan or trivial to make vegan. Doesn't even have to be complex. If you get a nice fresh tofu you can just cut it into rectangles and serve it with a good chili oil and scallions. Or do lazy man's tofu - cut into rectangles, brown in a little oil in a pan, deglaze with a simple sauce like water, msg, sugar, soy sauce, shaoxing wine, maybe a little starch. Soften Chinese chives or scallions on top. There's tons of ways to vary that last one it's just braised fried tofu. Can make black pepper tofu basically the same way but add peppers and other veggies. Can use tofu instead of egg in fried rice, add black salt to make it eggy if you want. Salt and pepper tofu. Miso soup with tofu and scallion. Fried tofu braised in diy ginger teriyaki. Tofu banh mi, fry the tofu, make carrot and daikon quickles, add a hot green pepper, use maggi sauce, can't go wrong.
If you're struggling with tofu, and it always ends up flavourless, it's probably because you're not drying it enough, I used to always make the same mistake. Tofu can be really nice if you can drain as much water as possible out of it, then let it marinate in sauce for an hour or two before cooking. If you want the texture to be a bit different, I'd head freezing it before cooking makes the texture change, but I've personally never tried that. Coating it in cornflour and frying it so it gets a nice crispy outside is really good.