[agjmills]

Personally, and I'd hope this is echoed by everyone:

I'd rather have less strawberries, that are more expensive, than have strawberries picked by someone who died as a result of contracting COVID-19 in a field whilst they were picking strawberries to earn money to feed themselves/their family.

[londons_explore]

And are you going to buy a different brand of laptop because the steel that made the springs in the power connector was recycled in a grimy workshop in Ukraine by a 6 year old child?

It turns out policing entire supply chains by consumers isn't viable. Either enforce regulations, or do nothing. The middle ground of trying to shame companies into doing 'good' things just leaves uneven playing fields for companies without a public face to shame.

[doliveira]

Words amount to nothing if our wallets won't agree.

[solotronics]

Unpopular opinion: the fruit pickers need money also. I don't think eliminating these jobs shifts demand for these folks somewhere else, in fact they probably can't find other work at this time.

[endorphone]

It's impossible to make these sorts of judgments without an understanding of what the end goal is. What the off ramp of Coronavirus town is in best and worst cases.

e.g. If a vaccine is realistically a year off (which is realistic, though we clutch onto every bit of preliminary news when in reality most are failures), in the relatively near term we will start to all have to take more risks, and the majority of us will go through COVID-19.

[majormajor]

So when shopping... how do you translate that goal into which products to purchase?

[joejerryronnie]

Everybody says this, and then proceeds to buy the cheapest, most convenient products possible.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

You can blame the customer all you want but you're only deluding yourself. Marketers, criminal farmers, pro business regulations, nonexistent law enforcement, and an economy that favors short term profits over long term sustainability are among some of the reasons why these things continue. It's not the customer buying random strawberries at a grocer that's the problem here.

[ceejayoz]

Not everyone; Farmers' markets and CSAs are available, and often quite popular. That said, this is where regulation comes in.

[cma]

Maybe they are advocating companies pay the liability, raising the price and incentivizing safer practices. Without some kind of labeling laws saying how many estimated to die per strawberry, you’d have to do a research project on every brand.

[fock]

yeah, because there's no way to tell about labour conditions in the supermarket... (where most of us unfortunately have to shop) I would really like to have shop to tell production cost/per unit like they have to do with price/unit in the EU. Not gonna happen with "Big"-Ag writing paychecks to the MPs though...