Wallet Mouth

How sweet it isn't

Last weekend Mr. Wallet Mouth and I bumped into a friend at a concert, and we invited him back to our place for a nightcap—by which we meant a slice of locally made banana cream pie with organic chocolate syrup. On our walk home, our friend prepared himself with dinner from one of our neighborhood tacquerias and a bottle of Coca-Cola, which he bought with some excitement, since it was Mexican Coca-Cola. Mexican Coca-Cola is still made with sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup, and pop purists insist that the American franchises' recipes, which almost always use the latter to save money, just don't taste quite right.

Taste is just where it begins. These days it seems just about everyone is aware of the manifold problems with corn syrup, the high-fructose variety in particular. And not just for its health consequences—the stuff is being singled out (perhaps a tad unfairly) as the root of America's obesity epidemic—but its economic ones as well; according to this piece by Linda Joyce Forristal, "just four companies control 85 percent of the $2.6 billion business—Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Staley Manufacturing Co. and CPC International."

Nowadays, of course, the big story is how those same companies, a.k.a. Big Corn, are pushing hard for a patently misguided ethanol-centric answer to our country's energy woes. Corn—and HFCS—just can't seem to get any respect. No wonder no self-respecting (read: marketable) "whole" food would contain it.

But it appears consumers with a sweet tooth are caught between a rock and the hard candy. Though not for her precise reasons, it seems my mother wasn't wrong to scorn sugar. Partway through Fred Pearce's Confessions of an Eco Sinner, a provocative firsthand account of the British author's attempt to find the moral high ground in a wide range of personal lifestyle decisions of the paper-or-plastic variety, I encountered this eyebrow-raising pair of paragraphs:

Sugar is the ultimate monocultural crop, and it is grown on a prodigiously large scale. In seven countries, including Mauritius and Barbados, it covers more than half of the entire land area. In many more, including Swaziland, sugar occupies most of the cultivated land. Rainforests and wetlands and rich pastures have all been cleared for the crop. Elsewhere, from India to Queensland and Barbados to Fiji, sugar is one of the major causes of the emptying of rivers and aquifers. In the Indian state of Maharashtra sugar covers just 3 percent of the land, yet takes 60 per cent of the state's irrigation water.

Sugar is the main cause of the rampant soil degradation in Cuba and the almost complete deforestation of Haiti. A study by the environment group WWF concluded that 'the production of sugar cane has probably caused a greater loss of biodiversity on the planet than any other single crop.' Sugar is a menace...

I'm enjoying, and highly recommend, Pearce's book, but ouch. And we were just rediscovering the joys of banana cream pie, too.

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.