Where my thoughts are at

A large part of my February break was spent talking to a friend of mine, who I will not name for privacy reasons. We were talking about food, which led to a discussion about Jack Monroe's Cooking on a Bootstrap. Cooking on a Bootstrap is a collection of recipes that cost very little to obtain the ingredients of and are fairly easy to make. It came up in discussion that Jack Monroe grew up with a low income that did not allow for excess spending by any means- hence the reason most of her recipes cost under one dollar to make. When I asked my friend how this interest in Cooking on a Bootstrap came about, he told me that he grew up in a house where fresh, healthy food was not always available. His mother wasn't making nearly enough money to support three children by "luxury" standards- dinners were often frozen TV dinners. This led me to addressing a factor of why the world isn't 100% ethical that I had been avoiding for far too long: cost and privilege.

This is what I would consider a breakthrough moment that should have happened a long time ago for me. I was always aware of it, but it becomes very real when low-income standards impact those closest to you. It is not as simple as "getting a better job." It is not a "pay now or pay later" situation for all of us. The question is not "well, why are you poor?" anymore, nor should it have ever been. The question is "How do we make ethical cheap enough for everyone?"

This is something I'll be facing head-on in just a matter of months. I'm already falling slowly into the impending doom of student debt along with my friends who are heading off to college as well. The student budget doesn't exactly include zero-waste vegan shampoo bars from Lush as opposed to the two-dollar bottle of VO5 that does the same job. When you're eating on a meal plan that's draining your bank account, who's to say you have the money to visit the farmer's market for locally-grown organic produce? Not me. How do we make financially burdening situations ones where ethical can be an option?

That's where I'm at with my thoughts as it currently stands. To reiterate, my main questions right now are:

1. How do we make ethical affordable for a vast amount of demographics across socioeconomic backgrounds and living situations?

2. How can college students be more ethical in their consumption?

3. What initiatives can colleges take to help students be more innately ethical?