I wish there was an easy way to decide what to buy in the shops; there's an enormous amount of choice, and very little information available about most products. Well, unless you want to spend hours online, trawling the end evil blacklist, the Stop the Traffik site, the PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) site, Greenspace, Ecoshopper and numerous others with similar socially-conscious themes. Incidentally, it's interesting to pop onto those sites every now and then to make sure the lists haven't been added to/subtracted from, if you want to make responsible consumer decisions. No judgements if you don't.
Yes, I'm a hippie. I worry about where my food comes from, how far it's had to travel, (and, thus, how long it's been out of the ground), what it's been exposed to during its lifetime. I'm a vegetarian, so I don't have to worry about whether my food was subjected to horrible conditions (pens only big enough to stand up and lie down and not move otherwise, ten chickens to a cage with the cages stacked on top of each other, dairy farmers allowing sores to grow on their cows' udders, etc.), but I know many, many carnivores who (despite their meat-eating habits) care deeply about this sort of thing.
What would you say if I told you that you could find out all of this sort of thing with an iPhone (and, this autumn in the US, the new version of Windows Mobile) app? The new Augmented Living mobile app ("AUG" for short) allows you to scan the barcode of an item in the supermarket with the camera on your phone, and it then tells you where the product was grown/manufactured, its nutritional information, and other interesting data like pricing histories. Awesome, right?
Before I get onto the *hi5* bit of this post, I'd just like to point out a few things.
1) Most people don't have iPhones (or, later this year in the US of A, Windows Mobile). Thus, only the well-heeled can really afford to be conveniently socially conscious.
2) One assumes that one would have to be in countries where this sort of information was registered. For example, if you were in a foreign country and wanted to make sure what you were buying (which is likely to be labelled in a foreign language) didn't contain something horrifying like dolphin or excessive amounts of mercury. So, if you're travelling to the States, you're in luck: you can find out exactly how much lard and corn syrup is in your food (not that I'm generalising here. In my defense, a disturbing number of American products do contain those ingredients).
3) I have a friend, to whom we shall henceforth refer as "The Aussie Surprise Fairy" (TASF for short), who raises a point about this. It's becoming too easy to live ethically and yet people choose not to. What percentage of iPhone users would actually buy the app? I would, but then I'm one of those people who go to restaurants and ask whether the hot chocolate is non-slavery (and whether the cheesecake contains gelatine [which is made from pig/cow hooves, for those of you who were previously unaware, and is therefore non-vegetarian] and whether the cheese is Kosher). I'm also the kind of person who thinks about these things, which your average iPhone user isn't. Maybe I'm wrong and I've mis-judged the trust fund brats of this world by thinking that they weren't raised to question the ethics of everything they do.
But still, *hi5* to the four young programmers who decided to get together and create this for us, and congratulations to them for winning first prize in the Consumer Electronics Association's (CEA) annual Greener Gadgets Design Competition.
Yes, I'm a hippie. I worry about where my food comes from, how far it's had to travel, (and, thus, how long it's been out of the ground), what it's been exposed to during its lifetime. I'm a vegetarian, so I don't have to worry about whether my food was subjected to horrible conditions (pens only big enough to stand up and lie down and not move otherwise, ten chickens to a cage with the cages stacked on top of each other, dairy farmers allowing sores to grow on their cows' udders, etc.), but I know many, many carnivores who (despite their meat-eating habits) care deeply about this sort of thing.
What would you say if I told you that you could find out all of this sort of thing with an iPhone (and, this autumn in the US, the new version of Windows Mobile) app? The new Augmented Living mobile app ("AUG" for short) allows you to scan the barcode of an item in the supermarket with the camera on your phone, and it then tells you where the product was grown/manufactured, its nutritional information, and other interesting data like pricing histories. Awesome, right?
Before I get onto the *hi5* bit of this post, I'd just like to point out a few things.
1) Most people don't have iPhones (or, later this year in the US of A, Windows Mobile). Thus, only the well-heeled can really afford to be conveniently socially conscious.
2) One assumes that one would have to be in countries where this sort of information was registered. For example, if you were in a foreign country and wanted to make sure what you were buying (which is likely to be labelled in a foreign language) didn't contain something horrifying like dolphin or excessive amounts of mercury. So, if you're travelling to the States, you're in luck: you can find out exactly how much lard and corn syrup is in your food (not that I'm generalising here. In my defense, a disturbing number of American products do contain those ingredients).
3) I have a friend, to whom we shall henceforth refer as "The Aussie Surprise Fairy" (TASF for short), who raises a point about this. It's becoming too easy to live ethically and yet people choose not to. What percentage of iPhone users would actually buy the app? I would, but then I'm one of those people who go to restaurants and ask whether the hot chocolate is non-slavery (and whether the cheesecake contains gelatine [which is made from pig/cow hooves, for those of you who were previously unaware, and is therefore non-vegetarian] and whether the cheese is Kosher). I'm also the kind of person who thinks about these things, which your average iPhone user isn't. Maybe I'm wrong and I've mis-judged the trust fund brats of this world by thinking that they weren't raised to question the ethics of everything they do.
But still, *hi5* to the four young programmers who decided to get together and create this for us, and congratulations to them for winning first prize in the Consumer Electronics Association's (CEA) annual Greener Gadgets Design Competition.
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