Eleanor Cooksey writes:

Early January, and it’s the time of year to be making New Year’s resolutions. After over-indulging during the festive season, it makes sense to decide to eat more healthily. And I would also like to try to be more green. However, I am not sure the two are compatible.

It might seem healthier to cook my cottage pie from scratch at home, but a study shows there are lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions involved in microwaving a ready meal version. This is because mass manufacture involves much more efficient use of resources and appliances, and being provided in portion format, is less likely to lead to wasting opened ingredients (such as that bit of mince that didn’t fit in the pan) or unconsumed cooked food (someone forgot the leftovers hidden at the back of the fridge).

Fine – so it looks like it could be better to eat ready prepared food, and many manufacturers are trying very hard to make their products healthier, for example by using oils high in polyunsaturated fats as oppose to saturated fat. However, it’s not that straightforward, as these oils need more water to clean the residues off the production lines, and I am not keen on increasing the embedded water content in what I eat.

Perhaps I would be better off to keep things simple, eat less meat, and focus on my ‘five a day‘. But who would have thought that it is greener to eat a salad with tomatoes imported from Spain than local produce needing lots of energy to heat the greenhouse, or that an English apple will have been consuming energy to stay fresh in refrigeration  throughout the winter? Or that going for fish is equally challenging given the amount of research needed to ensure you are eating from truly sustainable sources?

To avoid subsisting on a diet of just Brussels sprouts, turnips and parsnips I need help. How can we cut through the complexity so we can all make good (ie healthy, green and good value) choices as a consumer?

The photograph at the top of this poast is from VegBox Recipes, and is used with thanks.

I can’t remember an evening where I came away with my face aching from laughing and my hands sore from clapping so much.  Our local Arts Centre hosted an evening performance by Graffiti Classics, a professional string quartet of four (two guys, two girls) who met in 1997 when busking in Covent Garden and now perform worldwide.  Playing beautifully while dancing and singing energetically, from Ravel’s Bolero and Strauss to McCartney and Gershwin, cannot be easy. But they made it look so.  Great entertainment, very interactive with the audience, wonderful music performed to a lively stand-up-fall-down routine. Catch them if you can.  Or look them up on Youtube if you can’t.

Eleanor Cooksey: Four Lions

Smothering laughter whilst hiding my face behind hands was how I watched Four Lions, a film directed by Chris Morris about a group of Bradford-based jihadists who try to plan their own UK suicide bombings.

Why did it have this effect on me? I think because it represented the creative equivalent of ‘uncanny valley’ – a term used in robotics to describe how when a robot looks and acts almost like a human, it makes people recoil. Four Lions painted a scenario which seemed so believable and close to reality, it was frightening and almost unbearable. And still terribly, terribly funny.

Lindsay Kunkle:  Food, Inc., by Robert Kenner

A documentary that could change the way you eat forever, shines light on the messy politics of the food industry. Channeling popular food author and activist Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma), Kenner highlights the not so appetizing origins of our food. Genetically modified produce that refuses to rot, cows raised on unnatural diets of indigestible corn, the sheer over-abundance of corn in the marketplace, and the backhandedness of the soy industry are leaving us the victims as we battle food-borne illness, an out-of-hand obesity epidemic, and an economy that rewards unfair business, literally starving the small farmer.

The picture of Graffiti Classics is by Astralsound, and is used here with thanks.

Sophie Stringer writes:

The papers have been talking about ‘Blue Monday’ today – apparently the third Monday in January is the most depressing day of the year.  While the methods used to divine the gloomiest day on the calendar might be suspect to the point of dodginess, some brightening up of a Monday afternoon can never go amiss.

So this Monday, we were lucky to have cake to distract us.  Cake Club is becoming a weekly ritual in the London office; at 4pm tools are downed, tea is served and homemade cake is shared in the kitchen.

This week’s particularly fine offering was the plum and almond tart baked by Gus (yes, that’s the actual cake in the picture at the top of this post), but over the past few months we’ve seen everything from pumpkin bread to rocky road. The idea is simple – each week someone different makes a cake at the weekend, and brings it in on Monday.  Everyone is invited, the only rules of Cake Club are that participants have at least a mild intention to bake, and cake should be consumed seated while chatting (and not about work).

I could say something apposite at this point about Cake Club being indicative of our desire to embrace the authentic and relearn past skills, or evidence of the changing nature of our expectations of the workplace. But it should be enough just to be about cake.

Alex Steer writes:

Starbucks hasn’t had it easy, at least for the past decade. But whether being attacked by Naomi Klein for alleged anti-competitiveness in No Logo in 2001, or more literally attacked by demonstrators during a rally in London in January, Starbucks has always toughed it out. Until the recession, that is.

In late 2008, McDonald’s set up a giant billboard outside Starbucks HQ in its home town of Seattle. Proclaiming that ‘Four Bucks Is Dumb’, it advertised McDonald’s new line of (less expensive) espresso coffees. It was a well-timed campaign, and to judge from its share price, Starbucks spent three months in shock.

Its new strategy, announced last week, suggests that the coffee giant still has the caffeine jitters. It has opened three new outlets in Seattle – without any Starbucks branding. 15^th Ave. Coffee and Tea and its sisters look and feel like independents. The muted press release from Starbucks says that the unbranded stores offer ‘new opportunities for discovery, a high level of interaction and a deep connection to the local community’.

But these things – experience, interaction, community – are central to Starbucks’s brand. Hiding the brand suggests a company with an identity crisis. Perhaps Starbucks has been told that, in a recession, consumers retrench to the familiar and local. This may be true, but research from the US and elsewhere suggests that reports of a ‘bonfire of the brands’ are somewhat exaggerated.

The fuller story is that, for American consumers, price matters more. It’s no longer the poor relation to quality and convenience. But price isn’t everything. The brands that thrive in the downturn will be those that offer quality and experience at a fair price and give consumers what they want – for example, acting on the recessionary trend towards going out for breakfast, not dinner (good news for coffee houses).

So four bucks may not be bad – if they come with a little bit more of a bang. Starbucks needs to show its consumers that it understands this. But to build this trust, it needs to keep on being Starbucks.

The picture at the top is of Rob Brandt’s ‘Crushed Coffee Cup’ design, and is used with thanks.

Alex Steer writes:

The avocado pear’s name is the product of selective memory. Our word for the South American vegetable comes originally from the Nahuatl word ahuacatl, which means ‘testicle’. This unfamiliar word was borrowed into Spanish, but mishearing and confusion with the easier-to-remember word for ‘advocate’ or ‘lawyer’, avocado, led to this being used for the pear. Avocado was borrowed into English in the late 17^th century, and has stuck.

The avocado has in recent weeks found itself at the centre of a standoff between two supermarkets. Sainsbury’s and Marks and Spencer have launched TV adverts – commemorating their 140^th and 125^th anniversaries respectively – in which they each appear to take the credit for introducing the avocado to Britain. The avocado is now an advocate in supermarkets’ increasingly fierce battle for market share, but it is arguing the case for both sides.

There has been no shortage of ads harking back to the past recently – Sainsbury’s, M&S, Hovis, Persil – and no shortage of commentators noticing this. Most have identified that behind these campaigns lies a perceived yearning by consumers for the securities of nostalgia and tradition. Hovis’s strapline – ‘As good today as it’s always been’ – resonates with wary, recession-weary shoppers who are longing for a little sanity. Nostalgia brands are brands that have stayed the course; brands you can trust.

But Sainsbury’s and M&S are not just saying they are reliable retailers. They are saying they are responsible, ethical ones, and that they always were: employing women, helping the planet, doing their bit for the war effort. These campaigns are histories, written to appeal to the values and good citizenship modern consumers seek from brands.

The demand for corporate social responsibility is relatively new, and it’s hard for older brands not to look like they’re jumping on today’s bandwagon, compared to new brands who have built CSR into their blood and bone. By framing their histories in terms of modern values, retailers are telling consumers that, unlike the avocado, they were always advocates, representing quality and fairness. It remains to be seen if consumers will buy this, or conclude that it’s all a load of ahuacatls.

The picture at the top – a photograph of a painting – is borrowed, with thanks, from Betweenland on flickr.

Camilla Parke writes:

I must admit that I sat a little uncomfortably through the opening minutes of The End of the Line, the documentary screened on World Oceans Day, in which violent shots of blood drenched waters were interplayed with images of bloated Europeans gorging on sushi. My guilt is not misplaced; as an unquestioning consumer I have contributed to the problem journalist Charles Clover uncovers in this film: the little known damage that overfishing is doing to the world’s oceans. Significant improvements in fishing technology, huge increases in consumer demand and poorly enforced, inadequate quotas have decimated our seas. The impact on biodiversity is alarming: if overfishing continues at its current rate, scientists predict we will be out of most fish by 2048.

The plight of one endangered species in particular – Bluefin tuna – was explored in the film, and the press this week have focused on those retailer and restaurateurs that have (and have not) responded to calls to find more sustainable alternatives. A number of places are getting it right, and have been for some time – Feng Sushi in London’s Borough market has been sustainably sourcing its fish for the last 10 years. But for larger companies, the challenges are more significant.

Japanese restaurant Nobu seem unfazed by petitions from its celebrity diners to remove Bluefin from its menus, content to mention its endangered status on the menu and discretely suggests diners choose an alternative. Others are responding more proactively: Marks and Spencer has committed to only using pole and line caught tuna in its entire range of products; Pret a Manger is making a similar commitment.

Alongside the statistics, one of the most powerful learnings from the film is the fact that it is still possible to reverse the fortune of our oceans – as Clover points out, the answer is ‘not rocket science’. Although one hurdle is the inadequacy of current policy, one of the most important things we can do as consumers is to make more noise. Ask shops and restaurants how fish is sourced, and avoid those that are unsustainable. This really means thinking more and consuming less – a challenge given our love affair with eating fish. But if we don’t want to go hungry in the future, do we really have any other choice?

The photo at the top is borrowed, with thanks, from the End Of The Line website.

Pessimism is an often underrated emotion. In this dismal economic climate, brands like Schweppes (with their series of woodcut style print ads that send up British political figures) and even the Evening Standard (with their “Sorry” bus and tube advertising) have sought to capitalise on consumer discontent and, most probably, a simmering resentment towards our political and economic institutions (for a wonderfully vitriolic example of this anger, see Matt Taibbi’s ‘The Big Takeover’).

However, no mainstream brands appear to have done this as explicitly as Shredded Wheat in the US. The “Progress is Overrated” print ad above is part of a campaign by cereal manufacturer Post to publicise the simple, unchanged origins of their product. As you would expect, the long-copy form and type-setting feel of the print ad are wantonly old-fashioned, conveying “back-to-basics” message (although the slapstick tone of other campaign media feels at odds with this). What is especially interesting about the copy, however, is that it namechecks waste concerns, resource shortages and the impact of climate change as evidence that we have not progressed (though curiously no mention of the financial crisis. The people who buy Shredded Wheat are mainstream American consumers, many of them mums buying for their kids. The tone of the campaign (by Ogilvy & Mather in New York) implies that research has found this attitude reasonably prevalent in the target audience, which suggests that consumer discontent may be quite widespread.

While it may be difficult for established brands like Schweppes and Shredded Wheat to reinvent themselves as the Voice of Discontent, I think there is a substantial opportunity for less well-known brands to take this on, in the way that Mountain Dew reinvented itself as the ‘slacker’ brand in the midst of the corporate greed of the 1980s. With so many brands offering similar messages of solidarity and empathy with consumers at the moment, it might be that pessimism proves a smarter and more distinctive position.

The picture is borrowed, with thanks, from Noise Between Stations.

Rachel Claydon writes:

Momentum around the issue of toxic-free consumption seems to be building. New research released recently by the principal investigator at the Medical Research Council’s Human Reproductive Sciences Unit, Professor Richard Sharpe, provides further evidence of links between the toxic chemicals contained in many everyday products and major heath issues. This recent study warns that chemicals found in many cosmetics can damage the reproductive system in male foetuses, especially during the eight to twelve week stage of a pregnancy.

While the research was based on tests with rats and does not provide conclusive proof of harm, it nonetheless resonates with previous studies which point to a link between infertility problems and testicular cancer, pollution and chemicals in everyday products, and pregnant women are nevertheless being advised to avoid using perfume and scented creams.

Cosmetics are not the only products causing concern. Carpet, bedding, cling film, air fresheners and non-stick pans are among a number of household goods containing chemicals that campaigners believe have not been adequately safety tested. And American research published this week suggested an association between Bisphenol A – a chemical found in plastic packaging for food and drink – and the incidence of heart disease and diabetes, although it is a ‘preliminary’ stidy and it didn’t show a causal connection.

Toxic accumulation has been on environmentalists’ radar since the 1960s, and there is a growing body of regulation to try to tackle it. The issue is increasingly reaching the general public through media coverage of this kind of research – “Perfumes linked to infertility” screamed the front page of London’s Metro in response to Richard Sharpe’s research. Increasing consumer awareness of toxins in everyday goods is an important emerging trend, and we are seeing growing interest in toxic-free products such as Ecover and organic cotton. Producers who want to stay ahead of the trend would do well to check for poisons in their supply chains – before campaigners or researchers do.

Jo Phillips writes:

This weekend I bought 20 lettuce seedlings for a £1 from a country market. Should even a few of these grow into healthy sized lollo rosso, I reckon I will have saved a few pounds on the cost of equivalent produce at the supermarket, even taking into account the cost of compost and water. But perhaps more interesting than the potential to save money on food at a time when food costs are escalating and consumers are feeling the pinch, is the intrinsic value of homegrown produce to the grower. As Monty Don pointed out recently in his session at Hay, a person who grows food from seed wouldn’t even consider wasting it.

In his role as the new President of the Soil Association Don has been smart to encourage all growers, great and small, to consider themselves as part of a sustainable food movement. He clearly appreciates that those who have narrowed the gap between soil to plate to its minimum could, if connected to each other, be a powerful network for change. Linking small steps to big effects and harnessing the power of the collective may be a powerful way to address concerns about food security and food footprints and encourage behaviour change. And with sales of vegetable seeds overtaking those of flowers this year, the movement shows signs of burgeoning.

The greatest challenge perhaps will be in cities –people living within view of farms at least have a regular reminder of the provenance of food, but in urban spaces the mental gap is greater, and the knowledge less intuitive. But with the return of Victory Gardens in London and San Francisco, and vertical farms on the horizon, we are moving closer to the Soil Association’s vision of “a national policy of self-sufficiency in staple foods.”

© Jake Goretzki