Green Options

I just got back from three days at one of my favorite ag industry meetings: The Produce Marketing Association “Fresh Summit.”  To those in the industry this is just known as the PMA.   This is an event where the vast majority of the fresh produce and flower industry gathers to show off their products, their new ideas and all the technologies [...]

There is an old saying in the fresh produce industry: “Produce is purchased based on appearance, not by taste.”  This is unfortunately often true.  People buy their fruit and vegetables based on how fresh and blemish-free they look.  They don’t normally have the chance to do taste comparisons.  The reality is that lots of fruits and vegetables look better than they taste.

Fortunately, there have been some produce improvements that break through this “appearance” paradigm.  I’ll describe just four examples that are favorite of mine and about which I have some background information (don’t worry, no-one is paying me to promote these).

The Golden Pineapple

It used to be that buying a fresh pineapple was a high risk investment.  They were fairly expensive and much of the time they were so acidic that you would burn the roof of your mouth.  The Pineapple Research Institute in Hawaii developed a much sweeter, lower acid hybrid called 73-114, but for years it could never be commercialized because it couldn’t be successfully shipped to the US from either Central America or Hawaii.  Finally, the fruit company, Del Monte and the post-harvest technology company FMC figured out a a way for it to make it to US markets.  They found a particular food-safe wax that changed the gas exchange (CO2, water, oxygen…) such that the fruit could stay alive during shipping.  Del Monte launched this as “Del Monte Gold” in 1997.  Since then many companies have introduced “Golden Pineapples” and pineapple consumption has been rising ever since.

Are you worried that an organic garden on the White House grounds might cause some Americans to start eating a wide variety of chemical-free, locally grown produce? The Mid America CropLife Association, a lobbying group for agribusinesses giants, is.

Just a few days after Michelle Obama invited local fifth graders to help plant the White House Kitchen Garden, the MACA, a group which represents and is comprised of former executives from Dow AgroSciences, Monsanto and DuPont Crop Protection, sent the White House a letter (which can be viewed in its entirety here) expressing their disappointment that she had not “recognize[d] the role conventional agriculture plays in the US.”

But that’s not all. The group went on to provide a dose of propaganda educational information, including little known fact that “technology allows for farmers to meet the increasing demand for food and fiber in a sustainable manner.” Drawing a clear line between technology, undefined, and sustainability does not, in the strictest terms, suggest the group’s total disapproval of organic farming methods.

That outright statement came in an email MACA sent their members shortly after sending the first lady aforementioned letter, in which they said that the idea of an organic garden “made Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder.” [italics mine].

I am all about buying local and in particular, I am a big supporter of local farmers. I’ve always seen Wal-Mart as the antithesis of my beliefs in creating a more regionally economically sustainable culture.

When a press release came through from Wal-Mart announcing their commitment to increase their use of local farmers to provide fresh produce, I was skeptical.

However, in doing a little research for this post, I visited the Wal-Mart website and found that they have an entire section devoted to sustainability. Okay. That is good. You can see that they are going to great lengths to at least appear to be implementing more sustainable activities across the board. But one could argue that these are all either cost-saving measures or done to be SC or Sustainable Correct, which is important to their marketing and PR efforts.

This cynical view of things aside, one could also argue that anything Wal-Mart implements on a corporate level will have a pretty big impact on whatever local economies they might otherwise be harming.