I Used An App To Buy Only Ethical Food. It Was Really Hard.

As I walked up to the banana pileup, I knew I was in trouble. Sure, those things are an excellent (and affordable) healthy snack, but they are almost universally sourced from producers with serious ethical issues. Yet I still wanted them. What would Michael Pollan do?! Sheepishly, I scanned the banana barcode using HowGood, a free app intended to help shoppers make more ethical food purchases. I’d been using the app all week to try to make all the “right” choices at the grocery store. The app revealed, unsurprisingly, that the bananas did not meet HowGood’s sustainability standards, but there were no other banana options in the store. There were also no other options that met the app’s standards, it turned out, in two other stores where I looked for a better alternative. Eventually, I bit my lip and bought some verboten bananas. The app that led to my banana boondoggle was created by brothers Arthur and Alexander Gillett in 2007 with the aim of creating an unbiased, one-stop source of information about food companies’ ethical practices and histories, cutting through the confusing web of product labels, academic studies and Internet hot takes to separate the greenwashers from the genuine foodie heroes. The app relies on a research team — which includes input from hundreds of scientists, academics, farmers and grocers — that has rated over 200,000 products across 70 different indicators that fit into three broader categories. They...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news