Localwashing'Localwashing' Corporations Move to Co-opt Consumers Desire to Buy 'Local' & Sustainable Products & Services http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_18548.cfm 'Localwashing' Corporations Move to Co-opt Consumers Desire to Buy 'Local' & Sustainable Products & Services
HSBC, one of the biggest banks on the planet, has taken to calling itself "the world's local bank." Winn-Dixie, a 500-outlet supermarket chain, recently launched a new ad campaign under the tagline, "Local flavor since 1956." The International Council of Shopping Centers, a global consortium of mall owners and developers, is pouring millions of dollars into television ads urging people to "Shop Local" - at their nearest mall. Even Walmart is getting in on the act, hanging bright green banners over its produce aisles that simply say "Local." This new variation on corporate greenwashing - localwashing - is, like the buy-local movement itself, most advanced in the context of food. Hellmann's, the mayonnaise brand owned by the processed-food giant Unilever, is test-driving a new "Eat Real, Eat Local" initiative in Canada. The ad campaign seems aimed partly at enhancing the brand by simply associating Hellmann's with local food. But it also makes the claim that Hellmann's is local, because most of its ingredients come from North America. It's not the only industrial food company muscling in on local. Frito-Lay's new television commercials use farmers as pitchmen to position the company's potato chips as local food, while Foster Farms, one of the largest producers of poultry products in the country, is labeling packages of chicken and turkey "locally grown." Corporate localwashing is now spreading well beyond food. Barnes & Noble, the world's top seller of books, has launched a video blog site under the banner, "All bookselling is local." The site, which features "local book news" and recommendations from employees of stores in such evocative-sounding locales as Surprise, Ariz., and Wauwatosa, Wisc., seems designed to disguise what Barnes & Noble is - a highly centralized corporation where decisions about what books to stock and feature are made by a handful of buyers - and to present the chain instead as a collection of independent-minded booksellers. 'Localwashing' Corporations Move to Co-opt Consumers Desire to Buy 'Local' & Sustainable Products & Services
HSBC, one of the biggest banks on the planet, has taken to calling itself "the world's local bank." Winn-Dixie, a 500-outlet supermarket chain, recently launched a new ad campaign under the tagline, "Local flavor since 1956." The International Council of Shopping Centers, a global consortium of mall owners and developers, is pouring millions of dollars into television ads urging people to "Shop Local" - at their nearest mall. Even Walmart is getting in on the act, hanging bright green banners over its produce aisles that simply say "Local." See more of this article at: http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_18548.cfm Reprinted with Permission Organic Consumers Association |
OCA on New Food Safety Bill-HR 2749There's been a lot of buzz on the web about the new Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 (HR-2749). Many of our supporters have called or emailed us to find our stance on the issue. Although the Organic Consumers Association is fairly satisfied that the bill is intended to protect organic farmers from being negatively impacted by new food safety regulations, the bill does not address the underlying causes of America's persistent and evermore serious food safety crisis: factory farms and chemical-intensive agriculture. When addressing the concerns of E.coli or salmonella, the bill focuses on fresh vegetables and fruits rather than CAFOs or intensive confinement factory farms, in effect treating the symptom and not the disease. A close look at the nation's food poisoning epidemics over the past decade reveal that the overwhelming majority of fruit and vegetable contamination incidents are a direct result of water and soil pollution from large factory farms. The OCA believes that HR-2749 should be amended to address factory farming: 1) Animals should never be fed blood, manure or slaughterhouse waste. 2) Cows need to eat grass. 3) Animals need to be spread out on enough land to absorb their waste. 4) CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) pose unacceptable risks to human health such as antibiotic resistance, incubate dangerous viruses and pathogens such as the Swine Flu and Bird Flu, contaminate the environment, institutionalize animal cruelty, and need to be phased out and shut down. Reprinted with Permission from The Organic Consumers Association http://www.organicconsumers.org/ |
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