La justicia de comprar

I've been having a major ethical dilemma since before I even applied for the Mercy Volunteer Corps: for people who are living on limited means, is it better to spend extra on fair trade items or to leave that to people with disposable income?  We talked a lot about this in my Food and Justice class junior year, but now that I am in the real world with a very small living stipend, it seems much more relevant.

Today, as I was standing in the grocery store looking at coffee, I had a very strong urge to buy a fair trade option.  There were two problems with this.  First, there were no fair trade options.  Silly me, thinking a small grocery store in Georgia would carry such things.  Secondly, how would I tell my roommates that I spent twice as much money as necessary on coffee, which only two of us drink anyway?  I would want to talk about being at the cooperative in Monteverde, Costa Rica, and what a huge difference our purchasing power makes for people around the world.  And then I would get all too excited and just make people not want to listen anymore.

It's kind of like the whole not eating meat thing.  I don't want to be preachy, but I'm just not comfortable buying into the factory farm system in the U.S.  There seem to be a large number of small, local farms that I might consider buying from, but I'm sure the costs would be significantly higher than traditional grocery stores, and $110/week isn't very much to feed four people when you start buying "fancy" stuff.

For some reason, this dilemma seems much more relevant with food than with anything else.  But it's still in the back of my mind whenever we need to buy something for the house.  Should we go to Walmart, where things are generally cheaper at the expense of millions of workers around the globe?  Would we be wasting money otherwise?

I know that nothing will change in the world if only some of the most privileged people use their purchasing power to buy just products.  But I also know that it's hard to justify spending more than the bare minimum on products when your budget is small.

The debate is endless in my head.