When we shop, for most of us, the two key things that we look out for are suitability and price. We know what we want, and we want it to come at a price that makes us smile. But what about the ethical price of a product?

Sure, it's nice to grab a bargain at the til, but how is it that the stores are able to deliver this great bargain to us? It is easy to turn a blind eye and not bother to consider how a product came to land on the shelves of our local supermarket, favourite cafe or chain store, but what if we did consider how it is our products are manufactured? If we knew about the labour conditions of the workers picking our bananas or growing the cocoa that goes into our chocolate - would it change how we shop?

"Fair trade is a global movement that tackles poverty by making sure that people in developing countries are paid a fair price for their produce." Oxfam

Deep down, most of us do care about the people around us. And we care about our local area. When we start reading and watching world news, we start to care more about what's going on elsewhere in the world too. Exposure gives us an awareness and awareness gives us knowledge and the will to then act on what we know.

So when we learn about how it is that tea makes it from the plantation on the other side of the world to the cup we enjoy in our local cafe... or how the cotton harvested on a farm, somewhere equally as far off as that tea plantation, makes up our favourite knee high socks and knickers, we can be armed with a greater consciousness that urges us to make a smarter choice at the store.

It can be hard to understand the importance of what is seemingly a small change of switching to fairtrade products, but imagine if every city worker bought fairtrade coffee each day? That would be thousands more supporting the ethical treatment of farmers and communities. Buying fairtrade is usually only nominally more expensive, and so the difference to our wallets is slight, but the difference in the life of a farmer is significant.

Unfortunately, child labour is a huge problem facing communities that produce many products we consume regularly too. Fairtrade.net puts figures at "an estimated 218 million children aged 5-17" involved in work around the world. By purchasing fairtrade products where available, you are assisting the Foundation address the underlying problems associated with child labour, such as a family's basic need to earn enough money to survive.

"Globally one child in seven is engaged in work that negatively affects his or her education, health or safety – often poverty means children work to help their families survive. Fairtrade helps address the roots of child labour by offering producers in the developing world a fair price and stable trading deals." Fairtrade Fights Child Labour (pdf)

Often, when we don't make the smartest possible consumer choice, like buying fairtrade when it's available, it's not because we don't care, it's just because we haven't stopped to consider what decision we are really facing.

If you'd like to learn more about what's available in your area, please choose the appropriate website from below. You can also keep an eye out for the Fairtrade logo on products (see image above).

Fairtrade Association of Australia and New Zealand - It's Fairtrade fortnight from May 1st through 16th, keep an eye out for events!

Fairtrade Foundation UK - It's Fairtrade Festival May 7th through 9th, events listed on the website. Fairtrade UK has also compiled a list of retailers that you can purchase fairtrade fashion from, check out the listing including Debenhams, Topman, Warehoue and ASOS.

Fair Trade Federation in America - For those in the US who are keen to learn more and get involved.

World Fair Trade Day is May 8th 2010 - get involved in making some positive change for small producers and farmers.

Download a fact sheet on Fairtrade from the Fairtrade Association (pdf).

If you love a morning coffee, why not check out where your coffee starts it's life in one photojournalists glimpse into The journey of coffee in Timor-Leste.

View a video the gives you 45,000 reasons to swap to fairtrade chocolate. Oxfam "...takes you to Ghana, where local farmers talk about the amazing benefits they receive from producing fairtrade cocoa".

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Ruth's diary is the new novel by Fiona Robyn, called Thaw. She has decided to blog the novel in its entirety over the next few months, so you can read it for free.

Ruth's first entry is below, and you can continue reading tomorrow here.

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These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It's a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we're being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides.

The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they're stuck to the outside of her hands. They're a colour that's difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.

I'm trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I'm giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don't think I'm alone in wondering whether it's all worth it. I've seen the look in people's eyes. Stiff suits travelling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I've heard the weary grief in my dad's voice.

So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I'm Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I'm sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there?

Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat; books you have to take in both hands to lift. I've had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I've still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust.

Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about; princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad's snoring was.

I've always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I'll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say; 'It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for', before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It'll all be here. I'm using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I'm striping the paper. I'm near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I'm allowed to make my decision. That's it for today. It's begun.

Continue reading tomorrow here...

Over the weekend I happened upon a provocative conversation with a fellow train commuter that had me pondering about how and where we should share our impassioned beliefs. I boarded the packed train to Sydney and quickly realised my journey coincided with that of many teens on their way to a music festival: neon singlets and Smirnoff swigged from coke bottles was the apparent order of the day. Upon taking my seat beside an older gentleman, the only free seat in the carriage, I began reading my copy of the Weekend Australian. I was only one paragraph into a story detailing the latest strategy for Afghanistan when the man beside me struck up conversation. He spoke at me for the next hour and a half.

He told me he was 79 years old and I soon discovered that he believed in everything that I did not. He was a Christian author and a creationist who laughed at the the mere suggestion that science could trump religion. He went as far as to attribute Hurricane Katrina to New Orleans hosting the annual LGBT Mardi Gras celebration. He asked me if I had witnessed the Superbowl, it was flaunting evil, he said. It was at this point I could not longer hide my offence at his extreme views. I couldn't help but wonder if the man was deliberately attempting to elicit a similarly passionate counter to his views or if he was blindly evangelical. I think it was the latter.

As a general rule, while not compromising my own views, I try to ensure that I am not actively and purposely battering those around me with my own agenda. What's your tactic? Do you get passionate or keep it light? What are your rules of conversational engagement?

Body image is commonly linked to our self esteem, as such it is a contentious issue that provokes much heated debate amongst men, and more particularly, women, across the globe. When it comes to our bodies, one must consider the question: should anyone apart from ourselves have an opinion on what size we are? Because the issue of body image is also intrinsically linked to our overall health, medical professionals have often weighed in on the issue, urging us to observe a healthy lifestyle in order to avoid ill-health. Nutritionists and personal trainers exist to advise us on how to best work towards adopting a healthier diet and sculpting a leaner body. However, there are also many businesses that thrive on the desire that some men and women have to achieve an unrealistically slim body without adhering to the more sustainable lifestyle techniques such as healthy eating and regular exercise. There are crash diet plans, appetite suppressant pills and meal replacement programs. Procedures such as liposuction and gastric band surgery are more extreme examples of the lengths some people are going to in order to achieve what they perceive to be a more idealistic body.

Of course, one would be remiss in not mentioning the contribution of media to the body image issue. Women's fashion magazines often reinforce the idea that slim equals beautiful, whether purposely or otherwise. To the same affect, celebrities too have been known promote embracing ones own body at any size; such as evidenced in a recent article on Australian Idol winner Casey Donovan who exclaimed she loved her "killer curves". Similarly, Beth Ditto exhibited her comfort as a larger woman when she posed naked on the cover of Love magazine. Extremism on either end of the body image debate is almost certainly detrimental to ones health - so how can a person establish a strong sense of what is best when it comes to their own body, without feeling pressure and inadequacy?

An important consideration to acknowledge is there is no body image norm, nor should there be, we are all built differently.

We were not all built to pull on a size 0 and look like Jennifer Hawkins or Miranda Kerr, nor were we all made with curves to rival the likes of Kate Winslet or Nigella Lawson. But then, this is why the body image debate is so topical - because we have made it an argument based around how we look, often comparatively, not how we feel.


Christina Hendricks, Kate Moennig.
So, while there is no such thing as a "normal" body type, there is an average body size. In Australia, this average size of women is on the rise, with recent studies confirming that Australian women are getting fatter, faster. Earlier this year, there was national controversy about the use of Australian model Jennifer Hawkins on the cover of Marie Claire magazine. Many Australian women objected, claiming that Hawkins was not indicative of a 'real woman' or the average Australian woman. And with the average size currently sitting at around size 14-16, these women are correct, Hawkins is not average. But would a woman who merely ticks the box of being that "average" size, be a more positive body image role model for women? This is where the argument becomes complicated. Should we allow the justification of our size by comparative means, based on the fact that a majority of woman around us look similarly, or should we go further and question the average or perceived "norm" and attempt to discover what is best on an individual level?


Jennifer Hudson, Miranda Kerr.
Justification of our body based on the size of others should be irrelevant, though for many women, it is not. We compare our bodies to that of our friends, classmates, coworkers, celebrities, models and the general public. In order to achieve a healthy attitude towards our bodies, we must move away from this sort of comparison. We must also recognise that our self worth is not derived from the size of our waist. We can achieve a more positive attitude towards our bodies by acknowledging that body image is a health issue, not an aesthetic issue. To this end, we should focus on achieving our own healthy body, rather than attempting to emulate what may be healthy for our best friend, or a celebrity we admire.

So how does one determine their bodies comfortable healthy size? We can start by forgetting about fad diets, regular rapid detox plans, diet pills, surgery or unhealthy workout obsessions - similarly, we should forget about eating takeout four times a week, constantly snacking throughout the day on unhealthy foods or soft drinks or doing little to no exercise in a week. To find what size your body is comfortable plateauing at, one must observe what is widely acknowledged to be a healthy lifestyle - eating predominantly healthy meals at appropriate portion sizes and exercising at least 3 to 4 times a week, doing both cardio and resistance training.

Photos by Leanne Surfleet and natawiedee.

When you know how your body looks and feels when healthy, this is the norm to which you should compare your body going forward. If eating a healthy diet and regular exercise does not get your body to the point at which you believe is optimal for your health, you should consult a nutritionist to ensure your diet contains all the vital ingredients that are necessary to obtain best health, and a personal trainer who can tailor a custom work-out plan. You can additionally consult a General Practitioner who can help uncover any underlying health issues that may be blocking your progress.

In the end, you may find that your comfortable healthy weight is a size 16, or maybe it's a size 8. By being aware of what weight or size your body is most comfortable at when observing a healthy lifestyle, you are able to move away from rationalising or hiding behind slim pride, fat acceptance or national average solidarity.


This is a loaded topic, please be constructive in sharing your thoughts. How do you feel about the body image debate? Are you happy with your body? If you're not, what would make you happy?

At some point in the year we will invariably experience a slump in our usual motivation to perform our jobs or study. This is especially so after returning from holidays. With exciting memories of the weeks past filling our mind, it can be difficult to refocus our attention towards our work or study. Every day tasks seem mundane and pale in comparison to the time we spent away. New people, places and experiences, or even just the opportunity to have total control over how we spend our waking hours can fill our mind with grand ideas, exciting plans and a freshly adjusted sunny disposition and zest for life.


Photo by scui3asteveo.
The problem with this is that our inspired thoughts seem to dissipate with our return to our usual daily grind. One way to combat the back to work and study blues is to choose to own these inspired thoughts wholly and keep them in mind even after the holidays have come to an end. Identifying the way time off makes you feel and considering other ways to replicate or continue those feelings can assist greatly in bringing more positivity and motivation into your usual routine.

Here are a few ideas on how to recapture the holiday glee:

Plan your next holiday
Whether it's a European escape, a few days hiking in the nearby national park or a weekend spa escape, pencil it into your diary and give yourself something to look forward to. Planning an exciting event for each weekend is also great for maintaining motivation throughout the week - it need not be grand, but a trip to the markets, a night out with your mates, a show at the theatre, a trip to the beach, a lunch with girlfriends or any other activity that might be on offer in your town.

Get Organised
Use your day planner to make to-do lists and tick off each item as you go. Make a trip to your local stationary store to get filing trays, folders, post-it notes, notepads, pens - take control of your work or study load and equip yourself for success.

Use Words to Create an Inspiration Board
Clip magazines and newspapers with words that you identify with being on a break from your routine and brainstorm ideas on how to make these feelings happen regularly. For example, if holidays make you feel grateful, you could consider making a list of all the things that you are grateful for each morning. If your break makes you feel refreshed, consider mixing up your routine to replicate the feeling, say have freshly squeezed OJ with your breakfast or go for a brisk walk each morning. Keep the ideas you come up with close by, pinned up on your wall or in your work cubicle.

Health Blitz
This doesn't necessarily mean you must give up your mid-morning brownie, but consider smaller healthy changes such as drawing up an exercise schedule and moving towards more balanced meals. Research new activities to get into this year. Are there hula-hooping groups or a roller rink nearby? Exercising can boost your energy and help you pull yourself out of a rut. Fresh foods have a similar positive effect on your body. Check out the local farmers market at the weekend and pick up some organic vegetables and look online for a new way to use them. Teach yourself a few simple new weeknight meal ideas.

Attend Industry Events
Whether for the industry you are currently working in or that which you are studying to enter, attending industry events can be valuable for keeping abreast of industry developments, networking and getting excited about the intricacies of your industry. Use LinkedIn, newspaper community columns or local industry websites to find events, presentations or conferences happening near you.


What do you do to kick the work or study blues?