Big Food Latches Onto "Local"

The first time it occurred to me that I might one day want to cover the food business as a journalist was sometime in the late '90s at a "health food" store in Northern California. I was looking at the snack chips, and there was one package bragging: "Contains Gingko Biloba."

Gingko was a hot nutritional supplement at the time. There was some flimsy evidence that it might improve human memory. It wasn't total snake oil, since there was some science behind it.

But it struck me that if the American food marketing machine could actually get away with convincing consumers that eating potato chips would improve their brain functions, something had gone badly awry. This was an industry that needed as many watchdogs as possible.

Food marketers have since then (and for years before then) jumped on every trend, dubious and not, real and manufactured: low-carb, low-fat, organic, "natural," antioxidant, etc.

These days, as Tom Philpott points out at Grist, the buzzwords are sustainable and local. And, as is usually the case, the words, as wielded by food marketers, are essentially meaningless.

Monsanto (MON), Philpott notes, has been bandying about the word sustainable in its ads and marketing messages. Monsanto is best known as the leading purveyor of genetically modified seeds. That doesn't necessarily make them evil (and genetic modification, responsibly done, might help feed the world), but sustainable is a strange word to apply to a company that, for example, sells seeds yielding plants whose own seeds are sterile. Kind of the opposite of sustainable, that. (CORRECTION: The preceding isn't true. Monsanto does not sell such seeds, as a company spokesman just told me. I erred in not independently verifying the charge, and I apologize for the oversight. Monsanto pledged in 1999 that it would not sell such "terminator seeds," though it possesses the technology to develop them. So far, the company has stuck to that pledge.)

Even funnier is Lay's, the potato chip brand of the PepsiCo (PEP)-owned Frito-Lay. No gingko in its chips, but they are now being sold as "local."

The local-food movement argues that food grown near the area where it is eaten is more environmentally friendly. That's generally true (though the idea is rife with pesky complications). But "locavores" will be the first to tell you that keeping food local is just one part of creating a sustainable food system. If local food is grown using nasty chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, its localness is beyond irrelevant.

Nonetheless, Lay's Potato Chips are "local food," the company is telling consumers in five states. "Strictly speaking I suppose it is," Philpott writes, "since some of their potatoes are grown and fried in Florida," one of the targeted states.

But applying that same logic, he observes, would mean that in Iowa, where he lives, high-fructose corn syrup is also a "local food."

"Local Lay's are just the beginning of industrial food's latest foray into absconding with another useful term," Philpott warns. Look for lots of other products to soon go local.

He goes on to provide his own recipe for homemade (ultralocal!) potato chips. OK, he uses Idaho potatoes. But they sound tasty.