Lent update

All in all a week in the Lent is going pretty well. I guess it is easy to say since my study group didn't meet Sunday (the pastor was on vacation) and I have only had 2 days of organic only food. However, I would like to expand on my reasoning and how the experience has been so far.
As I mentioned in an earlier post the inspiration for eating organic was a book, Everyday Justice, that outlined the global impact of our daily decisions. Many of the things that the book mentioned were things I try to do already. One chapter talked about the impact of coffee prices on the farmers who produce coffee. Rarely does a person in line at Starbucks think about the farmer who grew their coffee and the impact just a few more cents per pound would do for their life, and how minimal that impact would be on our pocketbook. When I lived in England I became aware of Fair Trade products (shout out to Pax Lodge, Happy 20th!) because we sold fair trade goods in the little "coffee corner". The idea was really fascinating and I even brought home some brochures to show people I know who care about global impact of decisions.
Another of the topics is waste. We all hear recycle or reuse items to reduce your waste, but one thing I learned in the waste chapter totally caught me off guard. CAUTION: this is about diapers and the dirtiness contained in them. So me not being a parent I have never read the side of a diaper package. I know that many parents have also not read the side of packages so learning that disposable diapers are supposed to be cleaned out of waste before being thrown away was a novel thought to me. Throwing away a diaper with mess in it is filling a landfill with human waste, and that is a really disgusting thought. The author equates it to throwing the chamber pot out the window, except now we bury the parts that splat. Landfills are not designed to contain human waste, and the bacteria can seep into water supplies. GROSS.
Anyway each chapter talks about the impact of different daily things and one of them specifically talks about organically grown foods. Part of the focus of the book is trying to be more like Jesus in the way we treat people and the earth. Tomatoes are not something that grow year round so the tomatoes we get on tacos and hamburgers year round have an impact on the earth and should cost us more that ones grown in season. Heirloom tomatoes are now a novelty, and a delicious novelty at that, but that is what tomatoes are supposed to taste like. Having food that is genetically modified, sprayed with pesticides so it can grow in an extended growing season, with chemical fertilizers to produce larger fruits, and taken care of by a migrant worker who is paid next to nothing is not my idea of delicious on top of a taco.
I know that I live in a very politically charged part of the country when it comes to saying migrant farmers should be treated justly, I know that there are arguments saying that the people who come to the United States illegally do not deserve fail wages or jobs at all. BUT this is where introspection is important. The message sent to the companies who own the farms is we (consumers) demand cheap tomatoes year round. In order to meet that demand someone  must be exploited wage wise, and human rights wise. IF we (consumers) began to demand organic products and showed that we are willing to pay that little bit extra for those products maybe, someday the worker will be paid fairly for his service in producing our food.
This brings me to the struggle I am having with this specific Lenten promise. I am doing what I can to increase my purchase power on the side of justice. Spending one day a week (for one week) being so cautious about what I eat had only made me glaringly aware of how little I know concerning the origin of the food I eat. The sign at the grocery store is required to say the country of origin for "fresh" products, but that does not tell me much about who is producing the food.
We often see calls for donations to countries where people live on $-X amount of money a day need our help to feed their children, but what if we all just paid a fair price for the food we eat? Would the number of people needing our help to provide food for their children go down if we paid as much for food at the grocery store as we would if it were grown and sold at a local farmers market? The difference is not to great, pennies per pound, compared to what we already pay and many times the difference can be found in the flavor of the food.
Enough explaining, my struggle mostly has focused on the things that I have not noticed before and not mentioned in the book. Dog food and dog waste both concern me and require more attention on my part. Also all the cleaning I do, what is the impact of those products and the impact of all the water used. Already we use a bucket to catch water when it rains, but I am going to look at some kind of water catch system to use on outdoor flowers and for cleaning reasons. Oh the many ways we can become more just and better stewards of the earth we inhabit it does not only revolve around driving less and recycling!