Faux Handmade
Consider this hypothetical scenario.
Suppose that you discover a tiny furniture shop. You go inside and find a man making furniture — entirely by hand. Without the use of any power tools, he is crafting tables, chairs, stools, bookcases, and more. He shows you the tools that he uses; talks about how his grandfather taught him how to make furniture when he was a boy; explains that, after his wife died, he rediscovered his interest as a form of therapy; and demonstrates some of the techniques he uses to build this handmade furniture. You're fascinated by his story and impressed by the results, so you buy a couple of chairs. Later, whenever someone visits, you point out the 2 chairs to them and tell the story behind them. Their stories make them unique.
Suppose it turns out you're not the only one who enjoys buying handmade furniture. Suppose there is a growing trend all across the country for people to seek out tiny furniture shops where they can buy handmade furniture. Numerous little shops which had previously been struggling to get by begin to enjoy a steady stream of handmade furniture enthusiasts coming through their doors. Fans of handmade furniture explain that they like the individual stories behind each piece, the knowledge that they are helping a small business, and the little thrill of owning one-of-a-kind furniture.
Suppose the big furniture chains notice this handmade trend. They then create factories to make handmade furniture. The factories contain no power tools or robots, but instead have hundreds of identical work areas, each stocked with an identical set of hand tools. In each work area sits a worker, carefully following the company's prescribed instructions, step by step, for how to make handmade chairs, handmade tables, handmade stools, and handmade bookcases. Before long, department stores and furniture stores all across the country carry a wide variety of this "handmade" furniture.
Suppose a government agency, to protect the consumer from fraud, works with the big furniture manufacturers to create regulations requiring the inspection of the factories and the certification of all items sold as "handmade", ensuring that no power tools were used. There is considerable paperwork and bureaucratic red tape, not to mention a significant annual filing fee required to cover the administrative costs. The little shops, with just one or two employees, generally can't afford the time to complete the paperwork or the expense of the annual filing fee. As a result, they continue to sell their furniture, but they can no longer claim that it is handmade, because it hasn’t been certified.
In any case, the "certified handmade" furniture, while it is technically handmade, completely misses the point. The term "handmade" was just shorthand for the entire experience — furniture made without power tools in a small shop by someone who enjoyed what they were doing and who sold it themselves. Yes, the factory-produced furniture is "handmade", but it's no different in any other way than the rest of the mass-produced furniture available.
Faux Organic
The hypothetical scenario I described above is basically what happened in the area of "organic" food. Originally, when food was described as being "organic", the term covered more than just the type of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides used to grow it. It described an entire philosophy behind the way the food was grown on a small scale, with an attempt (admittedly not always successful) to minimize harm to the environment.
When organic food became popular, the big industrial agriculture companies recognized a marketing opportunity. Of course, they couldn't do the whole organic philosophy. However, they could change what they sprayed on their crops, so they worked with the USDA to create "USDA certified organic" standards. As a result, you can buy a large variety of "USDA certified organic" foods in the supermarket, generally from the same industrial agriculture companies that sell the non-organic stuff, although under a different brand name. (Michael Pollan refers to this as "industrial organic".)
Ironically, many of the foods sold at your local farmers' market are not "USDA certified organic", because these small scale farmers often can't afford the time, energy, and fees required to become certified.
Faux Free-Range
Once upon a time, chickens roamed outside in a yard or pasture, scratching in the dirt and pecking at bugs in the grass. Industrial agriculture changed that. Chickens were now generally kept within cages so tiny that they could neither stand nor spread their wings.
Some farmers continued to raise their hens the old fashioned way — outside in a yard or pasture. They called these “free-range chickens”, to distinguish them from the caged variety.
People who were concerned about humane treatment of chickens began buying “free-range” eggs and chicken.
The big industrial organic companies, again recognizing a marketing opportunity, began raising their own “free-range” chickens. They let the chickens out of the cages, but kept them in massive coops holding thousands or even tens of thousands of chickens. Then, after the first six weeks of their lives (when they’d grown accustomed to the boundaries of their existence), a small door at one end of the coop would be opened. Outside would be a small strip of grass — which few if any of the chickens would ever actually venture onto.
Thus, technically, these could be labeled “free-range” chickens. It was perhaps slightly better than keeping them in cages, but only slightly. (And even that is somewhat questionable, since the crowded conditions often results in more disease and violent pecking than is found in caged chickens.)
But again, this missed the point. They weren't really free-range chickens, not the way the term was intended to be used. So now, although you can buy eggs in the supermarket labeled "free-range", they're probably not what you're really wanting. So now you need to look for a new term, "pastured", which small farmers are using to indicate what they used to call "free-range".
Faux Grassfed
Once upon a time, cattle roamed in a pasture eating grass. Once again, industrial agriculture changed that.
Cattle now were moved into "Animal Feeding Operations" (AFOs), where they were feed corn. For cattle, corn is junk food. It rapidly fattens them up, but isn't very good for their health. In addition, since they are crowded together in large numbers (particularly in "Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations" or CAFOs) and in generally filthy conditions (a CAFO produces as much waste as a small city), disease is a problem. To combat that, the cattle are given regular doses of antibiotics. This keeps the cattle from getting sick, but it also contributes to the frequency of drug-resistant bacteria.
Small farms began to market "grassfed beef" and milk from "grassfed cows", signifying that they were doing things the old-fashioned way.
However, technically, even the cattle in CAFOs eat grass for the first few months of their lives; they are only "finished" on corn. So industrial agriculture, seeing a marketing opportunity, began selling their CAFO beef and milk as "grassfed".
Small farms have now begun to refer their their cattle as "100% grassfed", "grass finished", or "pastured", so you'll need to start looking for those terms.
Faux Local
Given the above, you knew it was only a matter of time before the term "local" began to be misused by the corporations.
How about "local" Lay's potato chips? That's right, Frito-Lay now has an advertising campaign in which they promote their potato chips as being locally made. You can even go to their web site, enter your zip code and part of the product code from a bag of Lay's potato chips, and they will tell you where that bag was made. Of course, that doesn't necessarily tell you where the potatoes were grown. They're talking "locally made", not "locally grown".
But, once again, that misses the point. Buying "local" is about more than just how many miles the product traveled. It's about buying something directly from the person who grew it, raised it, or made it. It's about shaking the hand that feeds you.
It's definitely not about buying junk food out of a vending machine, no matter how "local" the advertising firm for the corporation that produced it claims it to be.
The corporations aren't changing their methods; they're just changing their marketing.
If this keeps up, we'll have to come up with another term that means "local".
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