Don Genova's Blog

Hellmann's

Advertising and marketing play major roles in our daily decision-making. We can easily be influenced by something as simple as a few words in a commercial, or even the colour of a label. Today on Food Matters, I discussed how much ‘greenwashing’ has become part of the sustainable language landscape. The term greenwashing basically means when a company spends more time or money telling you its products or services are ‘green’ or sustainable than they actually spend on making those products or services green. They're not quite putting their money where their mouths are. I didn’t realize that this term has been around since 1986, when a New York environmentalist called out hotel chains for all those cards they use to tell you to re-use your towels to save the environment really just resulted in more profit for the hotels.

Nowadays, food companies routinely use labeling to convince us their products are greener. Anytime you see a yogurt container from a large manufacturer with a picture of a cow grazing in a field on the label you’re being greenwashed. Large companies need copious amounts of milk to make their products, which means the diet and movement of the cows are strictly controlled...they live in barns and eat a mix of feed designed to make them produce more milk...they don’t graze on grass.

McDonald's Green

In 2009, McDonald’s outlets in Europe started changing their colour scheme from red and yellow to green and yellow. The company said the colour change was to reflect its heightened sensitivity to environmental concerns. Recently more supermarket chains here in BC all started to make claims they were now selling sustainable seafood products, products certified sustainable by 3 or 4 different agencies that are out there. But if you go into any of those supermarkets you will find the number of sustainable seafood products available is still far fewer than the number of products that wouldn’t be certified sustainable. One supermarket chain made a big fuss about two summers ago that they carried so many local products, but then rejected a pumpkin shipment from a local farmer because the pumpkins weren’t all the same size and some of them had mud on them.

This really extends into labeling food products when it comes to health benefits. We’ve talked before about the overuse of labels that purport the products inside to be natural or pure, or artisan. Ask yourself when you read those labels, what do those words really mean in conjunction with the food itself or the way it is produced.

Apparently Canada's Competition Bureau and the Canadian Standards Association are discouraging companies from making "vague claims" about environmental impact. Any claims must be backed up and when I looked at the CSA website they do have measurable standards companies can meet when it comes to categories such as Green Procurement and Environmental Claims and Labeling. But when it comes to food products I’m not sure how many of them actually require CSA approval to be sold, and since we don’t even require labeling of genetically modified products I don’t see that there is a lot of government oversight of environmental claims.

So how do we tell the difference between a real effort to be sustainable and an empty promise? Sometimes it’s obvious, as in the case of the words on labels like ‘all natural’. Other times it’s a lot harder. Hellmann’s Mayonnaise, a brand of Unilever Canada, has been promoting a Real Food movement – and two years ago Hellmann's public relations company offered me and other bloggers an all-expenses paid trip to Toronto to explain their support of eating local and healthy.  I didn't go on that trip, but on another trip to Toronto on business I put on my skeptical journalist hat and they did a mini-version of their presentation for me. I couldn't actually see the downside. They wanted to promote local food, help people to demand that from their local grocery stores, and were giving grants to people to help them start community gardens and other sustainable food projects.  A couple of weeks ago, I watched a very well done Eat Local Hellman’s YouTube video from 2009 that put forward some amazing stats about how we are NOT eating local, and it encouraged us to eat local, with the Hellmann's logo only coming up at the very end of the video. I posted it to my Facebook and asked my foodie friends to comment.

Michael Pollan

When this first came up I happened to have a chance to discuss it with journalist and Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan. He wasn’t buying it for a minute. Definitely thought it was greenwashing, despite the benefits I described to him. With this latest video I posted to my Facebook page, the comments were more mixed.

I even traced this back to the parent company of Hellman’s, Unilever, and that multinational company has launched what sounds like a fairly major initiative, called the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, which says it includes: over 50 concrete targets that will:
• Help more than one billion people improve their health and well-being
• Halve the environmental impact of our products
• Source 100% of our agricultural raw materials sustainably

Quite bold. But is it real, how do you measure it? I found something called the Greenwashing Index website, run by the University of Oregon and EnviroMedia Social Marketing. All kinds of info there designed to help you figure out when you’re being greenwashed, and how you can participate by rating ads you see on tv.

Kilrenny Pasta Extruder

Eager eaters around Vancouver Island continue to hunt out and gather more and more local foods. And if you make it, they will eat it. Today on Food Matters I profiled two companies in the Cowichan Valley that are now bringing fresh pasta to the masses.

With my Italian background I have put away a fair amount of pasta over the years…two or three times a week at home growing up, lasagna was the special dish for family gatherings, but the funny thing is that we rarely ate fresh pasta noodles, most of it came out of a box with the exception of when my aunts would get together to make hundreds of little cheese or meat-stuff ravioli. Now of course I’ve learned how to make fresh pasta, and it’s fairly quick for me to crank out a fresh batch of spaghetti or fettuccine, but most people don’t take the time to do that…

Cowichan Pasta

Which is where fresh pasta companies come in, and I know that most supermarkets these days offer some sort of fresh pastas in the refrigerated section, but lately I've been tasting offerings from two companies, both in the Cowichan Valley, and both who started, by total coincidence, around the same time last year. First up is Cowichan Pasta, the brainchild of a young chef named Matt Horn. I caught up with him at his booth at the Winter Farmers Market in downtown Victoria on Saturday morning. Business was brisk, and he's making something he's always loved to cook with and eat. Traveling through Italy and seeing so many shops selling fresh pasta convinced him that we needed that kind of choice on Vancouver Island.

Matt makes 8 different kinds of pastas, 4 that are extruded and 4 types of ravioli he painstakingly makes by hand. He uses only Vancouver Island ingredients, including salt from Vancouver Island Salt Company, Cowichan Valley beef, BC spot prawns and vegetables and foraged items like seaweed and mushrooms with the seasons. Matt stresses you don’t need fancy sauces to complete the experience when you’re eating his pastas, you don’t want to overwhelm the delicate flavour of the pasta. The flour comes from Vancouver Island-grown hard wheat that is milled at True Grain Mill and Bakery.

Sourcing that flour locally makes it a more pricey buy, but once folks try it once he says they come back for more.  He's in the midst of adapting a food cart to bring to the markets so he can offer plates of pasta for sale there.

Deb Fahlman

 
Malfadine Pasta

The other pasta and sauce is from Kilrenny Farm, owned by Deborah and Russ Fahlman. I’ve been buying fruits and vegetables from the Fahlmans’ organic farm and booth at the farmers market for years now. They’ve had the dream of making pasta for sale for about 20 years, and finally last year they took the plunge, renovated their farm gate shop into a commercial kitchen, bought an Italian extruder pasta machine, visited Italy once again to learn more about making pasta, and started cranking it out. Deborah has been having fun learning to master all the bronze dies that came with the extruder, so today I brought in some malfadine, which is a ribbon of pasta that is very ruffled along the edges, really holds the sauce, which is Deborah’s marinara sauce made from tomatoes grown on their property. Along with egg based pastas Deborah also makes spelt and kamut pastas which are a lighter on the gluten factor.  So while her flour isn’t local all the sauces she sells are, because she either relies on ingredients they grow themselves or are available nearby, and they’ve started to offer lamb sausages as well from their own lamb, and that is one of my favourite dishes to make, a nice grilled sausage and maybe some fried onions poured over freshly boiled pasta.

The good news is that they are both developing a list of shops in Victoria and beyond that carry their products. But I have to mention that if you want to see in person how I use some Kilrenny Pasta you can sign up for my Romantic Roman cooking class at Kilrenny Farm just in time to impress your sweetie for Valentine’s Day.

The Road Well Taken

The beginning of the New Year is usually a time for people to try going on diets, or at least trying to be a little more conscious about what they eat after the holiday excess. If you also want to put a little more ‘green’ in your diet by eating in a more sustainable fashion for the planet, you need to tread carefully.  There are many obstacles, though, to taking a more sustainable route to your shopping and eating:

A lot of it comes in the form of advertising. When food producers and manufacturers started to realize that people were getting on the local, sustainable bandwagon when it came to their food purchases, they started to take advantage of that in a couple of ways. When it comes to advertising you will note the increased use of the words, ‘natural’, ‘artisan’, and ‘local’, or anything else that will give you a feel-good jolt when buying their product. I’ve seen a couple of excerpts from a new advertising campaign coming from McDonald’s that feature some of the ‘regular folk’ farmers who grow potatoes or ranch cattle that turn up as McDonald’s fries and hamburgers. Of course it doesn’t tell you the entire story of what happens to the cattle once they leave the ranch or exactly how those potatoes are grown. And just ask yourself what it really means when you buy Wendy’s ‘natural cut’ fries?

The corporate world goes deeper into the idea of getting your dollars you want to spend on sustainable foods by purchasing or taking over smaller, successful, organic companies. For example, chocolate giant Cadbury bought Green and Black Organic Chocolate in 2005, Coke owns Odwalla Juices and Pepsi owns Naked Juice. They don’t necessarily make clear the ownership on their labels, so if you have a problem with large companies that produce non-sustainable products you might be contributing to their bottom line even if you think you are buying from a smaller, organic company. The other problem with this is that it makes it very difficult for those small companies who have to compete head to head with the large companies on grocery store shelves. So the economies of scale of production quite often means that one organic chocolate bar from a large global company will cost a dollar or two less than one from a local producer, and if people vote with their wallets instead of their hearts that is bad news for the local producer.

When it comes to less-manufactured foods like fresh fruit and produce that’s a tricky situation as well. The demand for organic produce has increased so much that in certain areas of Mexico, for example, there are organic farms producing tomatoes for our winter consumption that are putting a strain on the local water tables. The tomatoes pass the USDA organic standards, but they are kind of skirting around the issue of true agricultural sustainability. More and more organic produce is also coming out of China, which cuts local farmers out of the loop and puts you very far away from being to ask questions about exactly how those fruits and vegetables are being produced.

There is a silver lining when production it is done right. An Economist magazine article published last year cited some important strides in sustainability being made in emerging world economies:
“Manila Water, a utility in the Philippines, reduced the amount of water it was losing to wastage and illegal tapping by 50 per cent over the past decade by making water affordable for the poor. A Chinese aquaculture company recycles uneaten fish feed to fertilise crops. An Egyptian food producer set itself the task of reclaiming desert land through organic farming. A Costa Rican food and drink company adopted tough standards for the amount of water it uses to produce drinks.”

What can you do you want to eat more sustainably in 2012? Get out there and buy local. We still have Winter Farmer’s Markets on the go, there is one this Saturday in Victoria in Market Square. In the winter it is still possible to find free range eggs, organic or pasture-fed chicken and turkey, pork and beef, all from local farmers. Plan in advance to freeze or preserve the upcoming harvest. I was so happy over the holidays to pull out some of my peach preserves and blend them into drinks, top my oatmeal with a compote I had frozen earlier this year, and give gifts like my Paradise Jelly...made from quince from my tree, apples from my neighbour’s orchard, and cranberries from a farm up island in Yellow Point. And finally, start asking more questions about where your food comes from.

Resources:

The McDonald's Feel-Good Video

Wendy's New "Natural" Fries Caught Using Chemical Stew

Organic Agriculture May Be Outgrowing Its Ideals

Is Whole Foods Wholesome? The dark secrets of the organic-food movement.

Wal-Mart's Organic Offensive

Green growth: Some emerging-world companies are combining growth with greenery

Bill C-474, Triffids, and the genetically modified / engineered food debate we're NOT having

Organic food and drink sales slump

Organic Industry Structure

How Green Is Your Eco-Label? (aquaculture)

And the two free Smartphone apps I talked about yesterday that I downloaded onto my iPhone are 'True Food' and 'Good Guide'.  Both are U.S.-based, so while they provide some information they don't have full details on Canadian products. 'True Food' helps you determine which food products are GMOs, and the Good Guide is supposed to let you scan UPC codes with the camera in your phone and then reveal ratings on their health, environmental and social performance.  Too bad it doesn't have that large a database and it doesn't seem to include any Canadian products.
 

Today on Food Matters I revealed my suggestions for cookbooks as gifts for the 2011 holiday season. But it’s very important to match the cookbook to the cook. You don’t give a book that has complicated recipes in it to a beginner, and you don’t give someone who already has 300 cookbooks the Dummy’s Guide to Boiling Water.

Michael Smith
 

I started with someone who is known for producing cookbooks that are for the relatively inexperienced home cook. The latest from Chef at Home, Chef at Large, and Food Network star Michael Smith is called Chef Michael Smith’s Kitchen, in which he has put together one hundred of his all-time favourite recipes that he makes at home on a regular basis. No fancy ingredients, not too many fancy methods and a photo for every recipe.

Mark McEwan

If you are looking for a book with just a little more technique, but still fairly easy recipes to make in the Italian fashion, check out Mark McEwan’s Fabbrica. McEwan is the chef behind quite the culinary empire in Toronto, with Fabbrica being his latest restaurant, what he describes as a casual but elegant, authentic Italian eatery. As he built the restaurant he built his collection of Italian recipes, so decided to put all those together in a cookbook. He takes pride in both the restaurant and the cookbook for being authentic Italian, and says you can learn how to do it, too.

Natalie MacLean

The perfect wine read for this year is Ottawa-based wine writer Natalie McLean’s second book, Unquenchable, A Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines. For this book Natalie traveled the world to find bargains, we’re talking well under 20 dollars a bottle for the most part here...because there is a lot of wine out there we can experience at lower prices that is just as good or even better than the higher-priced stuff.

Other books you can consider as great gifts for this year:

Jacques Pepin: The Essential Pepin

Nigel Slater: Tender, Volume II

Jamie Oliver: Jamie Oliver's Food Escapes

Coleman Andrews: The Country Cooking of Italy

Edward Behr:  The Art of Eating

Becky Selengut: Good Fish

Ottolenghi: Plenty

My Last Supper - The Next Course

While researching this item it was a real pleasure to be able to interview Jennifer McLagan, Natalie MacLean, Michael Smith and Mark McEwan. The entire interviews cover much more detail about their books and other facets of their lives than I had time to mention on the show today, so if you'd like to hear more from them, just click on the files below to listen.

Don Genova Interviews Natalie MacLean

Don Genova Interviews Michael Smith

Don Genova Interviews and Mark McEwan

Don Genova Interviews Jennifer McLagan