Marketing Nature's Own

March 29, 2006

Rains again. Rains expected.

Ryan has 4 zucchini seedlings up now and you have never seen a kid so excited by vegetables. Well, he likes watching them grown and picking them he doesn’t necessarily enjoy eating them.

Someone was cursing Marketing and Marketers the other day, primarily because it’s so difficult to keep track of what’s good for you because they are constantly playing with the words. If wheat bread is good for you, they’ll include something in the title of their product like Ground Wheat Flour (which I believe is actually just flour, ground from wheat, which we eat all the time) to make you buy it with the understanding that this is good for you like wheat bread is. Which is essentially a lie.

I laughed. It imitates Nature herself, don’t you see?

Let’s say there’s a butterfly, like the Monarch, which tastes good to birds. Somewhere along the line, nature produced a toxin in some of them which made them taste horrible to birds. In time that feature came to be in all Monarchs, and as a direct result, birds won’t eat them. What is also interesting is that birds will associate the color and pattern of the Monarch with the foul taste. Now along comes this other butterfly (and I’ll be damned if I can remember the name) who develops the same coloring and marking of the Monarch but, get this, don’t contain the toxin that makes them so inedible. They are mimicking in order to increase their chances of survival.

And if that’s not Marketing, I’ll eat my hat.

Our ancestors didn’t have it any easier, so don’t fool yourself. Anyone who foraged had to be able to tell the difference between an edible morel mushroom and a Death Cap. They also needed to know the time to pick wild berries, roots, and tubers, because doing so at the wrong time could cause illness or death. They needed to be able to read seasons, prepare meats, buy meats and vegetables from sometimes untrustworthy sources; in other words they had a hell of a lot of work to do that we never even think about.

These people were up at dawn and asleep before their heads hit their pillows.

So complaining about a bunch of stuffed white shirts making marketing campaigns trying to fool you doesn’t get you very far when you look back historically.

In fact, we look bad because we have it so damn easy. If the Marketers are trying to stick it to us, don’t just sit and complain, you’ve got 3,000 pages of reference materials all over the Web on any subject from Types of Wheat Flour to the difference between Biodegradable and Compostable.

As my mother always used to tell me, referring to those hucksters who sold vegetables on the streets of South Philly, “Did you ever hear a huckster yell, ‘Rotten tomatoes!’”

Stay one step ahead of the Marketers and read as much as you can to give your family the nourishment they need, your planet the treatment it deserves, or the company the money for products made that agree with your actual standards, not ones laid on afterwards by a campaign team.

And don’t be surprised when they change their stripes because you aren’t buying.