Wallet Mouth

Warm holiday wishes from the chilly Midwest

There’s something magical about visiting the Midwest at Christmastime. The snow, the bare trees, and the brick houses with generous front lawns and twinkling holiday lights all give me a certain peace of mind. So does having a temporary media fast. Mostly I’ve been going on chilly walks with Mr. Wallet Mouth, eating lots of toast, hanging out with family, and mentally preparing to become a parent.

The in-laws were excited to show us the new village-style mall built on the site of the old depressing one near their house. I never really thought one mall could be that much better than another, but I was wrong. This one is actually pretty pleasant and has more of a sense of community than the malls of my youth.

It also has an Alterra coffeehouse, Alterra being a locally owned mini-chain in the Milwaukee area. I was delighted to see that it offers a bevy of organic and fair-trade coffees—and not only that, but they cost no more (in fact, sometimes less!) than the noncertified varieties.

The in-laws’ old fave cafe, Stone Creek, also offers certified coffee, but it’s a certification I’ve never heard of: Socially Responsible Coffee. The cups say, “Many of our coffees are fairly traded and certified as socially responsible.” However, a Google search turns up nothing. Fair-washing or just poor marketing? Consumers need to know.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas!

You say tomato, I say slave labor

My last post points to the issue of sweatshops overseas, but as this article on the Florida fruit-picking industry shows, the U.S. has exploitation problems of its own.

Toward the end of the story, the reporter mentions a campaign waged by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a local advocacy group, to get major buyers to pay a penny extra per pound of tomatoes in order to improve the lot of the workers. McDonald’s and Yum Brands (which owns such chains as KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell) have agreed to the plan, but Burger King refuses, using the familiar old “we don’t employ them, so they’re not our problem” rationale.

It’s a pretty tired excuse in a day and age when corporations are increasingly expected to take responsibility for the unethical practices of their suppliers by getting them to either change their evil ways or say adios to all those fat purchase orders.

Still, I wasn’t particularly surprised. But I was shocked to read that Whole Foods Market “has been discovered stocking tomatoes from one of the most notorious Florida sweatshop producers” and that it, like Burger King, had also refused to pay the extra penny per pound.

Clearly, more investigation is warranted.

Amuse-bouche: Sweatshops

I haven’t even heard this Talk of the Nation segment yet, because I’m about to hop on a plane to visit family for the holidays. But I intend to listen to it later, as it’s about sweatshops and third-party auditors—all up my alley, and very apropos for the materialism-laced holidays.

Charity and consumerism can make poor bedfellows

On Mr. Wallet Mouth’s website, which is dedicated to field recording and phonography, he notes that he donates the proceeds of some of his CDs to charity. Because I’m married to him, I know that he does in fact make these donations (to a variety of do-gooder groups, including Doctors Without Borders and Heifer International).

But say the catalog you’re using to do some Christmas shopping states that when you purchase its wares, you’ll also be making a charitable donation. How do you know the company is going to follow through on that promise? Same thing when you’re at the grocery store and the cashier asks if you’d like to tack on another dollar or two to go to a good cause—how do you know that’s actually going to happen?

According to a story in today’s New York Times, you don’t. Embedded giving, as this merging of buying and donating is termed, is completely unregulated (despite the existence of charity regulators) and therefore susceptible to all the flaws and scams that can result from an absence of accountability. For example, the World Wildlife Fund didn’t even know it was the supposed recipient of donations from products listed in Barneys New York’s “Have a Green Holiday” catalog until it was contacted by the New York Times reporter.

So are all embedded-giving programs merely vehicles for virtue-washing, so to speak?

Not necessarily. My iPod Nano bears the the logo of (Product)RED, which generates donations to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The article points out that this program is unusual in the embedded-giving world, because “a detailed contract exists between the seven companies that have signed contracts to use the (Product)RED brand” and because buyers can track how much money is being raised on the organization’s website.

But setting aside for a moment the issue of accountability, as well as the concern (also raised in the story) that fusing shopping and giving could make people less likely to give large donations at the end of the year, I see another problem: Embedded giving takes the focus away from the item being purchased and its “shadow” or backstory (the social and environmental factors behind its production—the stuff the label doesn’t tell you).

For example, Apple, the maker of my iPod, has a checkered history regarding e-waste and toxics. (Only recently has it been getting its act together.) And while I can’t find fault with the fact that that $10 of its $199 price tag is helping to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, I also can’t help but believe that the RED donation serves as a distraction from what we consumers should really be thinking about before we buy: whether the product exploited people or the earth, and whether the maker of that product deserves our money.

Amuse-bouche: common-sense nutritional labels

Positive developments are afoot in the food-labeling world (link). They’re mere baby steps, since only select grocers (most of them in the Midwest and East Coast) will feature this new info, and the system won’t take effect for at least six months, but progress is progress, and innovations like this have the potential to spur wider consumer demand.

Know your stuff

Although this blog focuses mainly on how we as consumers can make the world a better place through spending our money more wisely, it goes without saying (I hope) that I don’t believe we can buy our way to a revitalized planet.

In fact, consuming is a large part of the problem. That, plus the fact that the global systems underlying all the things we purchase and use are not designed for sustainability.

The ins and outs of those systems are broken down articulately in a gem of a short movie called “The Story of Stuff.” The simplicity of its endearing stick-figure animation mirrors the succinctness with which narrator Annie Leonard lays out the hidden costs behind the extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal of all the stuff we buy.

Highly recommended viewing. Also make sure to check out the resources and other links on the website.

(Thanks to my Crank Ensemble bandmate Lena, who works for the Tides Foundation—one of film’s the funders—for alerting me to this.)

Not following the LEEDer

Over Thanksgiving I had a chance to visit a cousin of mine who works in architecture. When I brought up the subject of eco-friendly construction, she gave me an interesting perspective on the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, the nationally accepted standard for green building. Sometimes, she said, architects and developers opt to build to LEED specifications but not apply for the actual certification because of the time, effort, and expense involved. She cited a new animal shelter in Seattle, where she lives, as an example.

That’s a shame, I thought at the time, because the shelter won’t get “credit” in the eyes of interested parties, for all its efforts. Also, why should anyone trust the shelter’s claims that its facility is environmentally sound if it can't sport the coveted LEED logo to prove it?

Then today I came across a two-year-old story in Grist maintaining that LEED as a system is broken, largely because of the same sorts of criticisms: never mind what the U.S. Green Building Council says, certification is expensive, the article states, typically adding costs that total between 1 and 5 percent of a budget. Many builders would rather spend that money on additional sustainability measures.

Furthermore, the writer holds, the road to certification is overly bureaucratic, and the point system on which LEED is based doesn’t assign appropriate weight to different categories of building features (for example, one project’s $1.3 million heat-recovery system and a $395 bicycle rack each earned one point).

As I mentioned, though, that article is two years old. I’m no expert in this area, but for a broken system, it seems to be thriving. Wikipedia’s entry on LEED states that the application process has been electronically automated, which would seem to cut down on at least some of the bureaucratic hassles.

Cost is clearly still an issue for some, like the Seattle animal shelter. But perhaps having the LEED logo isn’t worth it in all cases. An animal shelter, after all, isn’t analogous to other certified goods, like organic food or fair-trade apparel. There’s only one of it, and only one “buyer.” Once it’s built, it will reap the benefits of being resource-efficient whether or not it has a LEED plaque on the wall.

Still, I’m becoming a fan of third-party certification systems as mechanisms for encouraging and rewarding environmental and social accountability, and it’s discomfiting to think that this system might be discouraging the participation of the very green-minded builders it aims to include.

Give a phone a fish...

I don’t eat seafood terribly often, but when I do, I want to make smart choices that don’t contribute to overfishing and ocean-habitat damage. Over the years, I’ve had a few of those pocket guides to sustainable seafood, but I never seem to be able to hang onto them.

So I was excited when my friend Zoë pointed me to FishPhone.org, a project of the Blue Ocean Institute. It’s designed to be accessed via cell phone, and it features a simple drop-down menu listing 34 species names, with short, helpful write-ups for each that lay out the sustainability issues and help you decide whether consuming, say, orange roughy, jibes with your ethics (answer: probably not, as the trawls used to catch it also kill threatened deep-sea sharks; then there’s the fact that, left unmolested, orange roughy commonly live to be 100 or older).

There’s also a text-messaging option for phones without internet access: just dial 30644 with the word “fish,” followed by the name of the sea creature you’re wondering about.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a similar initiative, seafoodwatch.org, that lists worst, better, and best seafood choices. There’s no SMS option and no text blurbs, but the information is region-specific (for the U.S. only), and it includes a Spanish-language guide.

Next time you’re flummoxed by a seafood menu or racking your brain in the fish aisle, stop casting about and give one of these tools a try.