purchase consciously: organic, local, fair trade...

I am:

• Buying products/produce from Tengu Foods again
• Shopping when I can at the local shotengai
• Looking out for JAS products in the supermarket (there are more than I originally thought)

Fair Trade’s a bit more tricky over here, but every few weeks I stop off at a little health food shop and stock up on fairtrade dark chocolate ;)

For now I’m marking this off as done.

I was on the Traditional Medicinals website and found this:

From Their Hands
to Your Cup…
The women in this photo live within the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Central America’s largest tropical rainforest, where they harvest breadnut seed. When you hold a cup of Traditional Medicinals tea in your hands, you are holding the passion, wisdom and work of their generations.
Please work with us to support these women
and their community.

We’ll donate $1.00 to needed projects within the Maya Biosphere Reserve when you click thislink. (scroll to the bottom of the page, the link is on the right.)

got myself a copy of the Tengu Foods catalog. They are a mail order company in Japan that specialise in organic foods. I’ve already bought a few things from them but have decided it’s time to start buying organic rice. Reason number one is that they use horrific amounts of pesticides on crops over here. Reason number two, I like the idea of supporting small-scale farming, in this case ‘The Vegetable Style Group’, an organic rice cooperative. A bit more expensive but worth it.

One of the things I like about Japan is that giant supermarkets haven’t yet taken over completely and there are still a lot of smaller, family run places. I’m going to try to shop more at these, rather than taking the easy option and picking everything up at the supermarket. The organic/fairtrade part is a little more challenging – although I did find a PROPER health food shop the other day. One of the things I miss about living in London is Green & Blacks fairtrade, organic dark chocolate, which is impossible to get over here. Probably not such a bad thing though given goal 42(zero refined sugar for a month)!