BAN THE BAGS!

Earlier posts on this blog talked about the bag mania that came in around 2007 when the Anya Hindmarch bags, made of cotton, were outed as being made in Chinese sweatshops...we then made a plain grey hemp bag which was the real thing, and held them up in protest outside the Hindmarch shop in London. Cotton, being a worldwide destructive monocrop, was used in those and other ecologically deastructiv bags worldwide. Here in New York these trendy bags are being recalled, as such bags, usually made in China, have been found to contain lead. Michael M. Grynbaum writes in yesterday's New York Times that consumers, such as Jen Bluestein, are finding out that it is fraud. Bluestein notes: "Green is a trend and people go with trends...People get them as fashion statements and they have, like, 50 of them. I don't think people know the real facts."

Duh. People don't, and the cotton industry is not letting on. So we now have these dangerous and idiotic bags when we could have had the real thing: Hemp. Plain hemp bags. Grynbaum notes, ironically, that "climate-change-conscious shoppers at one of Manhattan's culinary meccas on Sunday said they were chagrined that yet another good intention had gone awry." Shelley Kempner says "Bummer! We're still not doing the right thing", and asks if we might have to start using string bags. Actually, this is a good idea, less is more; we used these in Istanbul in the 1960s, and they were great. They were also biodegradable. But the problem with them is that no trendy lefty idiot shops get to print their name on them, so they are overlooked. Wholier-than-thou-Foods for instance has a big bag of its own, with its logo on it. But it is not hemp. Oh no, it is ecologically destructive cotton. Bluestein and Kempner were right. So when are we going to get it right?