Greenwashing...

I’ve always been a bit of a rebel—I question authority, I don’t take things at face value, I like to think that I live on the edge, battling the status quo. I don’t know where I picked up this attitude, maybe it has something to do with being a middle child—neither the firstborn nor the baby, struggling to earn my due—maybe it has something to do with genetics (my folks could be described as having the occasional quirk...), maybe it was just my group of childhood friends who set me on this path. One thing is for sure, though, at least over the last year or so, that sense of NOT being in the mainstream is almost certainly incorrect. Or is it?



From things like the election, in the U.S., of an (on paper) progressive president, to my own casual forays into the halls of local politics and even to the broad, casual acceptance of things that used to be my niche, my fringe philosophies; especially things like the local and organic foods movement, green energy, like solar panels and hybrid cars, railing against pollution and oil companies... Well, often, the fact is, I just don’t feel so alone out here anymore.



I seem to be surrounded by friends, big and small, friends I never expected to meet; let me elaborate: today, I saw a Coca-Cola truck with a ten foot high banner bragging that it was a hybrid-electric vehicle that was responsible for cleaning city air; last week I saw an article in which our new Wal-Mart claimed to be building its new local box store using ‘sustainable building’ practices; a new Canadian Tire, (across the street from the old one) will be LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified. Grocery stores claim to carry local and organic products; new restaurants advertise local foods. I’m surrounded by friends, everywhere I look, trying to help make the world a better place by going green, buying local, even cleaning the air with Coca-Cola.



Why do I smell a rat?



Last week I saw Food Inc., finally. If you haven’t seen it yet, please, really, go watch it. Now. Seriously, I’ll still be here when you get back....



OK, you’ve seen it? Good! Now, welcome back; where was I? Food, Inc. is a movie that seems to be a summary of a lot of the information I try to share with people on pretty much a daily basis (monthly, if you just read the newsletter...) It encompasses everything from the dangers and pitfalls of centralized agribusiness in the meat and commodity food industries to the intimate connection between what we eat and our (and our planet’s) health. One of the experts interviewed in the film was Gary Hirschberg, a C.E.-Yo (...his joke, not mine...), president, and one of the people instrumental in bringing Stonyfield Yogurt into millions of homes all over North America every year. Gary, it would seem, was kind of a late term hippie; the Stonyfield website describes him as ‘an environmental activist, a windmill maker, an author, and a noted entrepreneur’; a little more homework reveals that he was a member of The New Alchemy Institute, a think-tank and not-for-profit research group of sorts that experimented with green technologies and that sounds like a page out of any edition of the Whole Earth Catalogue. He evolved into one of socially responsible business’s most exhilarating (on the surface) success stories. He is a man who has taken his values to the street, and by ‘the street’ I mean Main Street, the place where you and I actually live. His brand is no longer merely the best-selling organic yogurt brand; it is the 3rd largest selling yogurt brand, period. He is no longer David, he is Goliath.



I have often repeated language of Gary Hirschberg, both consciously and unconsciously, when describing my vision for our restaurant... How it is important to reach a wider audience, how our business is our activism, how my dream includes the ability not only to help support organic farmers, but to simply, actually, support them. Stonyfield does these things; it supports hundreds of organic farmers and is responsible for tens of thousands of acres of pesticide and herbicide free farmland, an outstanding accomplishment for any company and, in my opinion, probably an excellent step towards saving the world. Hirschberg’s latest venture is encroaching even closer towards my own with a line of natural and organic fast food restaurants under the moniker ‘O’Naturals’, a franchise which he claims that he wants to ‘become McDonald’s’. He speaks of these things with the passion of an evangelist; he firmly believes in taking the socially responsible business model right into heat of the battle, the thick of the fight. He is fearless, smart, and probably, I hope, does more good than harm.



Stonyfield is a grand idea, but here’s the thing: it is an idea built (again, in my opinion,) on the same shaky ground that has created the calamitous state of food everywhere. Everything about Stonyfield, everything about big agribusiness in general, is that instead of, or, perhaps, in Stonyfield’s case, along with, being about good, better and best, it is about being big, bigger and biggest. It is the same bloated mentality that has led us to the edge of the cliff and the same mentality that will push us over.



I don’t doubt that Hirschberg means well and has done a world of good. But by this logic, Wal-Mart has also done a world of good and probably supported thousands of organic farms with a single purchase order. Hirschberg is at much less moral fault than Wal-Mart, who is in the business of organics and ‘sustainable building’ to look good and to sell more products rather than for any deep-seated activist rationale, but he, whether he likes it or not, is at the mercy of the same flawed system nonetheless.



In 2004, Stonyfield came under majority ownership of Danone Group, the folks who make Dannon yogurt, one of Stonyfield’s biggest conventional competitors. Like Ben and Jerry’s going to Unilever and Odwalla going to Coca Cola before it (to help clean city air, no doubt...), this was a big mash-up in the ‘socially responsible business’ marketplace. Under the terms of the sale, as long as Stonyfield is increasing profits, Hirschberg will remain in control; he has also obligated the company to continue a policy of donating 10% of profits to environmental causes for up 10 years after his departure. In return, he pays back all his investors, and also, incidentally, doesn’t really have to worry about cash flow around the Hirschberg home, anymore. Ever. It seems like a sweetheart deal, and the Danone group looks good with an organic jewel in its crown. And, like I said, there is no question that a big conglomerate can do more with a single purchase than a million of me will do in a lifetime of small potatoes organic purchasing. So, despite the sale, takeover, or whatever, it would seem that Hirschberg’s vision of an ecologically responsible giant agribusiness operation is still under his guidance. For now. Until it is no longer profitable, or even just no longer profitable enough. And yet, it is still flawed. Stonyfield, Danone, O’Naturals, Wal-Mart... these business are built on the same premise that got us into the mess we’re in, the philosophy of go big or go home.



Another guy in the film is Joel Salatin—now here’s a character I’d like to meet. He is a farmer who describes himself in Michael Pollan’s ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ (you know the drill, go read it...



OK, welcome back...) as a ‘grass farmer’. By virtue of his success at this activity, he also manages to raise beef, vegetables, chicken and pigs on a farm in Virginia that can only be described as ‘beyond organic.’ His take, in the film, on the large scale farms of the world is clear, it won’t work. “The model,” he says, “is flawed.” What he means is that conventional and large scale agriculture ignores too many hidden costs to the environment—be it planetary or human health or even just the massive cost of inputs required to run a farm of scale. Most large chicken farmers make an average of $18,000 a year, and the cost of a single chicken house which is required for a contract with a large scale processor is about $500,000; now, think about that... This is only one example, a little homework reveals dozens more examples. The fact is that cheap food is not really cheap; it is a market, like subprime mortgages, which is designed to fail. Even Stonyfield, with all of its market share and brand loyalty will collapse when the rest of the system collapses. Cheap oil, as we’ve all seen recently, is also not so cheap when you have to start digging for it a mile below the surface of the ocean, and it is the very foundation of our so-called ‘cheap food’ economy. Corn, a commodity which the film shows to be in (if not the primary ingredient of) a vast percentage of the cheap foods we have come to take for granted, is only cheap because of massive subsidies put in place by the U.S. government. Monsanto, the world’s largest purveyor of genetically modified seeds, has managed, through bully tactics and effective lobbying, to all but shut down the time honored practice of seed saving—the only way small, localized farms will be able to survive in a world without cheap oil. “The system,” as Salatin says, “is flawed...” Understatement.



The film is amazingly informative and I highly recommend it, especially its central message about consumer responsibility. I wish a film could change the way we all behave, but that’s not really up to a film, it’s kind of up to us, isn’t it?



On the local front, we are hearing more and more about local and organic, about ‘Green and Growing’, about how these big, new, and likely unnecessary businesses (do we really need four grocery stores in a town of 8,000?) that are moving into our small town are now the ones who are going to help us save the world...



There’s a new word out there, ‘greenwashing,’ that’s used to describe this tactic—it’s the same type of advertising ploy used in recent history that made sugary breakfast cereals a ‘part of a healthy breakfast’ or like claiming that french fries and ketchup count as a serving of veggies and are somehow healthful foods. They can be healthy, in moderation, as can toxic waste (OK, in extreme moderation...) Nowadays, ‘health’, the buzz word of the last decade or so, has been replaced by ‘green’. And, with the careful application of a little green paint, suddenly everyone is green, like those healthy junk foods of yesteryear, whether they are actually green or not. Pesticide-heavy farms are good for us and good for the planet because they are ‘local’. Grocery store chains can sponsor organic events because .5 percent of their sales are of ‘organic’ products from China or South America, so they are suddenly ‘on our side’...



I thought I’d joined the mainstream, and it does make me smile to know that WalMart, apparently, wants to be like me. Gary Hirshberg had a similar epiphany which he described in an interview a few years back. He said that he had started his quest to change the world by comparing the good turnout he had received at a tradeshow to an outlandishly larger turnout received by Kraft; he had decided then and there to figure out how they had done what they had and to imitate it, but with organic foods. Large organic farms do something similar: they use ‘organically approved’ inputs like Bt in place of conventional pesticides, sewage sludge in place of chemical fertilizers, then they proceed to pile into giant combines and set out to remake the face of the earth in their own flat, unimaginative image. A few years later, Hirschberg, after following this path, found out that Kraft was seeking advice on green(wash)ing their company and realized that, in this battle he had ‘won.’ Somehow he missed the irony.



I hate to be cynical (I mean, obviously); slowly but surely, people are coming around—attitudes are changing, the fringe is becoming the mainstream. We’re still fighting the good fight, just on different fronts in a big, weird and complicated war. Hirschberg is a warrior, with good intentions leading his own crusade, and appears to be winning. He is also, thanks in no small part to his timely flying of the green flag, a multimillion- if not billionaire. And Joel Salatin, smart, humble and by no means burdened with such material wealth is on the other front, a clear and honest voice who is also winning his own share of hearts and minds. So am I just a rebel? I don’t crave poverty, but I would, as I think Salatin does, settle for moderate material success coupled with the satisfaction of a life well lived. But why am I unhappy and skeptical when I see the corporations, often the same corporations that got us into this polluted, illogical system we’re in, changing their stripes? Going down dirty and coming up green? Is it because I know, you know, we all know, that when it comes down to it, the only real ‘green’ out there for a big company, a really big company, is on the back of the U.S. dollar bill? Well, yeah. That probably is it.