What's in a Name? The Power to Shift the Food System

I can’t help it. Food comes up in my conversations all the time. Whether I am at a conference for sustainable agriculture or at my neighborhood watering hole, the people I meet are paying attention to their food in a way that should perk the ears of anyone who produces, markets, distributes, sells, prepares, or buys food. These conversations should get your attention because they reflect a desire to reject a mainstay of the food industry – traditional food labeling, in favor of radical transparency.

Recently, two articles have brought to light the risks and challenges of transparency in food systems. David Karp’s article in the L.A. Times, “Fruit Varietals: Identity Crisis in the Produce Aisle”, describes how fruit varieties get mixed together for the simplicity of the supply chain and in order to prevent customer confusion. As Karp writes, for the produce industry, the value of veiling details about fresh produce is in efficient operations and subdued consumers.

The produce industry is not alone in favoring streamlined over customized operations. When I was working with a big commodity merchant last summer, there was significant concern that if textile customers knew the origin of a particular kind of cotton, they would begin to have sharpened tastes and, if they liked a specific region’s cotton one season, might demand it to the exclusion of other varieties or geographies next season. This picky customer would create chaos in global trading relationships and pricing because, if next year cotton from a different region is superior but the customer wants what he got last year, demand favors an inferior product.

Karp suggests that grocers are worried about the “educated customer” problem too. What a risk it would be if I got Pink Lady apples last month, loved them, and demanded my grocer get them again this month, even though they are expensive and out of season! I daresay, with the right information provided to them in the right format, people are smart enough to figure out that the best produce today might not be the best next week or next year. We’re already trained to think this way with some foods. Who buys pomegranates in the summer months, or corn on the cob in January? We get it. Tell us what is good now, and let us figure out what we want for ourselves. Karp rightly states that doing so would allow “good products [to] be rewarded with increased demand and higher prices, and inferior ones [to] fall by the wayside.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times article “Genetically Altered Salmon Set to Move Closer to Your Table” describes how a genetically modified fish could get approved by the FDA and show up unidentified in grocery store freezers next to, shall we say, authentic salmon. My first reaction is, “Label it!” (To clarify, in general, I think static labeling is insufficient, but here we are talking about whether or not to even distinguish “real” from “altered”).

If consumers are given enough information to determine what’s what, who cares whether the FDA decides to let this fish go to market? They will do their best to conclude whether these highly efficient protein producers are safe, but they cannot possibly be expected to anticipate the long-term effects of a genetically modified fish. If consumers have at their fingertips sufficient information to understand the choices they make with their food dollars, then collective intelligence and preference will decide whether to keep AquaBounty’s product on store shelves.

If a stable food system is one in which farmers produce what consumers want, consumers know what they’re getting, and consumers’ decisions influence farmers’ production plans, then full disclosure seems necessary. What would it take to get there? It will take more than the “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” campaign, the USDA’s well-intentioned effort to connect Americans to the farm, because we need to rely on real-time data. But data takes time, and time is money. As Karp reports, farmers do not have the incentive or are too fatigued to sort fruit by varietal, much less track field-level statistics.

It’s understandable that farmers are tired – if they sell their products directly, they are not only farmers but also marketers, distributors, and, increasingly, social media strategists. Technology is evolving that can help. Products like Stickybits connect digital content with a physical product, allowing food manufacturers, marketers, and farmers to tell a more complex story than nutritional values and ingredient lists can. Similarly, Leitha Matz of FreshDirect sees online food retail as a way to provide greater depth of information than is available on a sign inside a grocery store. She sees personalized, transparent information through the website as a key factor in FreshDirect’s commitment to supporting both farmers and customers.

The question of how we identify our agricultural products comes down to whether we believe that such products are differentiated. For decades, even specialty crops have been lumped together in name, price, and path to market. However, as food sustainability and transparency efforts make headway, we’re starting to realize that nothing that the earth produces is undifferentiated. Each peach has its own flavor. Each tree has particular nutrient needs. Each acre gets its own sunlight and irrigation. Each farmer has her own practices and philosophy of farming. And each hungry person has a unique combination of flavor palette, health profile, and willingness to pay. How can we possibly consider agricultural production to be a commodity?

Traceability and transparency are essential to healthy food systems because without them, consumers have little say in the food they choose to buy, except through niche certifications like organic (which I find more and more of my peers distrust). If we could see, at the moment of our purchase decisions, the system that we empower to feed us, then our dollars could begin to align with our nutritional, environmental, social, and cultural desires. Until then, I grudgingly trust food supply chains that are not merely veiled but curtained.

Right now, the only people with the drawstring on this picture are big food retailers that can demand their suppliers give them rigorous information so that they, in turn, can provide it to customers, and farms that see the economic value and vast marketing potential of offering deeper transparency through technology. In an era when consumers increasingly want information about pesticide use, fertilizer type, irrigation level, soil pH, nutritional value, long-term economic costs, and social tradeoffs in their food, I’m putting my money on the farmers.

Some see radical transparency as a costly burden (which, if done with paper and pen, physical labels, and manual sorting, it is), but I firmly believe that with the information infrastructure that exists today radical transparency is not only possible but necessary. Yes, I think that the companies that refuse to throw the curtain back on food products are in for a big surprise, as the companies that embrace the data, consumer insight, and brand evolution that comes with full disclosure thrive. Why? Because those companies will be in constant communication with everyone they touch, from their farmers to their customers. To my way of thinking, that describes an engaged, responsive, and agile company that will survive the 21st century.


This piece is cross-posted at Zocalo and The Huffington Post.

Food and Technology: Learning from our past and defining our future

On a recent Tuesday night, the back room at Jimmy’s No. 43 in the East Village is packed with foodies and techies, researchers and entrepreneurs, filmmakers and activists. The group has converged for “Five on Food #2”, the monthly event from Meetup.com’s food+tech group. We are there because we believe that technology can disrupt habitual behavior, points of reference, and mindsets, and that just such a disruption is needed if we are going to achieve sustainability in food and agriculture.

When Will Turnage takes the stage to talk about what the combination of food and technology means to him, and how he weaves the two fields together in his daily life, the group nods when he talks about being a developer, and cheers when he announces that he keeps bees. Turnage’s combination of technical expertise, passion for food, and commitment to combining the two in ways that are good for people and the environment, is a common theme among members. However, Turnage, who helped to develop the Ratio application that accompanies Michael Ruhlman’s book by the same name, suggests that the point of technology is to reacquaint us with the instinct and intuition we have lost. He wants to give people the tools they need to get comfortable in the kitchen again.

Daniel Bowman Simon, of the People's Garden NYC, also reminds us that we are not new here. On stage, he produces a photocopy of a 1917 city pamphlet promoting school gardens. Ironic, he says, given how he has had to hit the street to get people to sign his petition to ask Mayor Bloomberg to put a garden in front of City Hall. Simon says he likes making the face-to-face connection with potential supporters first, having them sign, and then following up with an e-mail (in other words, technology enhances the connection but does not establish it). So far, 5,000 people have signed; he wants 8 million signatures. “That’s how many it would take for it to be unanimous,” he says. Simon reminds us that where we are trying to go might not be so far from where we, or at least our ancestors, have been before.

Because of technology, we now have the potential to see the systems around us in new ways. Wendy Brawer of Greenmap.org arrives with symbols printed on bright orange paper. These symbols, she says, are the iconography that helps connect communities around the world to sustainability resources. The open mapping project, which she has led since the early ‘90s (it started on paper, she reminds me), allows cities, organizations, and individuals to create their own maps, which Brawer believes are the missing link in delineating and communicating the issues around food sustainability. She has gotten us a long way toward visualizing the activities, concepts, and needs that shape our local, regional, and global perspective on food systems.

Leitha Matz, who is Senior Content Manager at Fresh Direct, is another presenter this evening who is keen to offer a new level of transparency into food. She reminds the group that food and technology can sometimes be used to describe mega food corporations. However, this group interprets the combination much differently. For us, “food+tech” describes the potential that innovative technology, from iPhone applications and social networks, to GPS and e-commerce, has to restore a healthful, regenerative food system.

At Fresh Direct, Matz has been part of the effort to double the amount of local produce that the online grocer offers. In her view, online grocery has an opportunity for transparency that traditional retail lacks: it’s hard to put on the shelf the integrated pest management and other sustainable farming practices of farms like Red Jacket Orchards, but it is possible to tell a more complex story with digital content. Matz reminds us that this is a “wonderful moment” for consumer information. Though this is nowhere near a sales pitch, Matz’s talk suggests that radical transparency in food is possible.

Stephanie Beack is a farmer’s daughter. With a business degree and a professional background in tech, she says, “I firmly believe in the way technology can change lives.” For Beack, the transformation of food happens in the kitchen. Her site, Scrumptious Street, started two years ago because for her, getting healthy, sustainable food into the home is a way to change mindsets about how we eat. Beack suggests, as she closes her talk, that technology enables food.

But doesn’t food enable technology as well? If not for a stable and healthful food supply, we would not have the wherewithal to pursue the technological innovation that improves connectivity among people and throughout ecosystems. The essential nature of food makes it our most urgent challenge to resolve. As I step into the crowd after the presentations, I have great confidence that the creativity, enthusiasm, and commitment of the people in this room will, through unique applications of technology, change how we understand the future of food.