my2cents

Yesterday I found myself seriously debating with myself over what honey to buy at the supermarket. Right next to each other on the shelve sat two 500g jars of finest Swiss honey and Max Havelaar fair trade honey from South America. The Swiss at 12 CHF the other at half the price.

While I fully support any serious fair trade movement I think it’s ridiculous to fly products around the globe that we produce just as well over here. Sure, I want the honey farmers in South America to earn a decent price for their products, but doesn’t the shipment from their place to Europe make up for the greatest part of the final retail price? Helping the poor farmer by polluting the environment?

Max Havelaar also imports bananas and coffee beans for example. While the ecological conflict is still there I’ve got better reasons to put it off as we simply can’t grow bananas here in Switzerland. Of course, we could simply stop eating bananas all together, BUT if we buy them we can at least give fair trade products preference over “some other” products.

But honey, for God’s sake, seems as Swiss as it could be! Beemasters have a long history here. After all, I earn my living here and that’s where I want as much of my spending to go as possible.

My eyes wandered back and forth from one jar to the other as the above thoughts tortured my mind.

In the end I decided to buy the Swiss honey, but I bought the Max Havelaar honey nonetheless. Why? Because I wanted to try something new for once. Next time I’ll buy Swiss honey again for sure. Would you, too?

P.S. In case you wondered how the South American honey tastes compared to the Swiss: it’s a wonderful honey with a unique character, smooth, but discrete.

Traditional (aka conservative) values haven been given up by a large portion of the society over the last decade. I live Switzerland but this unfortunate phenomenon can be observed pretty much around the whole world. I’m sure the reason(s) for this development are complex and hard to pin-point.
I consider “the family” as one of the strong pillars any society rests upon. Of course, the notion of “family” has changed over time. The size of the group of people referred to as family has declined. The mom-dad-2-kids combination may be seen as ideal by many in western cultures, but not too long ago a family was run by the grandfather or great-grandfather.
Nowadays, what we see is the absence of family at all. Mom-dad-kid combinations are torn apart and rearranged as couples divorce and move in with new partners. Single moms and (less frequently) single dads struggle to squeeze the exchange of kids into their busy schedules. I have never personally experience any of this myself, but I pitty all those kids who grow up being shared by their divorced parents. They grow up without the sence of belonging. In the worst case they make up for that by joining replacement families such as fanatic religous groups of all flavor or street gangs.

I recently stepped out of a train on a Saturday afternoon and witnessed how a mom kissed her sad looking 10-year old girl who was about the enter the train goodbye. Nothing unusual as such. Then I overheard the lady say: “Say hello to daddy, would you”. I immediately (and maybe incorrectly) assembled the puzzle in my mind in a split second. Parents divorced, girl with mom during the week, daddy given visitation/visiting right for Saturday/Sunday, and child being shoved back and forth. How sad.
Imagine how that situation forms the girl’s value system. What sense of family will she be able to pass on to her children? She is the new generation…