The Problem with Labels
I’m always amused by the image Whole Foods shoppers must be conjuring as they go out of their way to purchase something “organic”: cute little 19th century farmhouses with kids getting up early to milk the cows in the barn and the parents working in well-tilled fields. And while organic food does have its virtues - especially when it comes to the use of pesticides - more and more organic farms take full advantage of the scale-driven efficiencies of industrial agriculture. In other words, organic doesn’t mean what the average Whole Foods shopper thinks it means.
Kim Severson of the New York Times reports on the latest food label that is catching on:
The toy industry had its Tickle Me Elmo, the automakers the Prius and technology its iPhone. Now, the food world has its latest have-to-have-it product: the cage-free egg.
The eggs, from chickens raised in large, open barns instead of stacks of small wire cages, have become the latest addition to menus at universities, hotel chains like Omni and cafeterias at companies like Google. The Whole Foods supermarket chain sells nothing else, and even Burger King is getting in on the trend.
…
The eggs can cost an extra 60 cents a dozen on the wholesale market. But most chicken farmers are not ripping out cages and retrofitting their barns. They question whether the birds are really better off, saying that keeping thousands of hens in tight quarters on the floor of a building can lead to hunger, disease and cannibalism. They also say that converting requires time, money and faith that the spike in demand is not just a fad.
As with organic, cage-free eggs brings to mind an image that does not always square with reality. Both of the photos above show cage-free chickens. The top photo shows chickens being fed at Polyface Farm in Virginia, while the bottom depicts the scene at a more industrial cage-free operation. As much as I love the way Polyface operates, it’s hard to imagine such strictly sustainable operations meeting the volume of product needed by the companies that Egg Innovations counts as clients, such as Ben and Jerry’s or Wolfgang Puck.
Hence the problems with labels. It’s not that I think that the terms “organic” or “cage-free eggs” are destructively deceptive, even if the purveyors who promote the terms are well aware that customers hide behind idealized definitions for both. But just like labels in politics often keep voters from thinking about the specific policies a candidate will actually support, labels like “organic” keep Americans from thinking about what they really want from their food supply. And what they don’t know can hurt them.
