Opinion: the use of terms like 'natural' and 'organic' in food marketing can often act as linguistic detoxification
We are increasingly aware and rightly dubious of such tactics as greenwashing, astroturfing and the other self-proclaimed eco-friendly credentials that riddle contemporary advertising. But our scepticism ought to in practice extend to any appeal to nature and not just the false promotions of companies.
The emotional charge of the appeal to "the natural" is more than the authenticity asserted in the posturing of greenwashing, it is the warm feeling of moral virtue and unpolluted purity. It trades on fallacious and vague ideas of nature with fluffy language like "eco-approved", "eco-friendly" or "environmentally friendly" and unimpressive standards like "recyclable" and impossible goals such as "detoxing".
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today With Claire Byrne, RTÉ business reporter Adam Maguire on how to spot greenwashing
Romantic poets, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth famously thought that "Nature" was a physical, moral and pedagogical antidote to the industrial revolution and the ills of modern living. Today, the legacy of this approach to nature can be seen in the ubiquity of the myth of nature's inherent goodness. Nowhere is this more visible than in the jargon of pseudo-scientific wellness gurus such as Deepak Chopra and Gwyneth Paltrow, amongst others, whom Alan Levinovitz has aptly described as peddling "consecrated consumption, in which the ritual of shopping becomes a kind of spiritualized retail therapy dedicated to nature".
When taken as an article of faith, as seen in the notions of "natural immunity" and "natural childbirth", this belief can be particularly dangerous. It is perhaps impossible to unpick the tight-knotted bias that binds the natural with good, but being natural doesn’t make something good and vice versa.
Likewise, on aesthetic terms, the Catalan Modernist architect Antoni Gaudí is often incorrectly attributed with claiming that "there are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature. Therefore, buildings must have no straight lines or sharp corners." This romantic division, at first aesthetically appealing, is of course a mistake as rock strata, tree trunks, crystals, and even icebergs demonstrate. Nature is not best conceived as a distant utopian wilderness to be admired, even fetishised from afar. Rather, sites such as farms, gardens and zoos are examples of the real compromises between the extremes of natural and manmade.
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The culture/nature distinction has long been understood by anthropologists to be a myth at the heart of western thought. Fundamental to its operation is the social and symbolic role of food. The preparation, delivery and codes of food consumption is a key way that we differentiate ourselves from animals and each other. Hence, advertising techniques such as stylised motion and before-and-after comparisons serve to cloak the food product with authenticity and civilized gravitas. By deploying the term "natural" from baked goods to chocolate bars and orange juice, "advertising idealises the natural world and presents a distorted picture of nature as sublime, simple, and unproblematic."
When it comes to social distinction, the question invariably arises what does your food selection say about you? Is your food cool? Is it trending? Does it have, in the words of Randy Marsh from South Park, "tegridy"? Are you drinking the cosmopolitan coffee? If you're a rapper, do you have the correct mustard?
Writing about the commodification of youthful deviance by advertisers since the 1960s, Thomas Frank notes that "not only does hip consumerism recognise the alienation, boredom, and disgust engendered by the demands of consumer society, but it makes of those sentiments powerful imperatives of brand loyalty and accelerated consumption." This power explains the huge size of the food marketing industry and the effort that brands will go to ensure that their product and the food experience are cool and fashionable.
Do we eat like cool idiots? When we are more concerned with terms such as "organic", we certainly do.
In the deployment of the language of the natural, we see a sort of "linguistic detoxification". Barry Commoner coined this term to describe occasions where governmental policies change the name of certain substances so they are no classified as toxic as then free from oversight, such as where sewage sludge became "biosolids". Given our inability to wean ourselves off "fast fashion", it has been noted that we dress like sexy idiots. Do we eat like cool idiots? When we are more concerned with terms such as "organic" instead of a different kind of COOL, namely Country-Of-Origin Labelling, we certainly do.
Despite growing awareness of greenwashing, there is clearly still a chasm between such knowledge and the wisdom that leads to anything that can be called green consumption. Only by attending to large-scale policy interventions such as taxes and subsidies and the rhetorical tricks of the language of the natural can we hope to achieve any kind of meaningful sustainability.
This does not require a wholesale nihilistic abandoning of faith or rejection of the language of the natural, but a recognition that natural, it is not a technical term. Accordingly, given the major role of food production, distribution and consumption in contributing to the climate emergency, we need to approach food and the food system with precise language and clear imagery.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
