Big Food's "Farmwashing" Fakery

"Call it farmwashing," says Brandchannel.com. And maybe we will.

From what I can tell, Brandchannel is the first place the phrase has been used, employed to describe packages of, and ads for, factory-made food bearing images of what we used to think of as "farms": big red barns, green pastures and ol'-fashioned tractors.

The movie Food Inc. touched on this phenomenon, cited previously by Michael Pollan and others, as a way to describe how far removed Americans are from the real source of their food, often huge meat-processing facilities and giant corn factories.

Before getting to the marketing implications of farmwashing, the Brandingchannel article takes a couple of swipes at the movie, which it says "certainly isn't the next Hollywood blockbuster" and "despite the apparent best intentions of director Robert Kenner ... isn't exactly the 21st-century movie version of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle."

Not sure what that's supposed to mean. For a documentary, Food Inc. has done rather well. And it's having an impact. It's been out for weeks and people are still flocking to it and talking about it. I also don't quite get the reference to The Jungle, or the writer's assessment of the movie as "a rather slow-going and, at times, didactic screed against big-brand food producers." (Doesn't that sort of describe The Jungle?) Or the writer's declaration that the movie "winds up spreading the blame around enough to prevent any single brand from ending up the ultimate scapegoat."

The whole point of the movie is that the entire industrial food system poses a huge set of problems. Why the apparent desire to hang it all on one "ultimate scapegoat?"