After last week’s earnest-fest I’ve been Zeroing away to do my bit for Fairtrade Fortnight. My efforts have focused on three areas: me, someone else, and the world at large. Inspired by last week’s interpretive dance I was tempted to express each through the medium of puppet street theatre but opted instead for practical action.
Me: I’d said last week we’d already swapped everything in the Towers, but taking a look through our cupboards and a few online shops it turns out I was lying like a horny President. We go for Fairtrade tea, coffee, hot chocolate, sugar, bananas and cereal bars, have an on/off relationship with Fairtrade jam, marmalade, honey, oranges, satsumas, pineapples, fruit juice, chocolate, biscuits, sweets, wine and flowers, and have bought the occasional bits of Fairtrade clothing, cosmetics and cards but there’s more we can do. If we go to the supermarket rather than the local corner shop we can also pick up Fairtrade peanut butter, Fairtrade peppercorns, Fairtrade rice and Fairtrade golden syrup. So we will. To get us started we picked up some Fairtrade peanut butter this very day.
Someone else: I spoke to a friend at work who doesn’t currently buy anything Fairtrade, and he agreed he’d look through his cupboards and see what’s in there he can swap to a Fairtrade equivalent. His condition was it had to be something easily available that he actually wants as he couldn’t be bothered going to some special store to buy Fairtrade guava flakes when he usually nips to Tesco for the weekly shop. We agreed on sugar. He says it won’t make a huge difference as he doesn’t buy it very often but, frankly, to look at his teeth I’d say he gets through a couple of kilos a week. As he’s one of my six readers and can now see this in writing, he’ll have no choice but to go through with it or live forever with the knowledge that he’s made me a dirty filthy liar.
The world at large: I nabbed some Fairtrade Foundation postcards from The Big Swap campaign to send to local store managers asking them to stock Fairtrade stuff. They’ve gone off to two Tesco Metros and a couple of corner shops in the vicinity of Zero Towers. If the 804,401 people who’ve registered swaps have done the same we’ll soon have Fairtrade bananas in every corner shop from Land’s End to Ashby-de-la-Zouch.
Photo credit: The Zero
