False Promises

Vermont’s first-in-the-nation GMO labeling law went into effect this week. I consider that a very good thing, far superior to the kludged-together industry-giveaway federal version currently under discussion in Congress.

But it got me thinking about the promise the food industry made when GMOs were first surfacing about twenty years ago: genetic engineering would enable agriculture to reduce or eliminate pesticides and herbicides.

The unfortunate reality: most common GMO crops are specifically engineered to tolerate larger and more pervasive doses of agricultural chemicals. In particular, these crops are created to tolerate massive levels of Monsanto’s Roundup (glyphosphate) weedkiller, which would have killed the pre-GMO versions.

There probably are good uses for very careful deployment of thoroughly tested GMO experiments. Janine Benyus, in her wonderful book Biomimicry, discusses some of the possibilities. But so far, we’ve been sold a false bill of goods.

This is the latest lie in the chemicalization and commoditization of the world by some of the most powerful corporations in the world. And it’s been going on a long time.

 

Commercial farm. Photo by Jose Conejo Saenz.
Commercial farm. Photo by Jose Conejo Saenz.

I’m too young to remember Edward Bernays’ 1929 mock-feminist “Torches of Freedom” campaign to get tens of thousands of women smoking, or the claim in the 1950s that nuclear power—one of the nastiest technologies ever foisted on us—would generate electricity that was “too cheap to meter.”

But I do remember the promise that paying up front every month for cable TV would allow ad-free broadcasting. Ha!

In perhaps a different category is the claims of the “Green Revolution” advocates of the 1940, 50s and 60s that chemiculture was the only way to solve world hunger. This is different because…they probably believed their own message. It wasn’t a lie; it was the truth as they knew it then. Now we know that long-term chemiculture kills the soil, and thus reduces fertility overall. We also know a lot more about how to grow better quality, higher quantity organic foods.

Unnecessary Obsolescence

There’s a related but different type of false promise: the idea that a certain technology will make your life better, and will be there when you need it. Too often, however, the products are wrapped up in pressure to upgrade, and then upgrade again.

Now, I don’t object to upgrading a product so it only runs on new hardware, as long as the old computer will continue to run the new version. As an example, the 2011 version of Microsoft Office has a much better version of PowerPoint than the 2004 version I run on my nine-year-old desktop Mac. That’s OK; I’m willing to do all my slide creation on my newer laptop.

But I do object—I consider it immoral—that Skype, Dropbox, and GoToMeeting (to name three) have yanked away the ability of perfectly good older machines to even run their product. GoToMeeting, which long ago stopped running on OS 10.5 and older Macs, now requires either the Yosemite or El Capitan operating systems. There are very good reasons not to upgrade an older, slower Mac to these versions; I only did it a few weeks ago after upgrading my hardware with an 1000 gigabyte drive and extra RAM. Luckily, the upgrade was completed before I was leading a webinar over that platform. But I was pretty shocked when I needed to test a microphone with that platform and determine if the problem was in my computer or in the new mic. I tried to run a GoToMeeting test with my wife’s OS 10.8 laptop. No go.

If we don’t have all the features, so what! We didn’t have them when we bought our machines, but we had a working program. If they won’t provide technical support, oh, well. By this time, we should have figured out how to do what we need to do. Why should something that runs perfectly well on older hardware be sabotaged by its manufacturer to force a hardware upgrade?

As an environmentalist and a frugalist, I want any product I buy to last as long as possible. It’s better for the earth and for my budget. When companies stop allowing perfectly functional software to work on older platforms, they kick themselves out of a warm and sunny spot in my heart.

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Urban bicyclists taking a break
Urban bicyclists taking a break

What surprised me about Seth Godin’s blog post today on cars vs bicycles was the way he based his pro-bike arguments in classic liberal altruism: protect the underdog, ensure the safety of the less powerful. This is even more remarkable because he lives in New York City, whre bikes have clear superiority over cars for many purposes. (His tounge-in-cheek pro-car arguments, on the other hand, were like the modern Republican Party: I have more power than you, so get out of my way.)

I’m a big believer in convincing by harnessing the reader/listener/viewer’s enlightened self-interest. So I’d rewrite his pro-bike list with these eight positive reasons:

  • In dense urban areas, you’ll get there much faster on a bike than in a car, for trips of up to five and maybe as much as seven miles, especially in rush hour
  • You can park within a few feet of your destination (in big cities, I often start looking for a parking space half a mile/one kilometer ahead, and sometimes don’t find a space until a mile/2KM on the other side)
  • In less populated areas, the bike provides a healthy, fun workout
  • You notice more on a bike: stores and restaurants to check out, architectural details, big scenic vista, some ripe and yummy fruit to pick on a wild raspberry vine, that gorgeous hawk soaring above you
  • You enjoy that wonderful feeling of being outside with the breeze and sun
  • Your carbon footprint during your trip is reduced by orders of magnitude
  • You get to smile and be smiled upon by other people; positive human connection, no matter how fleeting, is a good thing, and hard to achieve encased in a ton or two of steel and plastic
  • Bikes are waaay cheaper—bike economics: outright purchase of something between $200 for a decent used street bike on up to, say, $600 for a new one of better quality, maintenance costs of $50-$100 per year, fuel cost of zero; car economics: at minimum, $5000 plus hundreds or thousands in annual maintenance for a functional used car with a remaining lifespan of three years or more, plus costs of fuel and insurance, on up to several tens of thousands for a new one.

Of course, Seth is using the bike vs. car argument as a metaphor for the caring vs. selfish economy. But as an avid biker (going back to commuting to high school in New York City, and continuing through my current rural lifestyle)—and a benefit-focused marketer, I had to point out that bikes do actually offer a number of real advantages.

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Whole grain cracker (stock photo, not the brand I'm writing about)
Whole grain cracker (stock photo, not the brand I’m writing about)

In the next town over, there’s a store I frequent that sells remaindered natural foods. I bought some whole-grain rye crackers there recently, costing 99 cents for an 8.8 ounce package. Yesterday I noticed this astonishing bit of small print on the label:

Made in England from local and imported ingredients…Imported and distributed by [address in Australia] and [address in New Zealand].

Our nearest full-scale international airport is in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, about 100 miles away. Googling the distances, it’s about 20,000 miles from England to Boston via either Australia or New Zealand.

The cracker label does something very odd about  ingredients: wholegrain rye flour and salt are listed, and then—presumably because they’re recycling the same back panel across several flavor varieties—”May Contain Oats (Gluten), Wheat (Gluten), Sesame Seeds, Soya.” It’s a fair guess that at least the sesame (definitely included in this flavor) and soy traveled an additional few thousand miles to get to the factory in England.

Mind you, I’m not a locavore purist. Yes, I prefer to eat local, but I’ve got plenty of olive oil, chocolate, and other products in my kitchen that don’t grow around here. But when there is a local product available, I prefer to buy it. Years ago, I stopped buying the very wonderful bread I used to get because it’s made in California, and there’s perfectly lots of good bread made within 10 miles of my house—and I’ve basically only bought locally baked bread since then. (I did buy a loaf of my old favorite when I was in Berkeley, where it was local.)

Grains can be grown in my area, and some of the local bakeries actually use local ingredients (including a tortillaria that uses local, organic heirloom corn, and their tortillas are delicious).

It should not even be possible that something could travel 3/4 of the way around the world, be sold to me at that price, and have anyone involved make a profit. The shipping costs alone have to be much higher than that. And if externalities were counted and the true costs figured in, I should have been looking at a price tag somewhere around $10.

In the privileged middle-class country where I live, the impact is somewhat modulated, because only a small percentage of people make their living as farmers, and many of those farmers have secured markets that are insulated from these kinds of macroeconomics games (farmers markets, specialty restaurants, etc.). But talk to any dairy farmer in the US, and you’ll find that the economics are very troubling.

And when imports are dumped below-cost into subsistence farm economies in developing countries, the results can be tragic. Farmers who cannot compete with these artificially low prices lose their markets, and eventually their land. They crowd themselves into massive urban slums where they can find menial jobs, and those overcrowded megacities become crime-invested nightmares—while the land they once farmed withers or is polluted by some big industrial scheme where manufacturing jobs have been outsourced because it’s cheaper to operate in countries without strong environmental regulations.

We need to rethink our food economics and our whole consumer economy. Desperately.

 

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Value is about not just price, but quality. This busy market obviously understands.
Value is about not just price, but quality. This busy market obviously understands.
If you want to market on price, look at words like “affordable” and “value.” “Cheap” can be deadly.

As a service provider, I did lead on price for a number of years. Back in the days when much of my business was resume writing, I used a simple half-inch in-column ad in the Yellow Pages (remember them?) with the slogan “Affordable professional resumes while you wait.” The year they changed it without permission to “Affordable professional resumes while U wait,” I successfully argued that proper grammar was a key selling point in my line of work and they killed it—and got the cost of the whole year’s ad refunded. I turned out to be wrong; that ad brought me plenty of clients. But I personally would not patronize a writing service whose face to the world was ungrammatical.

Those ads ran in the 1980s and 1990s, and resume writing is only a tiny fraction of my current business. These days, I stress value, not price–for all the services I offer. Some are still quite inexpensive, like writing a press release or book cover—or, for that matter, the occasional resume I still write. Others, including strategic consulting on green and social change profitability as well as book publishing consulting, can be fairly pricy.

I would have moved away from marketing on low price anyway, as my business matured. But if I hadn’t, my business would have dried up. The market is very different now. Nobody is a prisoner of their own geography any more. I can’t compete on price with some clown on a bottom-feeding service bidding site who throws an article into a word-blender and spits out crap for $5 a shot. But I sure can compete on value and quality.

As a consumer, I’m price-sensitive on some items, but quality will trump price, and so will politics. Yesterday, I spent $40 or $50 at the farmers market. I could have bought the (theoretically) same items at a supermarket for half the price, but not the organic/local/fresh choices I purchased. But I also stopped at the local independent discount store and picked up some just-past-date polenta for a buck. I cooked it last night and it was fine. I have a less gourmet one in my fridge that I paid $3 for at a different store and it doesn’t expire until November, which means the one I ate tonight was probably packed last summer. But that’s OK, it was fine.

I learned all the way back in the 1980s that price and value were not necessarily the same. After a couple of bad experiences with cheap electronics, I started buying better quality components for my stereo, better telephones, and so forth—and being much happier with my purchases. I learned that I could get a good deal through a remainder catalog, and that a $100 item with an original list price of $300 was generally going to be a much better value than a $75 item that had never sold for more than $100. And when I bought my first computer, I went with the expensive but easy-to-use Macintosh and was very happy I did.

I will shop at that local discount store, but I won’t shop at that very famous low-price big box store beginning with a W. While I recognize that they are among the best in the industry on sustainability (something very important to me), I’m also painfully aware of how much I dislike their store siting and closing policies, their community relations, labor practices, supplier practices, and a bunch of other stuff. Plus, I’ve heard that the quality is often less than stellar. I give them kudos in my speeches for, among other things, developing a massive market for organic foods among people who have never been inside a Whole Foods. But I personally choose not to shop there.

But I’m perfectly happy to drive inexpensive, functional cars. Right now, we have a 2004 Mazda, bought new for $17K, and a 2005 Toyota Corolla, bought at six years old but with only 26,000 miles on it, for $10K. I expect both to last several more years. When we bought the Corolla, one of our other options was a used Prius with 99,000 miles, for $12K. The Corolla seemed like a MUCH better deal. It wasn’t the lower price so much as having only 1/4 as many miles.

In short, as a consumer, I’ll definitely factor in price, but it won’t be the only factor. How about you? As a business owner and as a consumer, how does price factor into your decisions.

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One of the books I’m currently reading is Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics—which makes many fascinating points about the interplay of money, attitudes, and relationships. (I’ll be reviewing it in my March newsletter; if you don’t already subscribe, please do so in the upper-right corner of this page.)

Early in the book, he talks about the gift economy, and the difference between reciprocal giving and circular giving. Reciprocal giving is closer to barter than to a true gift economy: you give something to someone, and that person reciprocates either right then, or at some future time. Until the gift is “redeemed” by the second gift, it creates a sense of obligation—kind of like what the Millionaire Mindset types call the Law of Reciprocity.

But circular giving is a completely different framework. You give something to someone, either because that person needs something you have or simply because you want to give a gift. That person will make gifts to other people who they can help. You may or may not be among the recipients. But when you have a need, someone will step forward and enable it. It’s more Karmic.

I’d never really thought about the distinction before, but I realize I’ve lived the parts of my life that are in the gift economy on the circular model. A great example (among many) is homestays. We’ve been members of the international homestay network Servas for more than 30 years, and Couchsurfing since 2009 (Note: Servas link is to the United States site, as the International is down at the moment). People stay at our house. We stay in private homes when we travel. No money changes hands. When we travel, we usually bring a small gift: a bottle of wine, a loaf of good bread, a copy of one of our books—but this is something we choose to do and is not required by either organization. Some of our guests bring gifts, some don’t.

This is not just about saving money, though that’s certainly a factor. It’s about having a visit in a place where you didn’t know anybody. Having a human connection in a private home, instead of an impersonal hotel room interchangeable with others all over the world. It’s about going someplace as a traveler and a visitor, not as a tourist—experiencing a place, if just for a couple of days,  through the eyes of people who live there. Eating their food staying in their neighborhood, playing with their kids or pets, listening to their music.

It’s very rare that our homestays are reciprocal. I think there have been about five people in all these years where first one of us visited, and then the other return the visit—and the motivation in those cases was not “you owe me,” but “we enjoyed you so much, we’d like to see you again.” It’s actually very common for people who visit us to invite us to visit them,and vice versa. If we ever make it to Berlin, we already have half a dozen families who’d be delighted to host us and see us again.

And this goes back to Eisenstein; he makes the point that money not only commoditizes goods and services (and drives uniformity over craftsmanship)—but also commoditizes relationships. We build relationships with many of the people we meet through these homestay networks. We’re on each other’s Facebook friend lists or e-mail humor or political alert lists, we send copies of our annual letter, we stay in touch if we return to those locations. In short, we’re gaining friendships—not with everyone, but with the ones where the chemistry is good, and that’s most of them.

Even in the most hospitable Bed & Breakfast, with the most delightful innkeepers, this doesn’t happen; money creates a different dynamic.

And circular gift economies are only one facet of the evolving economy. I could do another whole post on paid shared-resource economies like Zipcar and Airbnb. And one thing all of you should consider is how much more eco-friendly these are than everyone buying their own car, their own lawnmower, etc.

I haven’t gotten to the part of Sacred Economics where Eisenstein lays out his ideas for money economies that don’t devalue and dehumanize. I’m looking forward to it, and might write again here when I see what he has to say about that.

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Watch this video about the Copenhagen Wheel, a device that captures and stores energy from cyclists pedaling and coasting, and supplements pedal power on the uphills or over long distances. And then read a few of the comments.

To me, this is brilliant technology! First, it makes biking—and particularly bicycle commuting over distances of 20 to 50 miles—an attractive option for tens of thousands of people who’ve felt unwilling to try it before. That, in turn, reduces the number of cars on the road, which has dozens of advantages to the planet and to our pocketbooks. Second, it makes it possible for the moderate cyclist (like me) to go much farther by bike.

A lot of the comments are angry that this will disrupt their exercise. I think they’re not thinking about it the right way. Instead of blaming a machine for interfering with their workout, think about the ability to bike instead of drive to good riding places some distance away, or to bike much farther distances to explore an area farther out.

I do ride for exercise. And I do face a BIG hill when I go out my door. I’ve learned to manage it, but when I first moved to that area, it was very tough. Something like this would have been a nice transition as I learned to conquer that tough hill.

And for the exercise-only bikers, I have one more suggestion: write to the company and tell them you want a manual override option: an off switch, in other words. Then you have the boost when you need it.

Let’s apply this kind of creativity to every aspect of our lives! We could not only solve climate change but war, poverty, and other global issues. I wish this company much success!

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When I get a good apple or pear, I eat it “right down to the bone.”

Apple core

This is an actual core from a wonderful Macoun apple that I picked myself. It was fresh, juicy, crunchy, and that wonderful combination of sweet and tart. An apple right from the tree is one of the great pleasures in life. When we go apple picking, I get home and immediately start drying them and making apple sauce, because even one day later, it won’t taste quite as good. And three weeks later, it’ll taste only a little bit better than a store-bought apple shipped from the other side of the country.

As a locavore, a green business profitability expert, and someone who attempts to live a very green, yet very comfortable life, I feel each of us has a responsibility to minimize waste. Eating every last bit of a tasty apple is one of the ways that minimizing waste can actually be fun. And of course, the few grams remaining go into the compost, to be recycled by Mother Nature into something else.

And those are the two principles of waste reduction: use things more efficiently so you generate less waste, and figure out what that waste can be turned into to create something else. Better than pollution, I’d say.

Please comment below about how you are—or how you could be—generating less waste or setting that waste up as raw material for something else.

 

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In light of Michelle Obama’s new initiative on drinking more water, a reporter wanted to know the best bottled waters.

I immediately wondered why the reporter saw bottled water as the only choice to drink more water, and this is what I wrote:

I do hope your article offers the non-bottled alternative of filtered tapwater. It is far superior–at least for those of us who live somewhere the water is drinkable–in environmental and social impact and cost.

Enviro

Water bottling not only wastes the oil used to make the plastic, as well as the energy to power the bottling plant, it also contaminates and renders unusable two to three times as much water as is in the bottle. And quite frankly, I don’t think we have that water to squander. Our grandchildren might forgive us for squandering the oil, but they won’t forgive us for leaving them without enough usable water.

Economic

I’ve seen estimates that people can save $1400 a year per person drinking tap instead of bottled.

Social Justice

In far too many locations, water (and soda) bottlers draw down an area’s water reserves with little or no compensation to the locals–who are often economically disadvantaged. Sometimes they are left withinadequate supplies for their own farming, etc.

And did you know that a number of prominent bottled water brands are nothing more than filtered tap anyway? Both Green American and Corporate Accountability International have long-running campaigns in favor of nonbottled water. You can find lots of information on their websites.

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Yesterday, I showed you  how local organic food makes a difference in my life, my wallet, and in the health of the planet. The day before, I shared the five-course locavore feast I made, where the only nonlocal main ingredient I used was rice. Today, we wrap up this series with 10 specific ways you can get more local and organic food into your life—even if you live in a big-city apartment: Grow Your Own:

  • Grow herbs and dwarf tomatoes on a sunny windowsill
  • Set up a vertical garden—if you have about three square feet of space, you can buy a plastic tower for hydroponic gardening, and it’s amazing how much food you can get from this
  • Get a plot at a local community garden (or organize your neighbors to convert a vacant lot from an eyesore into a bountiful community-building enterprise)
  • Grow potted or raised-bed food plants on your balcony, terrace, or fire escape (as long as you don’t block the exit pathways)—and investigate whether your roof is suitable for a garden
  • Find a friend in the neighborhood who has a yard, and who will let you garden there for a portion of the harvest
  • Make friends with a gardener who will give you some of the harvest in exchange for your labor

Buy From Farmers:

All this is possible even in the largest cities. Watch the movie, “No Impact Man” (or read the book) to see how one Manhattan family switched to 100% locavore eating. (Link goes to my blog about the movie.) Enjoy!

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Yesterday, I wrote about how much fun I have cooking and eating local organic food—and how it’s not uncommon for 80 percent of our dinners to be grown within a few miles of our house.

Today, I want to talk about what local organic food means personally, and to the planet.

For me:

  • Food that’s fun to cook and delicious to eat
  • Super-fresh, and loaded with nutrition, vitamins, and minerals (instead of toxic chemicals)
  • Very frugal
  • Children who feel a direct connection to where their food comes from and how it grows—and who have carried their food awareness into their own lives in big cities, now that they’re grown
  • Community; we always see friends when we pick up our share at the CSA farm, and they have educational programs like herb walks or food preservation workshops, potlucks and concerts once in a while

As an example of the dollars and cents, consider the six-flat of tomato plants we bought. I think we paid $3—so 50 cents per plant. Let’s amortize the fixed costs of the garden across all the crops, and add another $3 to cover the tomatoes’ share. So we’re up to $6.

Fresh local organic tomatoes are usually around $3 per pound at the local farmers  markets—so we break even on the second pound. This is a slow year; we’re only getting about a dozen tomatoes a week, perhaps four pounds. Some years we get more like 40 pounds a week. But even with this year’s limited crop, that means we’re pulling in $120 worth over a ten-week harvest season, and in a good year, that number is more like $1200. And that’s just one crop; we’re also growing broccoli, green beans, kidney beans, eggplant, kale, onions, basil, rosemary, cucumbers, zucchini, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, and peas (earlier in the year). The whole garden costs us less than $100 for the year.

We split the $600 CSA membership with another family, and we collect our share for about 23 weeks, typically getting 10-20 pounds of organic produce per week—or roughly 345 pounds for the year. If the stores averaged even $4 per pound (they’re often higher for organic), that means our $300 has turned into $1380—not bad!

Saving so much money on our local organic produce lets us justify the expense of the locally produced food craft items at the farmers markets; the cheeses and eggs are quite a bit more expensive than the industrial versions in supermarkets. But it’s worth it, because they taste so much better, feel so much better in our bodies, and help our local organic farmers stay in farming. And with those foods, a little goes a long way; $10 or $20 a week gives us all we need.

The Planet:

Now, let’s look at what my food lifestyle means to the economy and ecology of my town, and the whole country:

  • Very low carbon footprint. Instead of being shipped across the country, our food is hand-carried about 100 feet from our garden to our kitchen, or brought three miles (five kilometers) from the CSA farm either by car or bicycle. Instead of requiring huge inputs of petrochemicals and petrolabor, we work our garden by hand, except for the initial rototilling. And as vegetarians, our carbon footprint is much lower than if we ate meat (it would be lower still if we went vegan).
  • Chemical-free. No health effects from pesticides and herbicides—to me and those who share my table, or to the farmers who grow it. AND no harmful effects to the soil and the water.
  • Good for the local economy. Our farm membership fee and the dollars we spend on local dairy products, bread, and fruit stay in the community, instead of being siphoned off by a dozen middlemen and into the coffers of far-away corporations.
  • Good for farmland. Every farmer that sells food to us is a farmer who is keeping the land in agriculture instead of selling that land off for development—and every successful local organic farm is a living lesson to other farmers that they don’t need to douse the earth (and their customers’ bodies) with poisons.

Pretty cool!

Now it’s Your Turn:

Please leave a comment about how you’ve incorporated (or will start incorporating) local artisan foods into your lifestyle. How are local organic foods making a difference to you?

Still need ideas? Tomorrow’s blog will provide concrete steps you can take to green your food, even if you live in a city. I do have to warn you though: once you’ve tasted REAL food, you won’t ever be satisfied by the poor imitations that dominate the industrial food system.

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