Tuesday 6th of November, 2007: Conclusions, Reflections and Results

Food Consumption Sustainability Index: 85%

Today was the last day of my week-long eco-labelling experiment. Although I intended to buy fair-trade labels wherever they were available, I ended up only buying fair-trade coffee, chocolate and potato chips. I guess this was inevitable as most fair-trade products are of the non-edible variety. Everything else was organic – largely with the KRAV label or the Danish okologisk certification.

The process itself was exciting: particularly for the first few days. I exposed myself to new tastes and products that I hadn’t bought before. The discipline of the project forced me to change my diet, simplifying it further (switching from fruit muesli to porridge oats for example), although it has always been very simple. I also naturally took a much greater interest in articles about organic food in the newspaper and finding definitions about what exactly “organic” means. I was curious to read food labels more closely, however my lack of Swedish language skill soon thwarted that process.

Regrets? I have a few: I later found out that there is organic bread at my supermarket and more sophisticated fair-trade breakfast muesli. I could have reduced my consumption of leftover conventional foods if I had planned more thoroughly and finished the conventional perishables before the start of the week.

The economics of the experiment: I made a table with all the organic/fair trade products I bought during the week. I tried to compare the eco-labelled products with the equivalent conventional product if bought in the same quantity. This gave me a percentage price difference.

As I mentioned earlier, eco-labelled food sometimes seems more expensive than it needs to be since it is not sold in larger quantities which could benefit from economies of scale. There is also generally more effort put into packaging: for example, it is impossible to buy organic instant coffee in a plastic refill bag, you can only buy it in a glass jar. Eco-label foods are apparently aimed at a higher-end consumer, who is not as budget conscious, and favours “quality” in both product and packaging, and the convenience of smaller quantity units.

Nevertheless, the results were interesting. Peanut Butter was significantly cheaper. For milk, biscuits and rice-drink, the price differences were negligible. But at the other end of the ledger, Kiwifruit, avocadoes and tomatoes were 2.5 times (150%) more expensive than their conventional equivalents. Overall, I paid 160SEK more for the products bought during that week than I would have spent if I had bought the conventional foodstuffs. Although, I should note that the coffee, garlic, hazlenut paste and digestive biscuits were bought in quantities that will survive well beyond one week.

The nature of this experiment was two-fold. First of all, I wanted to use a disciplined commitment to changing my food consumption habits for one week to teach myself about organic food and eco-labels. The blog was a means of forcing myself to maintain my discipline through disclosure of the boring details in a transparent forum and avoid the temptation to take short-cuts.

Secondly, I wanted to road-test the “one week lifestyle change experiment” as a tool for self-learning and lifestyle change for skeptics like myself, who struggle with “economic rationality” as a consumer conflicting with the values that they would support politically as a citizen. For example, as a citizen, I would vote for any politician who would propose eco-taxes on polluting agricultural practices such as industrial dairy farming. However, as a consumer I struggle to buy the small package of organic butter while it is considerably more expensive than the conventional butter (but again this is partially an issue of economies of scale that could be fixed if there was greater demand for organic butter – from people like me!).

I was trying to persuade myself about the merits of “full-immersion” lifestyle change experiments, and to that extent, I have exceeded. My enthusiasm for eco-labelled foods is more qualified: ultimately, it still depends on the food being “within range” of the price of the conventional produce. I will continue to regularly buy organic milk, eggs, bananas, biscuits, peanut butter, carrots and lentils. But more importantly, I believe that my awareness has been raised sufficiently to take an educated interest in new products as they continue to appear on the market.

I am unsure of the extent to which I can make people change to eco-labels when my own support remains qualified. However, hopefully my advocacy for people conducting their own one-week long experiments will encourage people to self-educate on other lifestyle issues and make change happen in their own lives, in the areas where they have the vision and potential for improvements.

Monday 5th November, 2007

Food Consumption Sustainability Index: 85%

My diet is pretty boring: cereal and fruit in the morning, peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, and lentil soup for dinner, and I won’t bore you with any other details than that. Other than to say that apart from bread, and a sandwich at the making change happen festival, I have kept to my promise of not buying any non-eco-labelled products for these last 7 days. I have used a few left over veges: onions, potatoes, tomatoes; but overall I think I have been true to the spirit of the exercise and open to the learning opportunity that it represents. On that note, I will say a bit more on what I have learned about organics.

You may know this already, but in terms of environmental impact:

1. Organic farms do not release synthetic pesticides into the environment — some of which have the potential to harm local wildlife.
2. Organic farms are better than conventional farms at sustaining diverse ecosystems, i.e., populations of plants and insects, as well as animals.
3. When calculated either per unit area or per unit of yield, organic farms use less energy and produce less waste, e.g., waste such as packaging materials for chemicals.

But could the whole world go organic? Even organics supports agree: no - not if we want to continue expanding meat production. Organically produced nitrogen could only reach the level of half of the synthetic nitrogen fertilizers being used in the world today. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v428/n6985/full/428796a.html
But as 1kg of lean meat requires 25-50kg of grain, the scope for more efficient food systems remains large. So it is less a choice between organic and conventional vegetables, and rather a choice between organic vegetables and a heavy-meat diet.

But, as most of the people I know who eat organic fruit and vegetables have already cut down on their meat consumption considerably, it seems incongruous to call organics a trendy fad reflecting upper-middle class guilt. If a commitment to organic produce is accompanied by a concurrent reduction in meat and dairy products, then it is hard to argue against its internal logical consistency.

For a good article covering the views of critics of organics:
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2006/12/11/borlaug/index.html

Economic Sustainability Tip Of The Day: Um, it’s hard to think of anything else that is of a comparable price, but if you want to start somewhere cheap, try potatoes: They are about twice the price of conventional ones, but at only 7SEK more per kilo, you can afford to buy the best – and these are very nice potatoes.

Sunday November 4th, 2007

Today I did some research about the KRAV eco-label on their website: http://www.krav.se/english.asp to try to understand some more about this shadowy, omniscient, omnipresent endorser of all that is good and meritorious in Swedish food production.
The first thing I learned is that KRAV is organised as an incorporated association with 28 members representing the full range of interests when it comes to food production. Their standards are subject to the approval of a global umbrella organisation called the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements. KRAV employs 70 people, about half of which are engaged full-time in inspecting the producers that receive their certification. That’s to say, in the case of organic crops, ensuring that they are not produced with conventional pesticides, artificial fertilizers, GMOs, human waste, or sewage sludge, and that they were processed without ionizing radiation or food additives.

By browsing through KRAV’s annual report for 2006, I learned that by buying KRAV milk I had helped to reduce eutrophication of waterways by 3 000 000kg, and reduce chemical pesticide consumption by 35000kg. I also learned that the country with the highest rate of spending on organic foods is Switzerland, with 950SEK per consumer every year. It is then a long way back to Denmark, in second place with 475SEK per consumer, and Sweden at 446SEK. So very much still a rich country’s club!

Overall, the report gives the impression of an industry (eco-labelling, and to a lesser extent organic farming) booming in these times of increased environmental awareness. The report also mentioned the possibility of KRAV moving into carbon labelling, but said that such a development “is dependent upon the level of interest among the market stakeholders. – There’s no point in us developing additional labelling if it is not requested by consumers and producers”. It will be interesting to see, when the 2007 report comes out, whether progress has been made on this issue.

For our Halloween party tonight, I bought some “fairly traded” Sackeus Indonesian “Exotic Chips”. Sackeus is a new fair trade brand that I hadn’t come across before. Under their logo on their website they have written “The True Fair Trade Company”, but unfortunately the rest of the website is in Swedish so I can’t investigate the rationale behind this faintly aggressive sub-title. But the chips were tasty, and I took the opportunity to promote my project amongst the other party-goers. This is paradoxically more for my own benefit than theirs: I know my own ethical disposition, and I loathe hypocrisy. I know that if I tell lots of people that I am doing something, then I am much more likely to force myself not to cut corners, even when I am in the supermarket by myself and no-one is directly surveying me. I would like to somehow connect this conception of ethics with Jurgen Habermas’ theory of communicative rationality, but I might be stretching the concept a bit far here. In any case, the power of communication should not be dismissed, even when the only person you can hope to persuade is yourself.

It’s a bit like the power of the self-fulfilling prophecy that I think could hold a key to more sustainable behaviour, especially in societies like North America (I know I am painting with broad strokes here) where there is a lot of pressure to appear optimistic and positive-minded. If only the environmental discourse could be shifted from negative issues of climate change destruction to the positive message of how sustainable life styles improve your quality of life then the climate change sceptics and the lifestyle change refuse-lings would be framed as “negative”, and ultimately socially excluded. The happiest people I have ever met in my life have almost always been the ones that consume least and live closest to nature, but somehow that idea gets hidden behind the negative attitudes towards “scaremongering”. If only sustainable living became aspirational and connected with positive images, it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy for so many people.

Economic Sustainability Tip of the Day: KRAV bananas. Between 15 and 20SEK. Hardly anything more in price than conventional ones, but much less likely to be propping up a banana republic, destroying tropical rainforest or poisoning local workers.

Saturday November 3rd, 2007

Today’s Food Consumption Sustainability Index: 85%

I am seriously starting to miss the savoury, tart sensation of vegemite on toast with a good cup of tea. I was thinking about whether vegemite might qualify as a sustainable, de-facto eco-food somehow given that it is made from leftover brewers’ yeast extract and some added vegetables. What can be more sustainable than a healthy (full of vitamin B and minerals) spread that is based on recycled leftovers? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegemite
But given that this experiment is all about trying new foods and investigating eco-labels I decide not to compromise things further by trying to justify a product that travelled 20000km by plane to be on my dinner plate here in Swedn... (but thanks all the same Mum).

Otherwise, still no great adventures in my diet. The same porridge oats, banana, sour milk and rice water for breakfast. Peanut butter on toast for lunch. Meanwhile, I try some organic, fair trade Anglamark milk chocolate as I study, and I must say I am a bit disappointed. Price-wise it is competitive with other 100g bars of chocolate, although usually I would buy the 200g bars which are much better value. But this chocolate is possibly the first example where the taste really is inferior to the conventional product. Oh well, KRAV has other chocolate options out there, so maybe I will just have to experiment further. There are worse tasks in the world...

I did however make a lentil soup from organic lentils, carrots and garlic. Unfortunately, I decided to use conventional onions, potatoes and peeled tomatoes, mostly because I wasn’t sure if I would have to throw the soup away due to the faint whiff of decomposition that they gave off after a 36-hour soak in water since Thursday afternoon. The bubbles that were starting to form on the water surface (methane?) were also more than a little disconcerting. In any case, it hasn’t made me sick so far. And I did top it off with organic lemon juice, (although that also smells and tastes suspiciously like lemonade concentrate).

Economic Sustainability Tip of the Day: Vegemite or Marmite – one pot usually lasts about 6 months even if you eat it almost every day. A little really does go along way, and what can be more sustainable than a food made from recycled industrial waste? Just as long as you don’t rely on a friend or family member to fly it over for you – slap an eco-label on that black gold!

Friday November 2nd, 2007

Today's Food Consumption Sustainability Index: 60%

Today is the day of the Making Change Happen festival organised by my LUMES classmates. I have volunteered to help with odd-jobs here and there and in the busy process I make my first non eco-label food purchase of the week: a sandwich that I had helped make in Smalands earlier that morning. The irony that this only “unsustainable” purchase is something that I buy from Oleg, on behalf of Smalands, is not lost on me. Meanwhile, I did try the organic lemonade, but unfortunately it was not much to write home about.

In between all the work, I do nip home for a cup of tea and a snack. At my boarding school, once you reached age 16 you were entitled to the privilege of a senior common room and a steady supply of free milk, bread, butter, teabags and spreads. Since then I have turned to toast and tea to fill my belly and open my weary eyes, and the story has been no different during this week. As I mentioned earlier in the week, I discovered a great Danish “Green Choice” organic peanut butter that is very good value. I also have taken to the Fair Trade Hazelnut paste which has a taste indistinguishable from nutella, although at 32.50SEK for 400g it is a bit more expensive than the 350g nutella priced at 21.90SEK.

The Fair Trade instant coffee that has kick-started my day for the past few days is also of a very satisfactory taste and quality. However, its high price is exacerbated by its small volume (100g) and the fact that it is only sold in glass jars and not plastic refill sachets… Are the glass jars made in developing countries also? Or is this just a means of offering a premium product for high-end consumers who are happy to pay more than double the price of regular instant coffee? Torsten argues that only 1SEK in every 10SEK of higher prices for eco-labels actually results in higher income for the producers in developing countries. In the case of fair-trade coffee, I think he may have a point.

On the other hand, no complaints about Kung Markatta organic Earl Grey tea. Not only does it have the KRAV label, but it also has the Danish Okologisk insignia as well as the Fair Trade logo. Not bad considering that it is priced in the same range as a 20 bag box of conventional Twinings Earl Grey (roughly 0.60 SEK per teabag). Although again, economies of scale favour Twinings as they sell 100 teabag boxes at 0.44 SEK per bag – which does make a difference when you drink as much tea as I do. Damn those free high school handouts!

Economic Sustainability Tip of the Day: Sorry to be repetitive, but those Kung Markatta tea bags come in a box covered in pimped-out eco-labelled bling, and are economically competitive for a 20 teabag box.

Thursday, November the 1st, 2007.

Today’s Food Consumption Sustainability Index: 75%

Halloween last night, but unfortunately no organic pumpkin on the menu. In fact, it is hard to find pumpkin at all in Sweden. I was shocked when my Swedish corridor mates told me they had never eaten pumpkin before. I always thought pumpkin was a Northern European food – possibly because we always eat it with potato in New Zealand, and everyone knows the Swedes love their potatoes.

Anyway, I digress. The highlight today is an all-organic salad of tomatoes, cucumber (yum-yum), feta and rucola. I haven’t had feta for so long, so it is hard to say if this one tastes better than the usual, but it tastes pretty good to me. The tomatoes are plump, consistent and juicy, and without that disconcerting matte-like sheen and vaguely chemical smell that comes with the conventional ones here. But maybe that’s all in my mind…

The salad is accompanied by avocado on toast. The avocado is not a revelation, but it is flawless and that in itself is enough to put me in high spirits: nothing depresses me like a bad avocado. Unfortunately, my bread remains stubbornly conventional - I am yet to find organic loaves at COOP or ICA.

Overall, I am really enjoying the experiment. I guess the initial idea was that the “change” I would be making would be for the duration of the week-long experiment. I never presumed that I would actually “buy-in” to all these products in the long run. But now that I have forced myself to dive in at the deep-end, I take a genuine interest in what I am consuming. I find myself reading articles on organics in the newspaper, I take a look at the eco-label websites, and I regret not being able to read all the nutritional information in Swedish on the back.

No doubt I will lose the rice-water and oatmeal at the end of the week, and the organic garlic might be a bit too small-scale to perceive any benefits, but I will be much more aware of these products as I walk around the supermarket in the future, and open to the idea that I personally might be receiving more than is calculated on the weight/price ratio.

Economic Sustainability Tip of The Day: Organic Milk – 90% more nutritious and only 5 ore more expensive. Why doesn’t everyone make the switch?

Wednesday 31st October, 2007

Today’s Food Consumption Sustainability Index (Rough proportion of eco-labelled food that I ate today): 40%

How often do you stumble across a smell that triggers pleasant childhood memories? For me, about once a year would be a rough estimate. Well, today I was transported back to lazy summer days, cricket, and cicada song by a humble cucumber. This was not just any cucumber, but a 15SEK KRAV-certified organic beauty – sleek, sporty and elegant like a 1963-model Jaguar E-Type Roadster. But unlike that old gas guzzler, this cucumber smelt crisp and juicy, and was my first experience of the much-touted superior taste of organic fruit and vegetables. The fine aroma of my KRAV cucumber not only turned on my taste-buds, it also provided a sound argument in support of the greater nutritional value of organics.

An opinion piece appeared in the Guardian newspaper on Tuesday, arguing that it has been scientifically proven that organic food had more nutritional value than “mainstream” foods.
(http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/peter_melchett/2007/10/organics_better_admit_it.html )
In particular, I found this passage about the decline in nutrients found in conventional fruit and vegetables quite alarming:

“you would have to have eaten 10 tomatoes in 1991 to get the same level of copper as you would have got from one tomato in 1940. Between 1940 and 1991, apples lost 66% of their iron, broccoli lost 75% of its calcium, and in news that would dismay Popeye, even spinach lost 60% of its iron”

The article suggests that the natural pesticides that plants produce are inherently linked to the nutrients that are most beneficial for human health, and so when plants are sprayed with pesticides they fail to produce the goodness that we require. This helps explain why my organic cucumber had so much more taste and smell than the water paper that I usually buy.

Meanwhile, I woke up this morning to my first organic breakfast: Organic porridge oats garnished with organic bananas, organic raspberry “fil” (thick, sour milk), and thinned out with organic rice water. This worked out ok, considering all the ingredients bar the bananas were completely unknown to me before today. But it was when I tried to use the “rice milk” to whiten my coffee that things got particularly messy. I mean, I have had soy milk in my coffee before, and I can deal with the curdling. But this rice “milk” had almost no effect on the colour or the taste of the coffee, other than a diluting effect, and as someone who likes to have 1/3 of their coffee as milk, the end result was dispiriting.

I had bought the rice water in a fit of eco-aesthetical self-righteousness. I reasoned to myself that it must be better from a climate perspective to drink organic rice water than organic milk. But now I remember reading about all the methane produced by rice paddies. I don’t know what the scale is like, but I can imagine it is similar to the methane produced by cattle (per litre of “milk” produced). In any case, the system boundaries of this project was technically limited to eco-labels, on the rather broad assumption that one organic product was as good as the next. Ok, this reasoning for reverting to dairy is quite spurious, but then I found this article in The Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article2753446.ece that says that organic milk has 90% more antioxidants than conventional milk. And given that organic milk is only 0.05 SEK more expensive, I am content to abandon my short-lived experimenting with vegan white coffee J

Otherwise, the day was spent finishing off old, non-organic lentil soup, tomatoes and mozzarella. Ok, the project seems to have hardly begun you may argue, but it would hardly be very sustainable to throw away my left-overs. In any case, I feel like I have already learnt a lot, and the crisp aroma of that time-machine of a KRAV cucumber will take some beating!

Economic Sustainability Tip of The Day: “Green Choice” KRAV, ecological peanut butter is available at COOP for only 26.50, whereas the conventional “Skippy” peanut butter goes for a hefty 35 SEK for the same-sized jar!

One-Week Eco-Labelling Personal Change Experiment

Tuesday 30th October 2007

The aim of this experiment is to delve into the world of eco-labelling – not just through research (Torsten beat me to it with his undergrad thesis), but by living and breathing eco-labels for one week. In practice, this will mean buying only food products labelled “organic”, “ecological”, “KRAV”, or with the free fair-trade label. How do they taste? What sustainability goals do they represent? And crucially, how does the price compare with the “conventional” alternatives?

The project begins with a trip to my former local supermarket – the ICA-Tuna next to Sparta Dormitory, and home to the most beautiful check-out girl in all of Lund. As my bike glides gently down the hill from LUMES, I find myself wondering whether she will be impressed by my newly-sustainable dietary preferences. I had previously taken pains to hide from her my most shame-inducing purchases: canned tuna and conventional, battery-farmed eggs. But for the next week I will stride proudly to the check-out counters with my organic bounty. My basket as my bayonet, I will be transformed from an eco-worrier in to an eco-warrior!

My aunt runs a small organic farm in New Zealand, but my knowledge on organic farming methods is less than rudimentary. I have a vague image of pesticide reduction, but I couldn’t even tell you if they ban pesticides religiously, or just promote alternative methods with less reliance on chemicals. I assume this makes the food healthier – you don’t need to rinse it with water any more, right? I am hoping they use less fertilisers, as this would reduce their carbon footprint, but as organics are generally produced on a smaller scale than “mainstream” farming, I guess they have proportionally more transport fossil inputs due to lower economies of scale. Well, I’m not even going to get into the carbon footprint of foods. I’ll leave that for someone else’s experiment…
My first goal should be to find out whether “ekologisk” is Swedish for “organic”, or whether it has a different meaning. I should also find out more about these KRAV guys – I need to believe that my hard-earned pacific pesos are going to a good home.

My first lesson in eco-shopping is a warning: never trust the price/kg calculations. Sometimes they mix up price/kg with price/piece, and often the price/kg calculations are just flat wrong. This happens suspiciously often with higher priced organic foods such as tomatoes, when the “organic premium” price differential makes them particularly economically unattractive. Tut-tut, the consumer advocacy people should really chase them up on that.

My first sacrifice of the week: no mozzarella in my salad. Organic mozzarella doesn’t seem to exist, so I plump for some organic feta instead. Greece: 1, Italy:0.

First dilemma of the week: 1kg of organic apples, 2 bags – one from Italy and one from New Zealand. The price is the same (20SEK/kg). I fall back on CO2 calculations for the tie-break, but I remember from my sustainability science paper on food miles that 1kg of food shipped from New Zealand to the UK produces the same amount of CO2 as 1kg of food trucked from Southern Europe. Patriotism rather than eco-label endorsement will have to settle the matter. New Zealand: 1, Italy:0.

The ICA-Tuna girl is sadly absent today, so my sustainability sacrifices will go unnoticed. This is a surprisingly large blow to my motivation. But I strive on gamely. The bill from today’s shopping: a stoic 206.50 SEK. But I won’t know what that means until I do all the accounts at the end of the week.

Economic Sustainability Tip of the Day: Goteborgs “KRAV” Digestive Biscuits: 17.90SEK – The same price as the conventional ones, but twice as sexy!