Unethical business

Another recent newspaper article caught my attention. This one is about California berry growers who are unhappy with new restrictions on pesticides. It has to do with the air pollution caused by spraying the fumigant. The pollution violates the Clean Air Act.

The growers say they'll have to stop growing strawberries if the regulations take effect. Only strawberries, evidently, make enough money to make it worth it for them to grow anything. No strawberries - no nothing, is what they are saying. They'll let the land lie fallow.

Hallelujah. Let it lie fallow. Let the soil recover from pesticide poisoning and then grow something organically. Something that nurtures the soil and the air and is safe for people to eat.

Honestly, conventional strawberries are one the worst fruits you can eat, when it comes to the amount of pesticides passed on to the consumer. It never ceases to astonish me that these things sell at all.

Why are people still buying them? Why doesn't everybody ignore the conventionally grown berries and buy the organic ones?

But you know what really gets my goat? It's the attitude of business. Particularly, of the farmers who grow these conventional crops, but also of business in general. Because this attitude is everywhere.

It's the idea that I, as a business owner (of any kind of business) have the right to produce my product for the cheapest rate I can. That I have the right to destroy rivers, soil, air, to poison people (as long as it can't be "proven"), to cause erosion, to wipe out species of fish or birds or animals or plants, to hire illegal immigrants and pay them starvation wages, to do anything I can get away with, for as long as I can get away with it.

As long as I can make a profit.

I can hear your eyes rolling. But look, I'm a business owner. I have nothing against making a profit. And you know, I could make a better profit if I covered the cost of my clients' groceries and went to the cheapest grocery store on the block and bought old, marked-down meat, produce, and canned goods loaded with perservatives. I could easily charge my clients enough to cover the cost of these groceries twice over.

Great bottom line!

But it's not honest. It's not ethical. I feel strongly enough about it to run my own business in an ethical way. And I feel that every single business, everywhere, should be run in such a way. No corners cut. No cheap ingredients.

You know, back when the processed food industry was in its infancy, food processors used "fillers" such as sawdust, plaster of Paris, and chalk, strychnine, copper chloride, arsenic...

Really and truly. And it wasn't China. It was us.

All in the name of increasing profits.

Conventional growing methods, using fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and mono-culture are just another example. With far-reaching consequences because we are killing the soil and poisoning the water.

This isn't the way to run a business. Yet we allow our entire economy to rest on it, and ridicule the people who call for ethical behavior.

Is this really the way we should live?