I believe in giving the planet a break when I can. I have a bike with a basket that works for quick trips to the store and a TGB delivery scooter that gets 60 mpg and can carry a week's worth of groceries. Every mile I put on either one of those means the car stays in the driveway.
I also believe in giving food animals a break. That impulse began by drastically cutting down the amount of meat I eat. I felt better, lost weight and don't really feel like I'm missing anything. When my carnivorous instincts do claw their way to the surface from my lizard brain I ride my bike to the local market and buy meat from farms practicing sustainable agriculture. Animals are pasture raised, free of crowded pens, feedlots, antibiotics and a host of other petty insults the food industry imposes on food animals and production processes in the never ending quest for more efficiency.
I'm quite proud of my green impulses but there are limits. Organic turkeys at the market are $8/pound. That makes a 14 pound turkey $112. The same size turkey at the grocery store is $8.54. I get why pasture-raised turkeys are $8/pound but I can't justify that cost differential. So I get the turkey at the grocery store and try not to think about cramped factory farming pens, the antibiotics, the arsenic and the flailing, sickening, blood-spattered disaster that is high-speed commercial poultry processing. If there is a hell it's got a Butterball logo at the entrance.
One of the local butcher shops carries Bell & Evans chickens, a grower that practices sustainable production on a larger scale. I pay $12 for a whole chicken, about twice what it costs at the grocery store. I can handle that. It's still mass production of food animals but it's mass production with a conscience and without the antibiotics. I can get behind paying twice as much to give those birds a better life and humane exit from their worldly existence. I'll pay twice as much for the companies at least making an effort.
But I'm not paying $8/pound for turkey. Sure, we could just skip it but I don't want to. We've been getting the family together for turkey dinner on Thanksgiving as long as I can remember and have no intention of ending that tradition out of protest. I'm not making a fake turkey loaf. Sorry, but that's just not happening.
There are limits to what I'll pay to save an animal from the ongoing trauma of factory farming. I don't ride my scooter or my bike in the rain, I take the car. Maybe one of these days I'll be taking the electric car, but not until we can afford one with a range better than 200 miles. I would gladly suffer the inconvenience of taking a high speed train coast to coast, but we don't have high speed trains so I fly and don't feel particularly guilty about it.
When it comes to being green I'm only as faithful as my options. Perhaps that tarnishes my progressive aura but I believe that one component of sustainability has to be competitive pricing. Sure, I'll pay more, but there are limits.