November 1, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Last week I posted a question that I have been wondering about in my daily life as a consumer. Are organic foods really “healthier” or “better for the planet” in some ways than conventionally grown foods? Can these assertions be reasonably supported? What about veggie and fruit washes? Are food washed with them actually freer of pesticides as compared to organic foods, or not?The topic also cuts to the heart of some of my recent postings. First, because it involves an important consumer choice that more and more people are making. In particular, if I don’t really want to “choose” to eat a range of invisible dangerous chemical pesticides and to release them into the environment, and I don’t want to “choose” to eat and support genetically modified foods, then I need to choose to buy and eat organic food. Secondly, thinking and writing about organic foods seems to me to be a good practical way to demonstrate what Gramsci called the “organic intellectual” engagement with real issues in the real world, treated in a serious and thorough way and shared openly through public forums, of which the Internet is the participative public forum par excellence.

There were two very interesting comments that were posted, one by Greg Dunlop and the other by “L Scoop.” I’d like to share them with you, and expand the topic a little bit, based particularly on Greg’s comments to me in a recent email (which he agreed to let me share).

First, let me share with you a little of Greg’s background. He has “both an Environmental Biology background and a Marketing background” and is very interested in “the whole area of environmentalism, green marketing and consumers.” He says that I “struck a nerve” with him when I used the word “organic” in my blog and posed those questions.

On my blog, Greg’s comments about organic foods were pretty skeptical. “When it comes to organic food, science goes out the window and hype and marketing take over,” he said, stating that he doesn’t “buy the basic premise that organic food is healthier washed or unwashed!”

“In fact I can argue you should wash the organic produce more as organic production relies on organic fertilizer (aka cow dung) whereas conventional can use either synthetic (man-made)or the natural (cow-made)fertilizer. You don’t need a microbiology degree to know that manure is laced with E-coli and other harmful bacteria. I digress though… what I really wanted to do was to bring this into a marketing context. “Organic” has become a brand … what do you think about when you hear the word organic. Healthy, safe, pesticide free, small family farms, better for the environment. The organic industry, and yes it is an industry, has done a good job at branding. But these are all myths (and mostly urban ones at that!)

• Myth 1 - Organic food are healthier - Study after study has confirmed that their is no difference in the nutrional value whether or safety of organic food. I can supply the references on request.

• Myth 2 - Organic farmer don’t use pesticides - Wrong! - they use so-called organic pesticides. They are approved for organic production because they are not synthetic or man-made. The list of approved organic pesticides includes nicotine, tin and copper based compounds, sulfur etc.- some of these are being pulled from the market because of heavy metal buildup in the soil. An organic grape grower in CA has to apply 10 - 20 applications of sulfur at 20 pounds per acre in each spray to control fungal diseases. A conventional grower uses maybe 5 sprays of a modern highly effective and highly tested synthetic fungicide at ounces per acre. I know which one I would prefer to get my wine from.

• Myth 3 - Organic production methods are better for the environment - There is so many ways that this is wrong! First - there are no organic herbicides used in food production - they simply do not exist. Organic growers must rely on mechanical cultivation that burns fuel and can lead to greater soil erosion or the use of fallow and/or cover crops thereby taking land out of production and reducing yields. Organic production has lower yields. All the land that can or should grow crops in the world is being used to produce food. If low yield organic farming techniques were to be used throughout the world we would need to drain the swamps and cut down the forests to make way for more land. High yield farming prevents environmental degradation by producing more on an acre of land. There are other myths relating to organic production that I won’t get into here but the basic premise behind the organic craze is this the biggest myth of all … natural good, synthetic bad! This argument has nothing to do about science … it is about philosophy! If it make you feel better to eat an organic apple … washed or unwashed then go ahead. But don’t tell me that an organic apple is healthier. Both are healthy and that is the point. Eating apples or other fruits and vegetables is the best thing we can do to fight cancer. The process behind getting it to you is unimportant. We are lucky to live in an affluent society (made this way ironically because of modern agriculture) and debate the nuances about the food we eat and not have to worry about our basic sustenance.

Greg gives a reference article here on the topic of Marketing & The Organic Food Industry http://www.cgfi.org/publications/Marketing_The_Organic_Food_Industry and suggests that interested thinkers might consider picking up a copy of the book “The Truth about Organic Foods” by Alex Avery.

Keeping an open mind is a good thing, and difficult when we really have no at-hand and reliable sources of information about the pros and cons of one particular food choice (or other kind of choice) over another. Potter and Heath, in their excellent book “Rebel Sell,” assume a similarly skeptical posture towards organic, calling the organic certification process, in effect, a legitimation scheme that was controlled and railroaded by a bunch of radical hippie extremists.

In his email to me, Greg expands on his ideas and links them to branding and marketing. He then advocates a more moderate position, where extremism is not seen as a sensible path. It strikes me as pretty sensible, in fact.

“In a generic sense, people use labels as a short cut to understanding the complexity of the world around us. They come to believe certain “truths” based on their values, experiences, emotions and of course the influences of government, NGO’s, companies, media, authority figures, peers, neighbors, family and friends. Ideas or issues become like brands. Organic is a brand. Ethanol is a brand. Fair trade coffee is a brand. These are just as much brands in today’s world as a Big Mac, and in many ways shape consumer choices both directly and indirectly much more so then what McDonald’s could ever dream about. But I like to dig deeper into some of brands, like peeling back the layers of an onion, and with my science background to understand the scientific “truths”. Just as we know the truths about the fat content of a Big Mac and that a steady diets of Big Macs is not too healthy, we also recognize that a Big Mac once in a while is not unhealthy either. With fat, sodium, sugar or whatever people are concerned about in their diet are people starting to recognize the idiom “the dose determines the poison” and therefore “everything in moderation please”?

So, that’s Greg’s perspective. L. Scoop actually had a very different perspective which was much more favorable to organic foods and the organic brand as a signal of real food quality and nutritional difference.

I’m no expert on this but I think there are two different things going on here. One, the thing that you’re talking about, is the safety of the food that you are eating….in that vein, you need to consider the type of fruit or vegetable that you are eating. In some of them, where the skin is very thin or you are likely to eat the entire fruit (including skin), you are more likely to have a situation where the fruit might not be that safe with or without a wash…for instance, if I were to buy something non-organic, it would be something like an avocado or a melon (where I discard the thick skin) rather than any type of berry or green bean where I would eat the entire thing. But, let’s say you’re careful and maybe with non-organic pesticide free produce or produce that is specially washed, you can get rid of all or most of the chemical concerns. Next, and more important in the long term, is the NUTRIENT VALUE of the fruits and vegetables that you are eating. And that’s where Organic produce has incomparable value compared to other types of produce. Do some research and that’s where the real value of organic produce lies. Victoria Boutenko has some of this information in your books, and I’m sure you can also find it elsewhere.

Now, I did look up the Boutenko site and apparently this is a family that has some serious health issues a while back and decided to switch to a diet of raw organic food. Apparently, this made major differences to their health. The site and associated books seem to me to be an advocacy site for an eating style that involves raw, rather than cooked, food, and there is no doubt that raw food has a superior nutrition profile when compared to cooked food. But does organic food really have a superior nutrient profile? That claim seemed suspect to me so I investigated it further.

I recently bought a book called “What To Eat” by Marion Nestle. Nestle, who doesn’t seem to be connected to the Swiss food company, is a nutrition professor and she has offered in this book a very thorough, well-documented, scientific but also eminently readable guide to what foods to ear for what reasons. The recommendation by Michael Pollan (and author whose work I like very much) on the cover certainly helped to sell me on the book.

Dr. Nestle says in her book that testing such assertions proves extremely difficult, but that it is likely that organic produce, grown in better and richer soil, may be slightly higher in nutritional value than matched produce grown in poorer soil conventionally. That’s isn’t really a very strong assertion. According to her fruits and vegetables are “better” because they are organic, “but not necessarily for nutritional reasons.” She cites a former head of the nutrition department at Columbia University who says that people should probably choose organic for reasons other than that they might contain “a little more carotene or zinc” (which, considered in the long run and in the entire nutritional picture, amounts to something fairly insignificant). Instead, it is the preservation of natrual resources, the reduction in water, air, and soil pollution, and the solution of environmental problems that are the bigger attractors. So, actually,nutritional benefit is apparently *not* where the real benefit of organic lie.
We’re getting two very different pictures here. The skeptics, who are informed. And the advocates, who are informed. I’m certainly not insisting that all of my food be organic, but I know several people who are. I have been shifting more of my food consumption to organic, but it’s really still just a small fraction of what I eat. But I’m wondering, each time I grocery shopping in fact, what I should do. And those decision, multiplied over hundreds of millions of people, are having major impacts on the food industry. Do they make sense? What is the opportunity cost of the money we collectively spend supporting organic agriculture?

What do you think? Who should we believe? How should we be making these important choices?

Posted in Green marketing, Branding | 1 Comment »

October 23, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Are consumers free?, asks a new “Epistemic Session” at the Association for Consumer Research this Friday morning. I’m delighted to be on a panel session organized by David Mick of U. Virginia, along with Tom O’Guinn of UW-Madison and Lisa Penaloza of EDHEC.

It’s a tough question, philosophical, maybe a bit abstract. As soon as you scratch the surface of that question you begin to encounter the fact that the values of the collective group are manifest through the thoughts, meanings, and actions of the individual, and the collective is made up of amassed individual influences. Culture, the market, the community, the collective–whatever you want to call it–it’s a big part of being us, and it constrains what we do as surely as pretty much as securely as our genetics do. Despite our shared need to differentiate and strong culture of rugged invididualism, it turns out that we’re pack animals after all. Solid primates, one and all.

Five years ago I published an article whose title asked “Can Consumers Escape the Market?” The answer: nope. Not really. Not if by consumers you mean people and by market you mean our entire culture and civilization.

Of course, there are degrees of freedom. This all hearkens back to what’s called the “Structure versus Agency” debate, which asks pretty much the same thing: how free is the individual to make choices and act in our society? The answer is contingent on many things, and its become pretty clear that people in our society are neither wholly free nor completely oppressed, but somewhere interestingly in between.

The Session and its core question is spurring some very interesting discussion on the Association for Consumer Research web-site, which I believe is publicly accessible here. There are lots of great posts. One of my favorite ones so far is by my friend and colleague Russ Belk, who talks about a classroom exercise he conducts in order to illustrate some of these points. He says:

“When I teach an introductory marketing course I have students do an in-class exercise to create their own economy by focusing on specific cases of what consumers in their economy will and will not be allowed to freely choose. I begin by soliciting the amount of support for allowing free choice for each member of such pairs of consumer goods as:

1. Guns and knives
a. Handguns and rifles
b. Butcher knives and switchblades
2. Firecrackers and hand grenades
3. Cigarettes and marijuana
a. For children and adults
b. For the poor and the rich
4. Alcohol and heroin
5. Motor-scooters and Hummers
6. Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and hardcore pornography
7. Prostitution and child pornography

As a result of these straw polls we get some interesting splits (e.g., knives are okay, but guns, or at least handguns, should be outlawed). So then I ask “Why will you allow choice A, but not choice B?” Although a few libertarians insist that all of these things should be freely available, most believe that there must be some freedom of choice but also some restraint where having total freedom of choosing would result in negative individual or social consequences.

So after a day of these guns versus butter sorts of arguments we begin to further consider how to create a fair, just, and humane society, how much is enough, how much is too much, who is responsible for addressing problems like global warming, and so forth. Finally, having hopefully sensitized class members to social versus individual interests, we circle back to the earlier choices and I ask are consumers really free to choose or really precluded from choosing each of these things in our own economy. . . .What these exercises suggest is that underlying the behavioral questions raised here are philosophical questions with important political, moral, environmental, and economic implications.”

So, illustrating the characteristic way he brilliantly inverts questions, Russ is drawing our attention to the flipside. Although the question tended to lead us to where consumers were constrained and might need more freedom, Russ is leading us to consider where consumers are free and might need more supervision or restraint, and also to consider why we aren’t so free–why there are social controls where collective forces restrict individual urges.

And while I’m plugging the ACR session on Friday (wake up early, it’s a 8 am), I may as well plug the CNN Special “A Planet in Peril.” It premieres tonight at 9 PM EST. It’s being hyped pretty effectively already, but I’m going to lend my WOM voice and blog to the chorus. I think Ted Turner and CNN aren’t afraid to tackle the big issues, which are our species’ environmental impacts, the legacy of our current age and its consumer culture and lifestyle. He’s been raising awareness of the issue for almost two decades now (does anyone else remember Daniel Quinn’s amazing novel “Ishmael“), and this looks like it could well be a milestone documentary, a great eye-opener in the tradition of “An Inconvenient Truth.”
The two topics–the Epistemic Session and the Planet in Peril– are intimately connected.

As Citizen Consumers, how are we free to help the planet and how are we deeply, systemically restricted? As Citizen Consumers, what sorts of actions would have the biggest impact in reducing planetary devastation the quickest? That’s not an ivory tower exercise. That’s the Great Challenge of our times.

Posted in Marketing News & Insights, Green marketing, Marketing Science, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

October 22, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Something different, again.

By night I am a tireless marketing professor, seeking to fill the world with wonderful new products and services that make people’s lives better. But by day I am a mild-mannered consumer who is trying to eat healthy and to feed his family healthy, but also has to live within a budget.

In preparation for tomorrow’s blog entry on being an “Organic Intellectual” I thought I’d play on words a little bit. I’m currently reading a very good book that is truly frightening, about the sheer amount and toxicity of the chemicals in our food, water, and air. It’s by Randall Fitzgerald and it’s called “The Hundred Year Lie.” The part of the book I like most is on solutions, in particularly detoxification regimes. Fitzgerald, who is an investigative reporter, indicates that a regime of raw food, fasting, wheatgrass juice, colonic cleansing, infrared saunas, and organic foods can help to reduce our bodies’ level of toxicity. It sounds pretty good and sensible to me (um…except for the colonic cleansing part).

Along those lines, particularly in regards to organic food, I would just like to know something, Are organic foods healthier than regular mainstream foods that are washed with a pesticide remover solution? I’ve been looking for good books and information on this topic but can’t seem to find anything useful or scientific in the least.

Does anyone remember P&G’s failed experiment with a product called “Fit”? Fit was designed to remove about 98% of the pesticide and other residues on the surface of fruits and vegetables. Fit was originally developed by Procter & Gamble in 2000, developed from food related extracts like citric acid and grapefruit oil. Fit flopped horribly in 2001, and was eventually sold to HealthPro Brands in 2006. I see several scientific tests related to the brand online attest to its efficacy at killing bacteria. I see that the product is available online here. Actually, although the product failed, I think it was a very good idea, and might be made to work again with the right approach, or better timing.

My family currently uses a Veggie Wash (works on fruits too; maybe the category is “Food Wash” but that sounds strange) called “Nature Clean” which claims to be an “all-natural fruit and veggies spray wash.” As far as I can tell, the main ingredient is sodium lauroyl sarcosinate, which sounds like sodium lauryl sulfate which is in most soaps. But the label says that this is a “food grade cleaner” that is made “from palm oil.” Okay, but there are no efficacy claims at all on the package, or related to it. It’s just a Veggie Wash. Plain and simple. And that’s what I’m curious about.

It’s definitely part of our purification preparation ritual for the food. But does it work?

And how much of what we’re buying as “organic” really is pesticide-free, anyways?

How does one stack up against the other? Economically, as well as in terms of how much pesticide residue is entering our bodies?

Here’s the bigger question that concerns me as a consumer: Do we have any information, any recourse, any way of finding out the answers to these questions? How might the Internet play a role, a big role. Maybe, just maybe, we can use our conversations to collectively empower ourselves as consumers-and as citizens. And I think the chemicals in our food and in our water might be a great place to start the conversation. I’ll circle back to this later.

Posted in Green marketing | 2 Comments »