March 2009 Archive for On the Udder Hand

The toy business is in deep trouble. And not just as a result of this recession, although there was a big article last week in the Wall Street Journal last week about how consumers are cutting back on expensive toy purchases.

No, what I mean is that, at least in the case of one of the largest toy retailers, they don’t seem to care about maintaining relationships with future customers. 

In my last blog post, I talked about my son’s sixth birthday.  One of his gifts was a Hasbro Iron May Rocket Blast toy, purchased at the local Toys R Us.  To his chagrin, when he opened it, it quickly became apparent that the air pump didn’t work, and was defective.  To my chagrin, I discovered that my wife, who wrapped the present, disposed of the receipt.

So I attempted to exchange the defective toy at Toys R Us for another one that worked, only to be told that, without a receipt, there was absolutely no recourse for us:  no credits, no exchanges, only a worthless, broken pile of plastic that I left the store with (Scroll down a bit to see a photo of the product in a shopping cart outside of the store).

So think about the logic of the situation:  Toys R Us basically told me to take the defective product and get lost.  Without a receipt, it’s not their problem – even though they sold me the product and are still selling identical copies to others.  Despite the fact that there was no evidence that yours truly, the customer in question, was a bald-faced liar, going to great lengths to rip them off of $19.98 by asking them to replace a toy they didn’t sell me, it just wasn’t their concern.  So the broken toy is my, and my son’s, problem, but now this retailer has a much bigger concern:  they’re going to lose a decade’s worth of future toy business from a six year-old, certainly more than $20 worth.

This relates to the dairy business in the sense that I couldn’t conceive that a supermarket retailer, if you brought back a gallon of milk that had turned sour, or a brick of cheese had mold on it, would refuse to exchange it, even without a receipt.  It’s bad business to lose customers over a few dollar’s worth of product.  My wife has taken bad fruit back to several supermarkets in our area, and they’ve always accepted it.  Even farmers markets will often do the same, because food retailing is a relationship business.  No relationship, no business.

This future relationship focus is also the driving force behind the dairy industry’s lengthy campaign to improve the quality of milk beverages sold in schools, especially in the school lunch program.  Too often, lukewarm and lackluster products turn kids off to milk…and once that bad taste is literally left in their mouths, it can be an impossible problem to surmount years hence.  There goes a potential lifelong relationship, dumped down the drain.

So it’s sad to see that in this case, one retailer can only see a receipt (or lack thereof), instead of a customer – a customer it certainly will not see in the future, in our family’s case.  Not all consumer requests are well-informed or workable, and we struggle with that every day in dairy production.  But some consumer expectations, particularly in the ability of consumers to actually have a trusting relationship with the products they purchase, are a critical part of the bond between farmers and the public.  We overlook that at our peril.

POSTSCRIPT: I expressed my concern over the situation via email to both Toys R Us, and to Hasbro.  I got a response from TRU that purchases from “land-based stores”, were a separate department than the online retail division, and my request would be forwarded to the bricks and mortar department of TRU and handled in a few business days.  Still waiting on that.

However, I did hear back from Hasbro – not their customer service contact, but the P.R. department, to which I had also sent a complaint.  Hasbro’s Public Relations rep sent me a replacement toy.  So at least someone gets the customer service angle, but it took the strength of iron man to get a satisfactory result…too much, in this day and age.

My son turned six last weekend, so as part of the celebration, we steamed snow crab legs (from Alaska – not local, but at least domestic and definitely yummy) at home last night for dinner.    

While I was picking some meat out of a leg, my son spontaneously offered a…how to describe it?  Not a prayer, since it wasn’t to a deity.  It was more of a eulogy, except that it was delivered in the second person, directly to the crab.  My kindergartner said thanks to the shell and legs of the crab he was ingesting, offering his gratitude that the crab gave his little crustacean life so that my son could eat.  It wasn’t an overt display of emotion, but there was with it a sense of sincere and simple appreciation, that this act of eating a once-living thing wasn’t merely just another commercial transaction or random bodily function.

Perhaps this act of thanks was prompted by the fact that when we eat certain foods, (i.e. shellfish, like crabs and lobsters), there is a shell involved, and we can see that a once-holistic creature is our meal.  Too often, of course, the true source of individual cuts of meat and poultry are unfathomable, especially when processed into unrecognizable shapes like dinosaur chicken nuggets (which my son also likes) and hot dogs. 

Farmers and ranchers often complain that consumers are so removed from food that they have no idea where it comes from, and think it’s all magically shrink-wrapped, bloodless and refrigerated right in the store.  Other than hunters, fisherman and farmers, not many people are out there butchering livestock or game animals (in fact, the number of hunters is declining faster than the proportion of farmers in the U.S.).  Is it because people actually don’t want to know?  Or that they don’t care?  Or that, as this new movie trailer asserts, “Food Inc.” whoever that is, is trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes?

If you watch the trailer of Food Inc., it makes the rather sweeping and erroneous assertion that dairy farmers don’t want people to know where their milk and cheese come from.  Most dairy farmers I know welcome visitors to their farm, as long as they have open minds and actually want to learn, as opposed to those looking to have their prejudices and biases confirmed. 

The “pastoral fantasy” mentioned in the trailer is actually a straw man argument set up by the film’s marketers, not necessarily by farmers themselves.  And the movie marketers are really no different, and certainly have no higher moral ground, than the marketers of many foods:  they’re trying to generate some sizzle to sell tickets to their movie, which I’m guessing will be far less revealing and insightful than this trailer makes it out to be.

What it seems to me is missing from the debate over where food comes from, who produces it, and in particular, balancing the rights of animals vs. the rights of humans, is a sense of the cycle of life.  At meals, we say Grace to God, to our loved ones and guests, and occasionally to the farmers who provide us with food, but too often what’s absent at the dinner table is the sense of the connection between the diner and what he or she is eating, often an animal product.

I think that if even a six year-old understands that there are trade-offs in life, that to live in nature and with nature is to make choices about how to use nature’s products, like farm animals or seafood…well, perhaps then there is hope that older people who aren’t too far gone with their biases and agendas can also understand that life offers us choices that aren’t necessarily black and white. 

But that would require too much thought for some.

The recent outbreak of salmonella-infected peanuts, plus the pathogenic problems affecting vegetables and raw milk, are well-documented signs of a flawed food safety system.  Congress is working to fix it, for better or worse.

The other well-documented recent phenomenon regarding food safety is the focus – some would term it an obsession – with ingesting only the “right” kinds of food.  This has little to do with avoiding pathogens, and everything to do with keeping up with the Jones’s in the pursuit of politically correct food.

We’ve all seen the buzzwords lately:  not only does it have to be “slow,” “organic,” and “locally”- and “sustainably”-produced, but it also has to come from “humane” “family farms.”  Now obviously those actually involved in both food production and processing know there’s not a thimble’s worth of difference in the vast majority of foods containing such labels, but that doesn’t stop people from obsessing about it.

I was therefore intrigued by this recent article by the New York Times, which unquestionably is the biggest media mouthpiece for the natural-organic-local-anything but usual food movement.  The Times gives plenty of space for people like Michael Pollan and Nina Planck to offer their new gospels according to alt-food.

But at least, in this most recent article, the NYT raised the reasonable question about whether this obsessive focus with politically-correct foods is actually harming the people it’s most intended to help:  children.  Read these passages:

“Many doctors, dietitians and eating disorder specialists worry that some parents are becoming overzealous, even obsessive, in efforts to engender good eating habits in children. With the best of intentions, these parents may be creating an unhealthy aura around food.

“We’re seeing a lot of anxiety in these kids,” said Cynthia Bulik, the director of the eating disorders program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They go to birthday parties, and if it’s not a granola cake they feel like they can’t eat it. The culture has led both them and their parents to take the public health messages to an extreme.”

I love the fact that a doctor has actually coined a phrase for the pursuit of politically-correct food:

Dr. Steven Bratman of Denver has come up with a term to describe people obsessed with health food: orthorexia. Orthorexic patients, he says, are fixated on “righteous eating” (the word stems from the Greek word ortho, meaning straight and correct).

I do not defend people who continually and only shovel garbage into their mouths, or even worse, offer it to their children.  My 5 and 7 year-old kids understand that there are healthy foods, and then there are treats that are not necessarily healthy, and the former have to be consumed first before any consideration of the latter is on the table.

That said, my wife (who also has extensive experience with food safety issues) and I don’t obsess over the political cause du jour in the kitchen.  There are times when the kids have Happy Meals.  My son will have cupcakes at his birthday party this week (homemade, actually, but without a single organic ingredient and covered with plenty of sugary chocolate frosting, along with Iron Man logos).  They also eat more vegetables than any other kids I know, and love fresh fruit (we shared a mango the other night that was a feast for the taste buds.  It most certainly was not local in any sense of the word, seeing as how there are no mango trees that I’ve ever seen in the U.S.).

The point being, to counter what Mae West once said (“too much of a good thing is wonderful”), too much fanatical focus on the orthodoxy of food production, to the point of orthorexia, is a sad illustration of the dire need some have to control their bodies, and those of their kids.  It’s a neurosis that can be passed to our offspring if we let it, and in many way is a far greater food pathogen than any germ in our meals.