The Knife Maker

>coffee farms certified by the experts at Fair Trade, who always thoroughly research and monitor every operation and all sales of fair trade coffee //

Research it yourself; and that's the Fairtrade mark (I've not personally researched other fair trade certifying bodies). I did. What I found was a rigorous system of monitoring. Once a firm has been well established and proven to be providing the proper care to their employees, providing safety equipment for example, I think they only send a person to inspect every 3 years - but, like I said that's after a long history of passing the rigorous testing.

Never any abuse? Doubtful, there's abuse in countries with strict labour laws that obviates (or should) the need for fair trade certification.

So then we come back to my metaphor (you understand the term and function presumably, even though you used it as a direct statement). I don't see why buying a chocolate bar should have me being part of a supply chain that includes child/slave/below poverty labour and abuse of the workforce (like spraying crops with pesticides when workers are working on them). Nor do I feel that we're in such a state of poverty as a species that we need people to be worked hard without access to sufficient funds to cover basic health and education needs.

So, you feel Fairtrade fails? That we shouldn't support people working out of poverty by preventing multinationals working for us from offering below subsistence prices for crops? That we should exclude people from getting educated and staying healthy in the name of greater profits for wealthy capitalists?

You appear to be worked up about my metaphor being imperfect; I couldn't care less about the metaphor. From everything I've seen Fairtrade works.

I've seen it before, it amazes me really, that HN has railed so hard against those that are trying to outlaw exploitative labour practices. Perhaps there are too many people here making a profit off electronics put together in Asian factories by underage workers who eke out their existence living amongst toxic chemicals working hard every day to remain in poverty?

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http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/producers/default.aspx http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/business_services/product_certif...

I never did before - but now I do. It really does cut better than a serrated. It also gives the bread an interesting very smooth texture on the cut.

Ceramic knives don't need maintenance. I don't do anything at all to them, except you have to be very careful not to bang them on anything - a good cutting board is essential. And never drop them or pry with them - they are brittle. (So I wouldn't use them to separate frozen items, or on bones.)

Mine have some knick on the edge - it doesn't hurt the cutting ability, but I figure once I have too many of those I'd either have to resharpen, or just buy them again. A $15 knife every year or two is not that expensive.

If you haven't tried them you should.

Budweiser has rice in it. So what? So do Asahi and Kirin of Japan, Bintang of Indonesia and Efes of Turkey, and nobody has such a hate on about them. Lots of the people who claim to hate Budweiser will out of the same mouth discourse long and pretentious about the merits of sake. Rice is a perfectly sensible bulk grain to make beer out of if you want a light lager, particularly in countries like America which grow a protein-rich strain of barley. Plenty of real ale types will maintain that Anheuser-Busch uses rice in its brewing in order to save money, which shows a worrying lack of curiosity, as anyone making this argument can’t possibly have looked at the price of rice and the price of barley. Adolphus Busch in 1876 was a German master brewer of exactly the sort that beer nuts go gooey over, he was trying to make a high quality beer (as proved by Budweiser’s use of expensive Saaz hops), and he decided that the best way to brew a lager was to use rice.

I'm not saying it makes the beer worse. I'm saying I can't imagine rice being used in 1800's Germany in beer.