A Fruit Grower’s Perspective On Green Labeling

Ben WenkMany consumer concerns with organic, local, eco-friendly and sustainable categories are tied to food. Ben Wenk, one of the partners at Three Springs Fruit Farm in Aspers, Penn., runs the farm’s retail and tailgate markets, which means he’s often faced with questions directly from his customer base over whether the produce they are buying is local, organic etc. Here, Wenk offers five tips on what you can do to help lead your customers down the right path.

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1. If something is sustainable, it needs to have three legs to stand up (to criticism). Those three legs are economic viability, environmental responsibility and social responsibility. In order to be recognized as sustainable, all three things must be present.

2. To me, local — as it applies to food — is defined by climate and availability, rather than borders and rules. If you’re in southern Pennsylvania and you’re “eating local,” you’re not eating oranges. The word I use to think about local food is our “regional food shed.” Where I live, this can provide for my diet nearly any vegetable (seasonally), nearly any protein, and a fair amount of wheat flour. I don’t always eat 100 percent in my regional food shed, so I seek out American grown olive oil, rice, citrus (etc.) for my meals as well. But that isn’t local to me.

3. The words organic and eco-friendly are all too often misleading. Eco-friendly has no consensus definition that I’ve ever heard and, to me, seems 100% self-applied. Organic is defined by the USDA and is administrated locally through certifiers. However, what passes as “organic production” at my neighbor’s certified farm and the farm producing certified organic greens in other countries might well be two completely different things. I certainly believe they are.

In other words, local is a more important word than any label someone puts on a growing practice. I don’t believe there’s a lot to gain in assigning labels to the way one grows food, because it changes from farm to farm (and sometimes from crop to crop on the very same farm)!

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4. If consumers were taught that food is produced in a rainbow of different manners, rather than two or three (organic, not, and “in between”), then they could learn to base their purchasing decisions on a relationship with the persons who grew or sold them their food, rather than having a grocery store produce manager put a sticker on their food, trying to make it all the same.

5. If you feel the need to help clarify any confusion your customers may have, take the time to do it right! If someone has an interest in knowing more, be specific and educate that person. If you grew it, you should be intimately aware with how it was grown and able to answer any question. If you’re a secondary handler and you can’t answer some of these specific questions, tell that customer that you’d be happy to get those answers and let him or her know or, better yet, build a relationship with your supplier such that the consumer and the producer can trust you to carry on that conversation. Educate yourself first, in other words. Words don’t mean much until those terms are defined — it’s what makes the law profession such a lucrative pursuit. If you’re uncomfortable using words with nebulous definitions, then don’t do it.

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