Isn't this what we want?

At some point, when a trend that is good for the planet, our bodies, and our local economies gains enough acceptance, big business is going to take notice — and take advantage. There will always be tension between doing something for the "right" reasons, and doing something to make money.

An issue of Organic Consumers Association's newsletter arrived in my inbox today with the following story:

When Local Goes Industrial

The local food movement is gaining enough popularity to capture the interest of big business. Some of the biggest corporate food companies are looking for ways to greenwash their products. Although it sure beats sourcing their crops from overseas and is a step in the right direction, the following marketing claims can be misleading since the actual processing of these often factory-farm grown products may be anything but local:

--Frito-Lay North America owned by PepsiCo is trying to portray Lay's potato chips as a local food in the regions where the potatoes are grown.

--ConAgra is trying to say that because Hunt's canned tomatoes are mostly grown within 120 miles of its processing plant in Oakdale, California, that makes them "local" for Oakdale, and maybe even Californians.

--Kraft is trying to figure out whether people in Wisconsin will buy more pickles if they know the cucumbers that go into a jar of Claussen's are grown there.

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My reaction: That's great! So what?! "Local food" doesn't have to — and shouldn't — mean just fresh food. Most of us don't live in a climates that support our stomachs with food springing out of the ground year round. Food packaging — the new food preservation — needs to get on board to enable more of us to eat more locally (for a few reasons, including to cut down on carbon emissions in transportation, to keep more money circulating in our local economies, and to make local communities more self reliant).

The bummer is that locally oriented food packaging operations aren't going to spring up from the grassroots. Maybe I'm wrong about that — I hope so — but I believe the money simply is not there to incentivise that kind of startup business. Instead, the best we might hope for is a few model programs here and there across the land, but mostly existing players re-orienting to meet the new demand.

This hearkens back to my days as a fair trade coffee activist, when the cause-oriented coffee purists — so called "hundred percenters," who didn't roast a single coffee bean that didn't come with a Fair Trade Certified stamp — were inspiring and visionary, but amounted to just a drop in the coffee trade ocean. When Starbucks weighed in with less than 1% of their total coffee roasting operation devoted to the Fair Trade Certified model, they became the single biggest Fair Trade vendor by total volume overnight. As an activist, this was difficult to accept. Most of the difference being made was coming from this one uncommitted company that threatened to co-opt the whole thing.

I imagine something similar happening with local food, and I do share these concerns with Organic Consumers Association:

• Hidden distribution costs. If Claussen's pickles go to, say, New York before being distributed to retail stores in Wisconsin, yeah that's a problem. Ditto if Hunt's tomatoes go to a warehouse far away from Oakdale.


• How local is local? Does within 120 miles count as local? Who gets to say so? Certainly food grown in Southern California isn't "local" to Northern California...

There are issues to work out here and I'll be the first to suspect "local" branding on corporate food packaging when I see it, but from where I sit this trend is not bad on its face. This is what we need to have happen, and more of it. If the history of the "organic" label is anything to go by, there will be vicious fights to manage truth in advertising when it comes to "local," and the word will probably emerge with some brave new watered-down meaning. Let's not try to keep big business away from locally oriented packaging entirely, though. That's certainly not what we want, if we want to maximize the benefits of local food production-consumption.