Mindfulness is important. I’ve been thinking a lot of consumerism, and how difficult it is to be an ethical, mindful, consumer as a modern human.
The existence of supermarkets. Food is at our fingertips. We do not have to hunt, kill, or cook. We do not have to forage or pick. Supermarkets on every corner open until 11pm. It’s 10:42 and you’re hungry. By 10:58 you have a sack full of food. You don’t have to wait until the morning meal to eat.
Before the existence of supermarkets. When the morning meal would come, it may be scraps leftover from dinner. A bowl of porridge. Some eggs, maybe. No yogurt from a little plastic container and granola from a box. Unless you had a cow and could make your own yogurt, and had a storage of dried fruits and nuts and honey and oats and and a an oven to bake. No corn flakes, unless you had some old cornmeal dried up and an icebox to keep the milk cold. No frozen waffles. No blueberry muffins. No grande caramel macchiato.
And maybe, if you lived ten thousand years ago, there would be no morning meal. Just one meal. That somebody of your tribe hunted and somebody else skinned and somebody else cooked. And you share the meat with all the others, and then you wait until the next meal, whenever it may be.
And as modern humans, where convenience is king, how to we approach living as we are supposed to live, as we are intended to live? Should we all move to the country and start our own farms and kill our own goats? Is that the only ethical way to live? When supermarkets give the option of organic or bio and the Monoprix next store has a large selection of fruits and vegetables and grass fed beef and goat yogurt, the money still goes to some white man in a suit in a tower somewhere that the farmer who grew the fruit and the worker who killed the cow is not.
How do we be mindful, of not only what goes into our body, of what we consume health wise, but also ethically? Where do health and ethics align?
