Greenwashing As a Tool to Separate Social Class

Barese Chard Ferment, 10 Total Food Miles from U-Pick @ Small Axe Farm, Springfield IL

    There is excessively over-researched articulation from the century’s turn regarding how food is grown and where it comes from to try swaying consumer interest toward an illusory connection with manufactured abstract concepts. Among the social spheres hoping to empower it, the word “local” is rarely allowed an opportunity to maintain an honest definition and immediately demands an intention of psychological impact. “Fraud” has limited application with food because, whether it’s “good” for us or not, anything deemed edible (by one or another) can still provide some sort of sustenance. Across the spectrum of justifications, it is most common to find either research groups studying an inevitable mountain of evidence that insists enough banality of suggested dangers to imply insignificance or a distinct flood of self-praise over the projected expectations for how much good they might do anyone who can participate. These mentalities begin to siphon off many aesthetic challenges mostly faced by companies in the energy field, but green-washing also helps shift public opinion of why it is so essential to understand where our food comes from and how we can empower ourselves to ensure a continuously developing network of people providing it for their surrounding environment.

green·wash

/ˈɡrēnwôSH,ˈɡrēnwäSH/

noun

noun: greenwash; noun: green-wash

disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image.

    The US Federal Trade Commission provides extremely lax enforcement for how this sort of language gets used, which contributes to skepticism of green claims and takes away power from consumers to encourage the people and/or brands they support towards progressive development within sustainable practices. For the grand scheme of solar energy providers and electric car designers, the less their actions are monitored or their processes verified, the more common it is to find things like corporate posturing. As a result, the Australian Trade Policies Act can now find organizations guilty up to $6M in fines (along with any expense incurred to provide honest transparency about their actual impact) for providing misleading environmental claims. (Unfortunately, those amounts are usually still “affordable” enough to justify). A great example of this misappropriation is a political phrase known as “linguistic detoxification”, where legislation changes the definition of toxicity for certain substances to dissociate a particular classification as toxic (originated by Barry Commoner). The same practices can be found on a county- or city-wide scale, where organizations may have personal connection with business or restaurant owners to inflate perceptions about some actions in an attempt to shadow others.

lo·cal

/ˈlōk(ə)l/

adjective

adjective: local

belonging or relating to a particular area or neighborhood, typically exclusively so

    The misconception of this term comes from how many different communities choose to define it and for what reasons (many times ignoring basic concepts like “particular area”, “neighborhood” or “exclusivity”). A primary concern for most of them is creating a network of producers and consumers within a particular area that they might become more reliant upon themselves as well as a community who share similar focus and determination. Some prefer to focus on economic virtue and subsist on the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008’s combined definition where “the locality or region in which the final product is marketed, so that the total distance that the product is transported is less than 400 miles from the origin of the product” and later included as just the state where it was produced. Using the technicality (or whatever it’s mutated modern equivalent is), Wal-Mart and Aldi market local Wisconsin Apples and local Michigan Cherries to consumer appeal. The ratio of product quantity to region of dispersal can surely be identified with language that provides fair amounts to everyone, but we could also try using such data to create a map that better visualizes what crops a “particular area” truly demands and who might be willing to try supplying them within a shorter radius… perhaps even learn storage methods or urban farming and so on. While many scientific studies speak against calculating food miles, their opposition lies primarily with including a total amount of energy used in producing a product (which is very limited among small-scale produce farming and even less-so with horticultural experimentation) and removes more potential for us to raise foods and medicines ourselves by physically watching and helping them grow.

    Farm-to-Table, also known as Farm-to-Fork, is a social movement promoting the use of locally sourced food-stuffs (however that be defined) in restaurants and businesses (with even some cases of Farm-to-School cafeterias). Not limited to just farms, any product created under their preferred standards of location is suitable to fly under the banner. Many farms attempt selling their own crops or products to such places, but most buyers have projected sales demands to meet which can be compounded by the size of their establishment(s), typically heading in two directions: (1) where regional distributors are researched and supported to provide a consistent availability of selected ingredients or (2) they cut. “Cutting” is a process where restaurants or businesses will buy a small percentage of their weekly groceries (many times publicly) to fractionate with larger amounts of distributed product. The illusion created projects a philosophical desire to know and communicate where the food comes from without much transparency as to where all of it really comes from. Large accounts of fraud in both Tampa Bay and San Diego were found, ranging from discrepancies about restaurants previously buying from area farmers then switching the source without updating menus to blatantly lying about their source (even after the source confirmed sale never occurred). To be fair, the marketability of social movements like these does have a relative air of “exclusion” as many of the price-points offered under this kind of language do reflect an upper echelon appearance, leaving others outside of such groups to consider what is actually being said about the qualifications of such products and who provides them. In some cases, people believe the “farm-to-table” horseshoe they’re being served might actually be healthier than another.

 

Kitchen pantry, easily accessed by nose-y dogs with many signs of rodents & full of outdated commercial products, on a communal farm site boasting progressive food justice, sustainable living, healthy diets and home-remedy medicines.  Basement pantry twice as large with even more regular signs of rodents and housing some foods over a decade past expiration.

    Food Fraud is a term meaning "the intentional adulteration of food with cheaper ingredients for economic gain," with particular emphasis on the industry at large. The first perpetrator that comes to mind is Kashi, who were praised for a long era of providing quality food products to a large array of people… until groups like The Non-GMO Project and other third-party testers grew. Eventually, it had been discovered that many of their ingredients (including every bit of soy) did not meet the qualitative standards they marketed themselves with. Back to Nature maintained a soft voice through their questionable ingredients shift as well, but there is a trend in business where brands (in this case independently owned naturally oriented producers like Annies’, Garden of Life, Burt’s Bees, etc.) sell themselves to corporate conglomerates (Kraft, Procter & Gamble, etc.) or their secondary entities. Economic virtue, again, allows for detoxifying legislature that creates loopholes to change contents without documented responsibility to provide transparency. Many restaurants and organizations allow for such habits as well, in the case of occasionally buying from farms for showcase dinners or public events but rescinding that support during general operation when budgetary concerns become priority.

    The Food and Drug Administration only inspects 2% of the food that enters it’s ports. Not only is food safety treated as a low priority, but they also admit that standards in place make preventing crimes with regulation nearly impossible because of how much potential there is to create it. While many state, county and city run governments have individualized collections of ordinance or authority, the federal level can still govern all. When corruption is a genetic trait there, it has a horribly natural ability to transfer into state, county or city based businesses and/or organizations. Greenwashing holds a prominent responsibility for the plateauing of small farm growth and steady decrease of existing average farms’ income by allowing the misappropriation of honest, conceptual and definitive language. Now, because that language has been manipulated into something massively obtuse, many scholars agree that applying a disciplined dietary shift can reduce the average household’s food-related climate footprint than attempting to achieve the complexity of “buying local".

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