Last week, Pepsi launched a new advertising campaign for Frito-Lay potato chips. The premise behind the campaign was to highlight the potato farmers behind Frito-Lay potato chips. Locavores have been up in arms ever since.
Locavores try to eat food that's been grown within a 100 mile radius of where they live. Some people take it even further, and only eat food they grow themselves. Eating local food boosts the local economy, cuts down on food costs, and cuts down pollution from transport. Plus, the less time your food stays on the truck, the longer your food will stay fresh.
Melissa and I recently went to a Stop & Shop luncheon, held at the prestigious Hamersley's Bistro here in Boston. Hamersley's Bistro has long been a proponent of eating local. Chef Gordon Hamersley tries to source 90% of the food for his restaurant from local farmers, and I think it shows. If you're in Boston, a stop at Hamersley's for their roast chicken is a must. Anyhow, at this luncheon, Stop & Shop held a round table discussion, asking us (local bloggers and editors) what we felt our readers needed to make their food budget stretch a little further. I asked Stop & Shop when they would be introducing more local produce. They touted their eco-friendly initiatives, but my specific question was never answered.
As it turns out, unlike organic, there is no federal definition of local. Good Magazine's post Local Lay's: When Local Goes Loco is an excellent read on this subject. Now I feel for potato farmers. The year that I spent sharecropping in Vermont was quite possibly one of the most physically strenuous jobs that I have ever held. It is tough freaking work. Even after the crop is harvested, you need to make sure that all the potatoes are out of the field.
I'm just not convinced that if those potatoes were shipped off to a processing plant to be made into potato chips, if that counts as "local" food. Having worked in the crazy land of advertising, I also understand that you have to push a gimmick, and local food is a big one right now.
Frito-Lay highlights American farmers, but as a $12 billion convenient foods business unit of Pepsi-Co, I fail to see how they understand the struggles of small farms. Frito-Lay has a "chip tracker" on their website, allowing you to track where your bag of potato chips originated from. I'd try it, but I don't have a bag of Lays. It seems a little creepy to me. If I'm going to eat junk food, I don't want to know how many thousands of miles it's traveled, nor do I want to think about how its going to be made.
If you're not a locavore, do you think that this is an effective marketing campaign?
~Meghan
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