Motherlove BlogHer Sponsorship entry: GREEN

I am excited to announce that I'll be attending BlogHer 2011 this year!! I'm already registered and will have more to share about what I'll be doing there in a few months.

Are you familiar with a company called MotherLove? They are a company that makes herbal personal care and supplement products. I absolutely LOVED their organic nipple cream after Little Sir was born and already have some for Baby #2! Well, they are running a special BlogHer 2011 Sponsorship contest and this post is my official entry.

The writing prompt for the GREEN category (what other category do you think I'd write for?!) is:

What do you want to accomplish this year to make the world a better place?

What kind of things could I possibly do that would make a huge difference? All I do is go to work, come home, spend time with my family and friends, cook food and clean!

It's my belief that the small things are exactly what is going to change the world. That's what I try to focus on with this blog. Small decisions like what cleaner to use on my floor, whether to pay the $1 extra for cage-free eggs or support factory farmed hens, how I should discipline my children, how to spend my free time, and even how I evaluate what makes a good book or movie.

Sometimes I wish I could escape the thought that the small things have a big impact. The other day, after 3 days of icy weather here in the Dallas area, I went to the grocery store to get eggs. I buy cage-free eggs even though I realize that doesn't always mean the hens are free-range. I would like to buy eggs I KNOW are free-range, but they are usually $4/dozen and we go through about 2 dozen eggs per week. So the closest I can get is cage-free.

Due to the icy weather, apparently the store had not received any shipments of cage-free eggs, and there were none available at all. No cage-free or even merely organic. Only traditional eggs, which of course were pretty cheap.

I knew we needed eggs and I didn't have time to go to another store, but I kept seeing the film footage from "Food, Inc." and other documentaries in my mind: dirty, bleeding hens, a foot deep in their own filth, trapped in an airless and stinking dark cavern, with their fallen siblings and colleagues' bodies littering the floor around them. Or the images of the birds chained to dirty bins until they expelled eggs. I thought about the articles I've read explaining why eggs were recently infected with salmonella (due to the filthy conditions). All these things came to my mind the minute I thought about picking up those traditional, cheap eggs. I thought about how the money from my debit card would be transferred to the grocery store and then to the people who put the hens in these conditions. That transfer would be my tacit approval of the poor treatment of these hens.

I couldn't do it, I left without buying eggs.

Does this make a huge difference? Maybe not. But what if EVERYONE did it? What if we all stopped buying eggs if we suspected the hens were treated badly? What if our buying power changed that industry?

I have heard that even Walmart is making an effort recently to change their food selections, because they pay attention to what people buy and act on that information. Think about their buying power. Then consider that they are analyzing what you buy every time you shop there.

Maybe it's not so crazy.