Why Green Words Make Me See Red

by Betty Fussell

Long ago, words like “organic,” “fresh,” “local” and “healthy” were hijacked by industry marketers. Today, producers and marketers who should and do know better — upscale producers like Creekstone Farms and upscale marketers like WholeFoods — have turned “natural” and “sustainable” into gobbledygook for the naive.

Alas, in our current Madmen age, labels are made to deceive, and high-end marketers and chefs are as vulnerable as the rest of us to “feel-good” labels from food producers.

Take beef, for example. Eric Brandt, of a mid-size family company in Brawley, Calif., called Brandt Beef, was the cover boy in April of Meating Place. This is the industry’s trade magazine, and they praised him for making “a great sales pitch to high-end chefs.” Some of the best chefs in NYC have succumbed.

His pitch hypes “natural” into “true natural.” But all he means by this is “no hormones, no antibiotics” for a specified period of time. Since that’s become a conventional industry practice for many producers, he adds “true,” which is false.

He uses feedlots and intensive grain diets, but there’s nothing natural about CAFOS and CORN. Nothing at all. And have you noticed how often nowadays corn-fed has been euphemized into “an all-vegetarian diet?”

Brandt’s pitch is particularly deceptive because he uses male Holstein calves (the dairy industry sells them cheap), which from day one have never touched mama’s milk from the udder. To read more about his “corn is true natural” defense, read Amy Westervelt’s story at The Faster Times.

Let the industry praise him for his booming boosterism, but let buyers — chefs and eaters — beware.

Go, Green, Go

by Betty Fussell

For a hawk’s-eye view of what’s happening in Green Beef, check out Will Harris on a new DVD called “CUD.”

Produced by Southern Foodways Alliance and Whole Foods, the documentary title says it all, but you gotta pronounce it the way Will does, “COULD.”

Will’s accent is thick as red clover in May at White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Ga., where I visited him a couple of weeks ago. Not an easy place to get to — nor to leave. His great-granddaddy brought cows to this spot near the Florida border in 1866, and his family’s grazed them here ever since.

To get here you fly to Atlanta, drive south for three hours, and watch Piedmont turn into Coastal Plains. Cows love it. And Will loves cows.

Also wildlife. I find him in his office feeding pieces of raw beef heart to an injured red-tail hawk. His office is part of his new processing plant, where he turns his cows into steaks.

Recently I ate some of those at the James Beard House around the corner from me in Manhattan. They’d been cooked by chef Linton Hopkins from Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta. This is why the story “CUD” tells is important. Small-scale processing supplies the missing link in that ever-greening path from farm to table.

Will bet his 1,000-acre farm on the plant, which enables him to sell to the Southern Region of Whole Foods, from Miami, Fla., to Princeton N.J. Small scale means control. Where industrial processors slaughter 5,000 cows an hour, Will does 5,000 a year. Control means not just the mantra of local, organic, humane, safe, sustainable — but the certifiable reality of each of these words.

It’s organic all the way. Zero waste means wash-water is cleaned and piped into the fields. Carcass waste (innards, bones, fat) becomes fertilizer by way of a giant Digester. He’s added chickens to the organicizing process and will soon add the larva of Black Soldier Flies to feed the chicks which feed the grass.

Grass is not just an edible carpet for cows but also for the horses grazing by his house, across the road from the plant, and next to the house he grew up in where his mama lives still. His three daughters will continue the 144 years of this farm’s local sustainable history because they understand their daddy’s vision.

“I began to feel that sending off my calves to the feedlot,” Will says, “was like sending my daughters to a whore-house.”

Watch a short version of “CUD” below, and for a glimpse of real green, visit Will’s website: www.whiteoakpastures.com.

How Mavericks Became Zombies

by Betty Fussell

Names matter, as the marketer of any brand name knows well. But let’s separate living brands from dead ones. Dead ones are zombie brands that pretend to be live ones, that suggest the practices of the originating company but conceal the changes executed by new owners who hide behind the old familiar name. Are we still saving the rainforests when we eat Ben & Jerry’s ice cream? Not since it was bought by Unilever.

From the current marketing of brands you’d never know that the word “branding” comes from the practice of burning a mark with a hot iron into a hide, bovine or human, to claim ownership. It might be a cow, it might be a slave. A burned-in brand was supposed to mean “my property.”

That equation did not suit Samuel Augustus Maverick, who had both slaves and cows in the 19th century, when he acquired most of West Texas. His attitude was, “If I own it, I don’t need to brand it.”

During the time of cattle drives and roundups, before industrialization ended all the fun, the rule of the range was that any calf which became separated from its mother belonged to the first person to brand it. As we know, that allowed rogues, rustlers and cattle barons leeway to discover a remarkable number of unbranded calves (who became known as “mavericks”) and of already branded ones that they could alter the mark of right quick.

Outside the cattle world, “maverick” came to mean someone who didn’t play by the rules — an outsider, a loner, a cowboy like James Garner in the original Maverick of 1957. Today a genuine maverick company in the conglomerated food industry is one that keeps ownership of its good name. That is increasingly hard to do.

The gaps between brand name and ownership widen even as I write. Since the power of a brand depends entirely on a consumer’s associations with a particular name, it behooves the big boys to keep quiet when they buy up the little boys.

I learned this decades ago when Kraft Foods bought up a little hippie group in Colorado, which sold “natural herb tea” under the name “Celestial Seasonings.” The name and the packaging — especially the idyll of peace, love, dove evoked by a girl on a swing in a nature wonderland of butterflies and swans — have remained the same as the owners changed and changed again. News flash: The current owner has just announced on CelestialSeasonings.com a change of packaging at last: “A New Look Outside … the Same Celestial Magic Inside!” Nature’s still there but the girl is gone.

I did not learn enough, however, to keep from being gulled when I agreed for a brief time to be a spokesperson for Entenmann’s Baked Goods. Only near the end of my tour did I discover that the local Brooklyn bakery had been bought out by Warner-Lambert and then General Foods, a subsidiary of Philip Morris. I should have suspected something was afoot when Entenmann’s was advertising its doughnuts as good for you because they were “fat-free.”

Caveat emptor, buyer beware, still warns against being fooled by deceptions like zombie brands. Take two examples in the meat world: Coleman’s beef and Niman’s pork. Coleman’s Natural Beef is owned by Meyer Natural Angus, Niman Ranch by Hilco. Both companies are in the commodity biz, but the brand marketing is all about the standards of excellence of the original owners.

This deception harms small independent companies like Heritage Foods and Ranch Foods Direct that have to compete with zombie brands. Even Shakespeare warned against trusting those who would brandish their names to conceal their true identities and motives. Two of his most dangerous villains, Iago and Shylock, each defended himself by declaring the virtue of “my good name.”

Here are a few websites that help track the corporate parent companies of  “organic natural” brands that began as “mavericks” in the industrial chain: Nutrition Wonderland, Endgame.org and the Organic Consumers Association. Of course the parents may be owned or controlled by other parents, like Hains-Celestial Group by Heinz. Corporate family trees are designed to discourage consumer trackers.