Thanks for linking to my seasonal guide Kathryn. Hopefully between us we’ve got most areas covered :-)

Thanks for the sweeteners link. I really can’t decide about agave: recommend or don’t recommend?

Thanks for your links to ethical, political and environmental issues connected with our eating choices. Our world is the way it is, largely as a result of what we have wanted to eat over the last 10 000 years, and especially the last 200. As eating is one of the things that is ESSENTIAL for us to do everyday, it is one of the biggest areas in which we can have an impact with our choices.
Thank you for putting these more confronting issues on par with the more comfy, delicious stuff!

The ethical shopping guide is certainly food for thought – I don’t agree with some of the criteria. I think that it is too focused on company ownership, which means that other priorities are over-ridden. For example I always buy Ardmona canned tomatoes because they are Product of Australia. According to the guide the downside of this brand is 30 % ownership by Coca-cola. For me I think that the product itself being local is more important than the company ownership. Ardmona are the only canned tomatoes at my local supermarket which are local rather than imported, so the company ownership takes the back seat in my decision. In an ideal world I’d choose something where the product and the company were both local.

There are many issues involved in making ethical choices about food. I guess the more informed you are about each issue the easier it is to choose your personal priorities. The tick and cross method used by this guide is too black and white for me when the issues at stake are so complex.

I have the Ethical Shopping Guide too, and have found it very useful as a base line of information. I agree that the information given is fairly limited, but this is not surprising given the constraints of producing an accessable, easily understandable, cheap pocket sized book.
I have found that the best way to be more ethical, and healthier, is to avoid supermarkets and packaged food as much as possible.
I understand that some products are simply impossible to find outside supermarkets, or without packaging.
But in the case of tinned tomatoes, you might want to try investigating Meditterranean community networks, as many older Meditterrean folk still grow HEAPS of tomatoes, and presumably might be willing to sell some of their preserved produce!

Making ethical food choices is generally a compromise, choosing which aspect you want to prioritize. I agree that locally produced probably gives more bang-for-buck for our communities/nations. However, we shouldn’t underestimate the kind of power that we are choosing to give to multinational companies by supporting them financially, power that they use and abuse in all sorts of unaccountable, non-transperant ways, all over the world.