Newsflash: Lays Are Not "Local"

First things first: I love Lays potato chips. Although I never buy them, (oh wait, actually I do buy the Olestra ones and the baked ones) I will eat them if they are at any party/gathering. Additionally, I don't look down on anyone who loves Lays, or buys Lays. So, this is not an elitist post, it is just an FYI. I spent an hour writing/researching this, so please actually read it - I know it's long.

Last night, I saw a commercial for Lays that had a bunch of different farmers from different parts of the country saying they supply the potatoes for Lays. Then, at the end some text said something about thanking the farmers all over the United States for supplying such good potatoes. Or something. You can probably look it up on YouTube if you really want to see it, since I am probably the only one who still actually watches live TV and commercials.

I didn't really think anything of it. Maybe I wasn't paying attention enough. I just thought, "who cares where the farmers are from, I assumed they got the potatoes from a bunch of different farms, not one single crazily gigantic farm." But, the common man is supposed to interpret this commercial as meaning Lays are a locally grown food. Puh-lease.

This morning, coincidentally, I read a bunch of articles on my Google reader about how Lays has started this marketing campaign to convince people that Lays potato chips are a LOCAL food - thus implying they are an environmentally friendly brand, and all us greenies should flock to the store to grab some of these local chips. This is going to be their biggest ad campaign in 2009. You can even enter the code on your bag of chips on the Lays website to find out, specifically, which state/states the potatoes in that bag came from.

However, Lays are not local, and are not an environmentally friendly brand (although, as far as I know they aren't any worse than most other companies, which are all un-environmetnal but pay marketers big bucks to trick us into thinking they are). The vast vast vast majority of Lays potatoes are grown on industrial farms, which are - by nature - not environmentally friendly.

They are not local in the way any enviro would define the term. Local means it was grown and produced close to where you are consuming it; and it usually also carries a hint of fair labor practices, humane treatement of animals, and environmentally friendly processes with it. Local also implies a small or medium sized farm - definitely not an industrial farm, for sure. I think the agreed upon distance between growing site and consumption site is 100 miles, but I haven't been invited to any enviro meetings where we discuss the exact logistics of all this, so that number probably has some wiggle room depending on how close to the line between nutbar and enviro you want to be.

A survey of restaurant chefs by the National Restaurant Association (NRA? odd...) found that "locally grown" foods is the top trend for 2009.

Also, Lays isn't the only company throwing "local" into the mix in a misleading way. I looked it up and lots of other big companies are doing close to the same thing. It just the new marketing ploy to trick people into handing over more money for something they think is "green," but actually isn't. Because there is no hard and fast rule who can say what is "local," companies can get away with it.

Lays' justification is they think people are interested in knowing where the food was grown, and it creates a sense of community to know the potatoes came from their state. They also want people to know Lays is an American company with American workers, and so when you buy a bag of Lays chips you are helping Americans through tough times.

Fine.

But, their ad campaigns are inarguably misleading to the common man who has probably heard that it is a good thing to "buy local." That it is an environmentally friendly thing to buy local. The common man doesn't know that "local" doesn't just mean the food was grown nearby, that it involves way more than that, as I said earlier. The common man doesn't know that if you buy food that was grown nearby, but at an industrial farm, it is a million times (not an exact figure) worse than buy food that was grown farther away at a small or medium sized farm. The common man is just trying to be a good green member of society and do what they've heard is the right thing to do. They're not going to Google what local actually is, and they're not going to be subscribed to these green blogs that are all in an uproar over this new ad trend. So, Lays knows exactly how its local ad campaigns will be interpreted, regardless of what they claim their motive is.

So, the bottom line is if you see a major brand advertising that it is local - don't believe it is really local in the enviro meaning of the word. If you really want to buy local food, go to your local farmer's market, or your neighborhood hippie-ish type grocery store, and ask them where the food comes from. Any self-respecting hippie will be able to help you with that. If you go to a restaurant that claims to have local food, ask which farms it comes from. This serves the duel purpose of making sure it actually is local, and showing the restaurant/store that customers care about having food that is actually local. Two birds.