Keep harrassing your Pak N Save about the chocolate – our local Pak N Save stocks the ‘Scarborough Fair’ stuff, so yours should be able to get it through their usual supply channels. Unfortunately, Scarborough Fair chocolate isn’t tempered all that well, so it’s not very good if you want to melt it and then use it to coat things. It’s fine for everything else, though – eating, chocolate chips, fondue etc. – and has a nice smooth texture in the mouth. Also, Trade Aid has an online shop, so everyone can buy cocoa, chocolate etc. from them even if they don’t have a local shop. Their chocolate is really nice (especially the coffee flavoured one) and tempered beautifully. They do add about $6.50 for postage when you order online, but I tend to do one or two bulk orders a year anyway so it’s not too bad.

And re. Fair Trade coffee vs. chocolate, my understanding is that coffee farmers tend to be smallholders who don’t employ anyone outside of their immediate family, whereas cocoa is farmed on larger plantations with many workers. That means that all it takes to give the people who grow our coffee a chance at a decent life is paying them enough money to really live on, whereas for cocoa a significant amount of the crop willl still be grown slaves no matter what the crop is sold for unless the plantation adheres to Fair Trade rules. For bananas (also available at our local Pak N Save) the issues are more to do with worker safety (e.g. the workers having access to protective clothing when they spray pesticides) and them not being coerced into doing things that will render them infertile etc..

I like to think of Fair Trade as meaning ‘produced by people who were paid a minimum wage and worked in conditions that weren’t wildly detrimental to their health’. In NZ, such conditions are enforced by the State, but in these countries where the State doesn’t do that we consumers can play that role for our brothers and sisters.

http://martinheather.blogspot.com/2011/09/political-violence-in-ivory-coast.html

Cheers,

–Heather

I simply assumed that you were what I imagine as the ‘typical’ lifestyle block owner/farmer: spending most of your time on your city job, so unable to put in all the work it would take to make the land even as productive as before, let alone as productive as it could be. But I could well be wrong, and I expect that I will be at least ‘less right’ as time goes on and your food garden etc. gets more established and productive.

I’m not quite sure I am convinced because:
- I believe I read that smaller units tend to be more productive, as smaller paddocks get used more efficiently certainly the old farm has more thistles etc. (except just after they have sprayed large quantities of expensive chemicals) we weed by hand and have got most of the thistles out so only small ones are coming on leaving more room for grass (at least that’s what we are trying to achieve!
- When the land grew sheep it did not grow potatoes, veges or fruit whereas we are growing more and more of these things.
- It will be feeding other people, whanau, friends and the church foodbank so I am only convinced by your last point in so far as the earlier ones could be established…
So as far I’m concerned currently I think the main impact that the change of lifestyle has on my Repentant Carnivore status is to make me more aware of where the meat comes from, rather than changing the whole “equation”…

However, my understanding was that the primary reason you felt you needed to repent, was that your diet was using up lots of land, meaning that poor people had to make do with much less land’s worth of food. If anything, I feel that on these grounds your home-kill beef should be eaten *even more* sparingly than that which is commercially farmed. Why? Because it’s taken even more land to grow than regular free-range beef.

I can’t remember how big your lifestyle block is, but I bet the sheep that formerly ran on it produced more protein per hectare than your four steers do! So, supposing for argument’s sake that the land is now producing 3 times less protein than it would if commercially farmed, you need to add in two *extra* vegan meals for every beef meal you eat.

I hope you have a big chest freezer! Otherwise, I guess you could make your local food bank even more happy than you originally intended…

Anything else seems to be disregarding the amount of land that you have effectively taken out of food production by farming it inefficiently – land which is no longer available to feed other people as before.