Lay's 'Local' Potato Chips

So what are we to make of the fact that Lay’s potato chips now
promote themselves as a locally grown food? Do we thank Michael Pollan
for this?

In case you missed the news, Frito-Lay, the world’s biggest snack
food maker and a unit of PepsiCo., this week said it will market Lay’s
potato chips (“America’s favorite potato chip”) by putting the
spotlight on the 80 farmers in 27 states who grow potatoes for Lays.
By typing product codes from a bag of chips into a website using what
the company calls a Chip Tracker — you can check it out here — consumers can learn where their chips were grown and made. Just the other day, I wrote that traceability is a big deal, but I never expected to be able to track the supply chain of a potato chip.

USA Today quotes a Frito-Lay exec:

“Knowing where food is made and grown is important to
consumers,” says Dave Skena, vice president of potato chip marketing at
Frito-Lay. “Sharing with consumers how regional we are is relevant and
compelling.”

TV ads will feature the local farmers, the New York Times reports:

One is Steve Singleton, who tends 800 acres in Hastings, Fla.

“We grow potatoes in Florida, and Lays makes potato chips in Florida,” he says in the ad. “It’s a pretty good fit.”

And you thought eating local was about shopping at your neighborhood farmer’s market. How naïve.

It’s no surprise, really, to see Big Ag is jumping aboard the “local” movement. My Giant supermarket touts “Delmarva” chickens,
meaning they come from the vast chicken farms on the eastern shores of
Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. They may be local, but, alas, their
chicken poop is also responsible for much of the pollution in the
Chesapeake Bay.

Wal-Mart, too, says it is buy more local food, for practical as well
as environmental reasons. It’s fresher, cheaper to ship and helps
counter the notion that Wal-Mart is a giant chain store that doesn’t
care about local communities.

As Frito-Lay’s Skena put it: “This is celebrating the notion of community.”

Oh, please.

Of course, American growers have a compelling reasons to argue that
local is superior to long distance food. Again, from The Times:

For some big agricultural interests, promoting local
food has a protectionist bent. Sales of Virginia apples were hurt a few
years ago when Chinese apples flooded the market, said Martha Moore,
director of governmental relations for the 38,000-member Virginia Farm
Bureau.

Those kinds of threats from imported food is one reason her agency started a local food marketing program last year.

“If promoting local agriculture will help America to become food independent, that’s what we want,” she said.

Well, sure. But if we close our doors to Chinese apples, Chilean
grapes or Brazilian sugar (which we do, at least in the case of sugar),
what, then, are we going to say with other countries decide to shut out
American wheat — or movies or software.

And as long as we’re on the subject of grapes, next time you pack a
lunchbox for little Joey or Judy, ask yourself what you’ve accomplished
by throwing in a “local” bag of chips instead of a “foreign” bunch of
grapes. Junk food is junk food, even if it’s made right around the
corner.

Now I’ve got no beef with Frito-Lay. The company takes environmental
issues seriously. A Frito-Lay plant in Casa Grande, Arizona, aims to
cut its electricity and water usage by 90 percent, and within a couple of
years, the plan will “run almost entirely on renewable energy and
recycled water while reducing waste going to the landfill to less than
1 percent,” the company says.
Frito-Lay has set big audacious goals to reduce its environmental
footprint. I interviewed a Frito-Lay sustainability exec named Dave
Haft at the Milken conference a year ago, and he was a really
impressive guy. If I were a fan of potato chips instead of a pretzels
guy, I’d buy Lay’s.

The trouble is, local is a slippery idea. Indeed, there’s no one
quality or attribute when it comes to food (or anything else) that
equals “good.” Not organic, or Fair Trade, or local or, for that
matter, low-fat. We need to find ways to think more holistically about
the impact of the things we buy or consume. Over time, I suspect,
companies will move to create broader eco-labels that take into account
the entire life cycle impacts of the things they sell.

Are “local” Lay’s a step in that direction? Not really. But if all
they do is get people thinking about the environmental impact of the
food choices, that can’t be a bad thing.


_{Potatoes – Image CC licensed by Flickr user rick.}

_{Product images courtesy of Frito-Lay.}