By now you’ve no doubt seen the plethora of press releases from Kroger saying they have the first carbon neutral eggs in the country. 

            If you look at the pictures of the provider, who has built 4 massive confinement houses so far all located in Ohio, they’re quite telling.  First, the chickens aren’t allowed on grass.  They have little filthy aprons they can step onto outside.  

            While these birds are surely happier than the ones in confinement battery cages, the main claim is that they lay eggs with net zero environmental cost.  The real kicker is that they eat waste food:  bakery wastes, slaughterhouse wastes, broken pasta.  This is all presented as “upcycled” and having no cost.

            Certainly we could question the nutritional excellence of industrial waste.  But beyond that, isn’t it fascinating that this outfit is claiming a no-cost feed situation that is predicated on a wasteful food system?  In other words, if the food system were localized, decentralized, and customized, it wouldn’t produce such a prodigious waste stream.  The height of misrepresentation is to tout something that depends on failure to be the new standard of success.  What convoluted thinking.  A wasteful, centralized system spawns perfection.

            This upcycling idea enables them to claim “beyond organic.”  As if feeding GMO bakery waste and cracked noodles are better than raw ingredients.  It’s absurd, of course, but how many consumers will look at this cleverspeak as an oracle of progress?

            Oh, the manure will be dehydrated, packaged, and sold as organic fertilizer.  Solar panels power the ventilation system and egg collection system.  I wonder if they measured the lithium mining and energy that went into constructing the solar panels.

            The whole thing makes you realize the truth of the old saying “figures lie and liars figure.”  Or that statistics can prove anything.

            I have a different idea.  How about we don’t build a permanent house for the chickens at all and use a portable structure that moves around pastures where manure doesn’t have to be dehydrated or hauled anywhere.  We’ll feed the birds whole foods and let them supplement their diet with grass, legumes, forbs, bugs and worms.  We don’t need any solar panels because natural ventilation runs through the portable structure.  That means we don’t need electricity, concrete, or fans.

            I wonder how much it would cost to get bean counters to determine if this qualifies as carbon neutral.  Oh, in addition we’ll build the portable structure out of wood and not steel.  I think we need a government grant to pay for little outfits like Polyface to count our beans.  I wonder if Bill Gates would be interested in throwing some of his philanthropic money at this?

            In your experience, what’s your best example of greenwashing cleverspeak?