Not Everything Is For Sale
Have you ever tried to buy real, pure honey lately? It’s harder than you’d think. Yesterday, whilst hunting for honey at our local shops, I stumbled upon a bitter truth about our modern markets—one that’s been staring us in the face all along.
Real honey isn’t really on the market anymore. So many people want honey and to fill that demand they made honey mixed with sugar syrup or jaggery. It has gotten so bad that some honey collectors go to the hives and come back with this mixed honey—covering their tracks right at the source.
The numbers tell us the same: according to recent scientific studies, approximately 75% of honey samples from retail markets worldwide showed signs of filtration and adulteration. What was once nature’s pure gift has become another victim of mass production.
When Pure Becomes Rare: The Hidden Cost of Demand
This made me think—what if we are just living this fantasy that everything is for sale? Of course there is real honey out there. Of course one can buy it, but it is getting increasingly harder to find. The demands of the modern consumerist market are somehow stifling the production of real things and more fakes are emerging which just fill in the demand.
The world has changed. Our free market system has now ceased to create more opportunity but in fact has created more illusion. We thought we’d be sharing more goods but we’re sharing bad fakes—forced to create bad fakes in order to make sure the demand doesn’t go to waste. For one thing our economic system has given us, is this sense “Why not make money off of this?” Let’s just capitalise on everything, regardless of ethics. Like bees transforming nectar into honey, we too transform raw materials into products. But unlike bees, we often compromise the essence of what we create in service of quantity over quality.
Let’s return to the honey seller. This person’s task of harvesting pure honey and then selling it at the price agreed by the market isn’t working out so well. People want 500 jars a month and they can only make a 100. Of course, they can’t make the bees work overtime. So what does one do? Their ethics will be guided by their circumstance—they might have a dependent family, a sick parent or a house in dire need of repair. So they will meet the demand of 500 jars but by cutting corners.
In the rules of supply and demand that should run economics, this person should be paid the amount of 500 jars for a 100 jars because there just isn’t that much supply. Most would disagree because we want our things at the price we’ve always got them. A little inflation here and there sneaks under our radars. But let’s look at the honey sellers, they only have a 100 jars worth of real honey—that’s their limit. If the demand is at the same price then they have to either choose to meet it by cutting corners, or just sell a 100 jars and tell 400 people to come next month.
In this way, however, they’re not only selling themselves short, they’re failing to capitalize on the 400 people at their doorstep willing to pay for honey. Now, the honey seller thinks, people don’t really know the difference between real and adulterated honey? So why not, give people what they want in a way they can’t tell the difference. Most of us have not worked firsthand with a beehive and eaten pure, raw honey so we don’t know the difference. We might think we know but we don’t even know how many times we’ve been fooled in the past by almost-original products.
Here lies the modern paradox: authenticity becomes a luxury when survival is at stake. As philosopher Michael Sandel notes:
“Markets don’t only allocate goods; they also express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged.”
What attitudes are we promoting when we demand nature’s bounty at unnatural prices?
The honey seller’s ethics will not waver at mixing the honey with sugar
syrup. They need the money and people are not willing to compensate them
fairly for real honey. They could take another path and just not sell
the honey, keep it for themselves. But unfortunately, we can’t survive
on just honey.
Is this wrong? Is this right? Unfortunately, this is just life. Of
course, it has something to do with capitalism but not as much as we’d
like to think. People have always operated first and foremost in
self-interest.
Beyond the Jar: Ethics in a World of Substitutes
As Aristotle once observed:
“To give away money is an easy matter and in any man’s power. But to decide to whom to give it, and how large, and when, and for what purpose and how, is neither in every man’s power nor an easy matter.”
Similarly, to produce purely for profit is simple; to balance ethics with survival is infinitely more complex.
We as human beings have an innate drive for survival and whatever the circumstances, we will push, with an extra force, at our conditions in order to survive. We are never completely independent so we will also make great strides to make sure those dependent on us also survive. To fault any person for cutting corners in the attempt to make a living, to prolong their existence, is in my opinion an immoral act.
We often make this judgement from a place of safety and relative affluence. Clearly, we who judge people of cutting corners, do not have to do so ourselves. This means our survival is guaranteed enough that don’t have to push against circumstance. However, we falsely project our conditions onto those who are facing an entirely different reality. It’s something to think about because in our daily lives we are not exposed to the struggles and challenges of the lives of others. That, too, is normal.
Consider the bee colony itself: when resources are scarce, they don’t compromise on the quality of their honey—they simply produce less. But they don’t have mouths to feed beyond their hive, no children to send to school, no landlords demanding rent. Their economics is pure, while ours is muddied by the complexity of human needs and desires.
I will leave you with a quote by Oscar Wilde that not only exemplifies my point but adds to it.
“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one’s neighbor that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him. A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man & Prison Writings
In the end, perhaps the story of honey is the story of all things pure in an impure world. The question isn’t whether everything is for sale, but whether anything can remain pure by the very markets meant to distribute it. Like the bees themselves, we must find a way to balance the collective good with individual necessity. As we seek answers, we might find wisdom in observing the bees themselves: they take only what they need and give back more than they take.