posted 2007/09/06 at 23:13
Although my political beliefs lead me to really dislike and mistrust a large number of companies, I don't boycott that many companies, in large part because if I boycotted all of the companies that I thought were bad in some way, there basically wouldn't be anyplace left for me to shop. That being said, there are a few companies I boycott for various reasons: Wal*Mart (pretty much the epitome of evil), Nike (incredibly exploitive of their workers), Shell (the worst of the big oil companies when it comes to the environment), and McDonalds (the whole "meaty fries" controversy from a few years ago) are four that spring readily to mind. Maybe I can't practically boycott every company I'd like to, but conducting my daily affairs without doing business with any of those four companies really isn't a problem for me.
The thing is, though, today for my comp class I wanted to bring in hamburgers for my class. As I've done in the past, I'm starting the class out with critical thinking exercises and techniques, and I wanted to use fast food as a topic to get the class thinking about both the food industry as a whole and power relationships in general. I actually wound up lifting my boycott of McDonalds there to go and buy twenty-four double cheeseburgers for the class before we started tonight. (Of course, I then got stopped by two trains on my way to campus and showed up to class fifteen minutes late; it was a good thing I bought an insulated bag from Kroger before going up there.) I guess that now I'm wondering why I chose McDonalds. I mean, yes, McDonalds is kind of the behemoth of fast food hamburgers, but they aren't the only place I could have gone to. (The Wendy's locations in Michigan are offering fifty cent hamburgers right now, which would have saved me a lot of money.) Did I subconsciously want the students to form a bad impression of McDonalds specifically?
This episode is making me think of why I've ever lifted or stopped a boycott. I mean, last year I used Wal*Mart's money transfer service when I got stuck on my way home from North Carolina with a huge deficit in my bank account, but that was an emergency situation and I looked for a Western Union location for a long time there before finally stopping in at a Wal*Mart in West Virginia. However, there was one time before then that I shopped at a Wal*Mart, to buy a piece of electronic equipment that I couldn't find any place else and which, in all honesty, I could have lived without. I used to boycott Snapple and Pizza Hut because they employed Rush Limbaugh as a celebrity spokesperson, but I haven't really done that boycotting for a while now. (Then again, I haven't had any Snapple in ages; I always preferred Fruitopia, which is of course off the market now because I liked it.) Perhaps my actions today are making me think of the whole nature of boycotting and why and how some of us choose to boycott (or not boycott) certain companies.
I've kind of taxed my mind here without really getting anywhere, so I thought I'd just bring it up here and see what kind of responses I get from the rest of you on the subject.
What's funnier than you breaking your own boycott is the fact that a professed vegetarian is buying hamburgers for the entire class that they teach...
*shrug* I haven't (knowingly) consumed meat in over 15 years now, but I still buy meat at the grocery store for my family if they request it. I respect the rights of people to eat meat, I just choose not to.
Yeah, but nobody was asking you to buy meat in this case. What if one of your students was a vegan? Not likely in that part of Michigan, but still...
Trust me, after the students opened up those cheeseburgers and really dissected them, I don't think they felt much like eating. Of the 24 cheeseburgers I bought, I think only half wound up being eaten.
I understand the point you're making about being fair and buying food for everyone, but I can't think of any fast food items that are both vegan and pose questions about their nutritional value and the problems they create. This is something I weighed when I decided to do this exercise (normally I do this introductory exercise using those combination desk-chairs that are in most classrooms, but in this particular classroom we actually have tables and chairs), and in the end I decided the lessons to be learned from the exercise outweighed the risk of potentially alienating any vegetarian/vegan students.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon