We Americans love good marketing… Anyone over 35 years old remembers the first time we saw the grouchy old lady at the burger joint say, “Where’s the BEEF?” Clever marketing sticks… as it is designed to do. And we have been taught (quite without being aware of it) to hum along and enjoy the ride.
Which is all mostly harmless and sometimes even downright funny. Clever marketing is, well, CLEVER! And sometimes highly entertaining…
But at what point does the whole thing become absurd? I think we’re there. It seems that people have finally come to start believing, at least on some level, that the ditties contain some semblance of fact… and therein lies the danger. The marketing has been done so well and so thoroughly, that we have stopped even pausing to consider that the words don’t actually MEAN anything.
I’m going to tell you a couple of stories. All I can say to preface them is that as ridiculous as these sound, they are true stories, and they are not about stupid people – they are about regular people who have simply stopped thinking about it.
My sister Emily has a flock of chickens, and she sells eggs from her home. She has a hand painted sign at the top of the driveway – Fresh Eggs For Sale - $3.50/dozen. She has regular customers, and also a lot of random folks just driving in.
One afternoon, she had a woman that she didn’t know stop in. The chickens wander around the yard, and the woman had to stop several times just to drive in and not run over any of the hens. She got out of the car and asked Emily, “Do you have eggs?” Emily said yes and asked how many the woman would like. “Oh, just a dozen. Uhm, but do you have a dozen brown eggs?” Emily has a mixed flock – her chickens lay brown, white, green, pink, and bluish eggs, but she had enough that she was able to put together a dozen of all brown ones.
So she said sure, and asked the woman to wait while she ran inside and rearranged a dozen eggs, all brown. As she was doing it, she became curious – Did the woman have a finicky child at home? Why else would someone care what color the shells were? So when she went back out to hand over the dozen brown eggs, she decided to ask why they all had to be brown. The woman, standing there on the porch and surrounded at this point by Emily’s curious hens, said, (as though it should be entirely obvious) “Well, brown eggs are local.”
(Can you hear the jingle in your head?? …”Brown eggs are local eggs, and local eggs are fresh…”) Wow. As though the Americana hens she had just tripped over were somehow not local???
Another afternoon, an older gentleman driving a big old Lincoln came down the drive. Again, he had to go slowly to avoid running down the hens. He parked and got out of the car, shuffling through the flock to get to the front door…Emily’s chickens are convinced that “people” equal “food treats”, and they cluster hopefully around every new arrival. Emily had seen the man coming, and, worried he might stumble over the hens, met him at the door before he even knocked. He said he was interested in a dozen eggs. Emily said sure and went and fetched the eggs from her fridge. The man took the eggs, but then just as he was giving her the money to pay for them, stopped. He said, “Oh wait! My wife wanted to be sure I asked - are the chickens free range?” Again my poor sister almost choked, trying not to laugh, and thinking, “What exactly do you think you were tripping over as you walked through the yard to my front door?”
Again, Wow. My sister swears that these were intelligent, normal people, and I believe her. Intelligent, normal people want to believe that these catchy little labels mean that the food they are about to eat is fresh, safe, and humane, and that they if only they make sure to buy the right label, they can feel good about what they are eating. Cage-free. Certified Organic. Free-Range. They sound good. They certainly sound like they mean something.
Unfortunately, these are industry terms now, and they don’t mean much of anything anymore. These descriptions all started off meaning something – something that differentiated a product from what is produced on a huge scale in disgusting and often brutal conditions. But with each new term that decent farmers come up with, it is only a matter of time before it is legally defined by big agriculture, and basically redefined to mean next to nothing.
Cage Free. An intelligent and normal person would assume that this term means that the animal didn’t spend its life in a cage. Right? I mean Basic English would give you that general impression… Under the legal definition, though, it simply means that the cage was 11 inches by 11 inches, instead of the industry standard of 7 by 7.
Certified Organic. Sounds powerful and serious. But all it means now is that the pesticides and fertilizers need to be derived from a “natural” source. And if you think that makes the food safe and free of chemicals, please read the piece on Organic Pesticides. Organic used to mean a whole lot, and to some good farmers, it still does. But legally, and on a corporate scale, it no longer means much of anything at all.
Free-Range. You picture chickens wandering around on open land, don’t you? That’s what it should mean, and what it used to mean. On the industrial farm, unfortunately, it isn’t cost-effective to allow chickens to roam about on pasture. By the current legal definition, it simply means that they have to offer the chickens the option of movement and the option of fresh air at some point. So they raise the chickens in huge masses – inside and in the dark – and at the point that they are quite sure not a single one would opt to wander through a little hatchway to a bright spot, they open the hatch to a tiny little patch of grass that a chicken has never – and will never – venture onto.
The latest popular terms are Grass Fed, Pasture Raised, and Humanely Raised. So far, I believe these still mean basically what a normal person would assume they mean – the animals eat grass, they are allowed to roam freely on pasture, and they are not mistreated or abused… But by next week, I’m sure they won’t mean that much anymore, not if industrial agriculture realizes that the public is asking for them…
Consumers are trying. We want to eat clean, healthy food. We want to know that the animal that provided our dinner lived a humane life. We try to buy the right things. We ask for the labels that should, by all rights, mean what they sound like they mean. But the slight of hand in our food system would put Harry Houdini himself to shame. Industrial agriculture has a LOT to gain from telling us the lies we want to hear. Each term they usurp and redefine (and gut, in my opinion) makes them a huge profit, and almost like magic, each one in turn is sucked dry of every drop of meaning it once possessed.
So, what are you supposed to do? You want to eat good food. You want to know that it is clean, free of poisons, and that it was raised properly. If the food is from an animal (dairy, meat, or eggs), you want to know that the animal that provided your dinner was treated humanely, right? I certainly do, and like most people, I assume that what I consider important, just about everyone considers important…
All you really need to do is this: Don’t buy labels! Get the facts about your food! Get to know the people who raised it. It’s not difficult – actually, you’ll probably have a really good time. I mean, farmers are a very enjoyable group. They have a sense of humor by definition. (If they don’t, they won’t be farming for long.) They also are intelligent, kind, and patient (more prerequisites for the job). Your local farmers are some of the best people you are ever likely to meet. And all you have to do to get the food you honestly want to eat is to get to know them a little.
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