Gift-Wrapped Guilt?

And I bought handmade soap (crafted from natural oils by traditional Indian soap makers) as well as folded paper Christmas ornaments (made by a group that supports disadvantaged Bangladeshis) from a special seasonal outlet of Ten Thousand Villages, which is the company that distributes the Jakciss rugs. And I enjoyed finding out more about the artisans on the company's informative Web site.

But I'm left with a conundrum. I want to do the right thing, but I'm not prepared to make a career of it. It's not hard to find criticisms online about the Body Shop, for example; it's much harder to verify them. And I'm much less interested in checking out the story behind the bananas I buy than I am in the origin of those origami ornaments. What's more, despite efforts by nonprofits like TransFair and the International Fair Trade Association or IFAT (which monitors companies like Ten Thousand Villages), there's a lot of room for misleading labeling in our ethical shopping baskets. So when it comes to my food shopping in particular, I'm left wondering whether I would be doing just as much good if I simply bought the best bargain and sent the money I had saved to a development charity (as Oppenheim would have me do). Best of all might be to buy locally whenever possible, like my brother.

Even the purchase that I believe was one of my most ethical is controversial. I bought a lamb. No, not a lamb like my friend's heifer, which will help feed a family in the developing world for years to come. My lamb will feed my already well-fed family in the weeks to come. I bought it -- butchered and packaged for my freezer -- from my daughter's old kindergarten teacher, who lives on a farm and used to bring orphaned lambs to school to be bottle-fed.

I can't pretend that I was motivated by the need to provide the workers with a living wage, although I do know that running a profitable business helps keep property taxes down and therefore keep the farmland open. No, I bought the lamb largely because the more I've read about the lives of animals that end up shrink-wrapped on supermarket shelves, the more I've developed a distaste for mass-produced meat. So it struck me as a principled stance to know that the animal I'm eating led a happy, hormone-free life, even if it was a short one.

But try telling my vegetarian friends that. Or even the carnivorous friends who came to dinner last Sunday and could hardly stomach the fact that I had such intimate knowledge of the creature I was carving.

One man's meat, you see, can be another man's ethical predicament.

Author's e-mail :

sellersf@washpost.com

Frances Stead Sellers is an assistant editor of Outlook.