How Green is Your Food Company?

Food Processing magazine's examination of the "green" initiatives of food companies starts out way meta: it opens with a mention of Al Gore and his film "An Inconvenient Truth," then tells us that the "convenient truth is that concern for the environment has been a trend for some time â€" at least going back to Earth Shoe-wearing hippies of the 1960s."

I'm pretty sure that Earth Shoes were a phenomenon of the '70s, but in any case, the three-paragraph review of the history of the environmental movement abruptly ends, at which point we are told that, "Now the cause is being joined by big business, with food companies at the forefront."

Huh. I did not know that. Here I was thinking that the food industry was one of the worst environmental offenders, what with its dumping of vast amounts of petroleum-based fertilizers into waterways, its development of soil-rotting monocultures, its fouling of the landscape with livestock waste, its spewing of greenhouse gases into the air and whatnot.

The long article goes on to describe the "green" actions of various food producers. Some are laudable, some are not much more than marketing. Most are some combination of the two. But all that stuff I mentioned in the above paragraph? That's all still happening.