Offmessage

A few weeks ago there was a flurry of news and comment around the Soil Association’s proposal to remove the Organic marque from food that had been flown in to Britain.  At the time the Kenyans (among others) were rightly up in arms about the effect it would have on their economies. On the Today program a Kenyan representative very carefully pointed out that the environmental impact of heated glasshouse grown vegetables was much higher than that of food grown without heat and shipped in.

While this report at Riverford only talks about Spain/Italy and road freight, rather than Kenya and air freight, it does highlight the easy confusion about what is actually green.

It leads me to a gripe, too.  When did “Organic” stop meaning “grown without chemicals” and start meaning “meeting whatever random criteria public opinion has badgered us into”?  Like the Fairtrade movement the Soil Association should be very careful about diluting or confusing its brand.

I didn’t realise that Fairtrade products had to come from collective owned/operated farms and I didn’t realise that Organic meant more than no chemicals.

Confusion, obfuscation and brand overreach leads the consumer into a bewildering array of uninformed decisions; exactly what these marques were supposed to stop happening.

Oh.  And while I’m on consumer confusion…  WTF is with this advert for McCains Rustic oven chips?  Only showing 4 of the 5 traffic lights is downright misleading, and should be banned outright, right now.

Oh, bless my poor liberal Guardian reading bleeding heart… Much as I approve of Jamie Oliver’s campaign to improve the lot of our domestic chickens I rather wish it didn’t mean that the supermarkets weren’t permanently sold out of the RSPCA approved chicken that we’ve been buying for the last few years.

Which, I guess, is a lesson in two things - being careful what you wish for and the power of television. Still, it does really gall that we’ve ended up having to buy exactly the chicken we’ve been avoiding for years because of the surge in popularity. Someone somewhere missed a trick - it’s not like Channel 4 haven’t been able to warn producers about the campaigns long in advance and, as Hugh and Jamie have been so eagerly telling us, it only takes 6 weeks to grow a chicken…

I’m not the only one to have noticed, either..