In Chapter 4, Playing with Our Food, author Anna Lappé begins to talk about how big business is getting in on the sustainability craze. She warns that this chapter, which discusses "plays from the greening playbook[s]" of various companies like Monsanto, Cargill, and Pepsi, will leave readers "a tad cynical." However, Lappé actually aims to make us more savvy -- to be able to tell which companies are making genuine efforts to become sustainable and which are in it for selfish purposes. Lappé breaks the chapter into several sections.
"What Business Do We Have Being Green?" basically covers the author's argument for why big businesses have a responsibility to the environment at all. Firstly, corporations, which were originally intended to be accountable to the government, are now often more powerful than governments. Secondly, companies owe us because they profit from us -- they use our common resources and our tax dollars -- while giving us little in return except a rapidly worsening environmental crisis. Finally, companies are not exempt from our expectations of them as a society.
"The Playbook" discusses strategies that many companies use to make themselves look green without actually going green:
- Advertise the new you: In a year and a half, McDonald's goes from a partnership promoting gas-guzzling Hummers to offering Big Mac coupons to customers who reduce their own greenhouse-gas emissions by cutting down shower times.
- Spin the story: BP: British Petroleum spends more money rebranding itself as "Beyond Petroleum" than it does actually going green.
Lappé continues with such common strategies as "Exaggerate Your Transformation" and "Reward Yourself." Once readers learn these common "plays," she claims, we will better be able to determine for ourselves which companies are actually making an effort to become eco-friendly and which are just "greenwashing."
Chapter 5, Climate Change, talks about the food industry's attempts to do, well, exactly what it says on the tin. "Big Ag," Lappé argues, is attempting to profit from our fear of climate change while not actually changing much about the way they make their food or addressing the "root causes of the ... environmental destruction." Lappé criticizes companies like our good friend Tyson for their attempts to make a profit from the production of "organic" and "renewable" fuel from byproducts like poultry poop. The plants that convert these byproducts into fuel are actually very energy inefficient and have led to concerns about both the environment and about public health.
Basically, the fuel produced by farm-animal waste could not only perpetuate environmental problems but also give corporate giants like Tyson more money for their supposedly eco-friendly practices.
In the subsection "What's the Matter with Manure?" Lappé elaborates on some major issues with supposedly sustainable and money-saving methane digesters. Methane emissions are a significant problem for farmers whose animals produce significant amounts of manure, and digesters on the surface solve the problem by using some of the methane emissions to produce energy that can be used in the place of fossil fuels.
There are several issues with this solution, however. Firstly, its benefits are often exaggerated. For example, proponents celebrate the reduction in solid waste that comes with the use of digesters; however, a 50- to 60-percent reduction doesn't sound so great when you consider that solid waste is only a fraction of the actual waste that farmers have to worry about. Lappé also mentions that although farmers may benefit from waste reductions and energy production, in the end the vast majority of surplus money goes -- as always -- to the big companies that provide the machines.
By Erin
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