Do Locavores Eat Lay’s Potato Chips? by Shelley Lance
Corporate agribusiness embraces the concept of “eating local” to sell commodity crops, according to this article in the New York Times. One example is Frito-Lay, which is rolling out an ad campaign featuring the faces of five Florida potato farmers who grow some of the 2 billion pounds of starchy potatoes that go into making Frito-Lay potato chips.
Others jumping on the locavore bandwagon are Hunt’s canned tomatoes, Foster Farms chickens, and Kraft cheese.
Why the new marketing focus? “Concerns over food safety, quality and cost are driving people beyond hard-core locavores to seek out food that has traveled fewer miles and has a traceable provenance,” says Stephanie Childs, a spokeswoman for the food conglomerate ConAgra.
Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, comments: “The ingenuity of the food manufacturers and marketers never ceases to amaze me. They can turn any critique into a new way to sell food. You’ve got to hand it to them.”
San Francisco Bay Area food writer Jessica Prentice is credited with creating the term “locavore.” Her comment: “The local foods movement is about an ethic of food that values reviving small scale, ecological, place-based, and relationship-based food systems. Large corporations peddling junk food are about the exact opposite of what this is about.”
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