America Recycles: A farm-fresh lifestyle in a box; Truth about cage-free eggs

Posted Nov 14th 2007 7:38AM by Sarah Gilbert
Filed under: Starbucks (SBUX), PepsiCo (PEP), Marketing and Advertising, Agriculture

Today is America Recycles Day! Why not do some recycling? Sure, I didn't cut down any trees to create these posts, but I think they're in the spirit of the day. Here are my two favorite posts from the past year.

Selling you a farm-fresh lifestyle in a box, bag or can

... By far my favorite image in any book is the overleaf of Blueberries for Sal, a bucolic and all-blue illustration of Sal and her mother. They are canning blueberries in a 40s-era kitchen, complete with hand-cranked egg beater, polka-dot curtains, and a cast-iron wood cooking stove. Every time I gaze at that picture I believe for a second that I will go downstairs and preserve something in one of the old-fashioned Ball jars I found at a garage sale.

Alas, it never quite happens that way, but just reading the book makes me feel connected to the farm-wife ideal. Much like a wander through today's grocery store aisles. As Kim Severson mentions in today's New York Times, she feels smug when she puts a bag of Cascadian Farm organic French fries in her grocery cart (she calls is "greenwashing" and the marketers call it "an authentic narrative"): "a gentle image of a field or a farm ... suggest[s] an ample harvest gathered by an honest, hard-working family." And in creating these images for us, in selling us the hard-working farm family, marketers know that just for a minute we've left our wired, fossil-fuel-guzzling lives for a hand-hewn pine kitchen table in that log house in Maine.

In short, we're being sold our ideal lifestyle in a box, bag or can. My ideal lifestyle shines like autumn sunset on the matt label of Pepsico, Inc. (NYSE:PEP)'s Lay's new Natural line of baked chips and Cheetos (natural Cheetos?!?), it smiles on me like the friendly cows on the label of Brown Cow's Cream Top yogurts. ... read more

Cage-free eggs: What are you paying for, and are they better?

Cage-free eggs are the latest forefront in the constant PR campaign of many leading retail companies to be seen as the humanest, the most animal-friendly, the most vigilant about the health of its products. As indication of the bigness of this particular buzz-phrase, several weeks ago, Burger King Holdings Inc. (NYSE: BKC) announced a switch to both cage-free eggs and pork products. So important is the issue that when Portland, Oregon fast food chain Burgerville broadcast their own switch to cage-free, local media cried, when will Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ: SBUX) switch all the eggs in its products (including its popular breakfast sandwiches) to cage-free?

The answer could be far more muddled than (for instance) the coffee giant's recent changeover to hormone-free milk or trans-fat-free baked goods. Here's the thing: it's not necessarily assured that cage-free eggs are the be-all and end-all of chicken humanity. And the costs go far beyond a little extra space. ... read more