Great Tech Innovation: Find Food Health and Safety Info From Your Phone

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Great Tech Innovation: Find Food Health and Safety Info From Your Phone

 

By Tim Kingston, AlterNet

Posted on March 19, 2009, Printed on March 19, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/story/131752/

 

The price of a dysfunctional food system is a potentially dangerous dinner. To

put it bluntly, in our profit-driven food system, the very nutrients needed to

stay alive could kill you. If it's not Chinese melamine in your milk, it's

American E.coli in your spinach. If it's not the salmonella in your peanut

butter from Georgia, it's that same bug in your Mexican green chilies. Consumers

-- health conscious or not -- have a right to be paranoid.

 

What's to be done?

 

Try GoodGuide.com. The San Francisco start-up is a free, socially conscious,

ethical-shopping Web site and is adding a new set of pages to its site devoted

to food safety on March 16. The site is the brainchild of Dara O'Rourke, a

University of California, Berkeley associate professor of environmental science,

policy and management, and it offers more than you ever wanted to know about

those mystery ingredients in your cereal, as well as the environmental footprint

and the labor practices that go into manufacturing the roughly 30,000 packaged

foods found in your local Safeway, Lucky or Ralph's.

 

" GoodGuide wants to give you X-ray vision, " explains O'Rourke, who founded the

site in 2008. " We can give you the information the retailers never want to tell

you. " He says retailers and marketing mavens spend billions of dollars on those

2 feet between your eyeballs and a box of Twix. " We are trying to cut a little

tiny hole through that wall of marketing money. Here, in your hand, you can have

independent information, a personal scientist in your pocket to help you live

your own values in the market place. "

 

Here's how it works. You stand " Lost in the Supermarket " in the central food

aisles of your grocery store. Pull out a cell phone. Dial 41411, text in

" gguide " and the bar code/universal product code of the product in question and

hit send. (You can also text in product names or categories.) In seconds you'll

have product information. On an iPhone it's even easier. Download the free

application at the iPhone store -- as over 100,000 others have done -- and

browse online as you shop.

 

" We rate all packaged processed foods, " says O'Rourke. Brands and products

evaluated include Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Nabisco, Heinz, Hains, Celestial

Seasoning, Yoplait, Kashi and even Boca Burgers. There is one caveat: GoodGuide

does not yet evaluate fresh vegetables, seafood or meat. Nor does it rate Trader

Joe's or Safeway's specific product lines.

 

The Ratings

 

Using a combined staff of 11 self-professed tech geeks and product life cycle

nerds, O'Rourke has crunched vast amounts of data to come up with GoodGuide food

evaluations. The new food ratings are similar to the site's other product

evaluations in that they rate potential health hazards, environmental impact and

the social, labor and political practices of manufacturers.

 

What is new is that the food pages offer a nutritional analysis of the packaged

foods. O'Rourke uses a standard nutritional measure to do this, the " 3R's, " i.e.

ratio of restricted-to-recommended nutrients: " We are taking recommended

[nutrients and] vitamins A, C, iron, etc., divided by fats, salt, sugar and

cholesterol to create a ratio that tells overall how healthy the product is. "

The site also deconstructs all the mystifying information in the product label

on the side of the box. " We rate the additives, colors, etc., and ask if they

are hazardous, " says O'Rourke, exclaiming, " We have colors used here [in the

U.S.] that are banned in Europe! "

 

Other factors taken into account include whether the product includes GMOs,

trans fats or fructose. The site also investigates how far packaged foods were

shipped, whether the animals involved were treated humanely and if products are

Fair Trade or organically certified.

 

Despite all that, it can still be hard to judge the actual environmental impact

of a food product. Does it make more sense to buy organic blueberries flown in

from Chile or conventionally grown strawberries from the U.S.? What should

consumers do in colder climes? For example, does it make sense to fly oranges

into Great Britain from Israel, or should Brits buy English greenhouse-grown

oranges? Believe it or not, says O'Rourke, it is less environmentally damaging

to fly oranges in than grow them in fossil-fueled greenhouses.

 

But one important thing all consumers can do to reduce their environmental and

carbon footprint, says O'Rourke, is " eat less meat. " This is because of the

amount of energy and grain/corn needed to feed the animals, as well as the

pollutants emitted by the animals and the associated industrial processes.

 

Partners

 

Given the scale of the project embarked upon, GoodGuide has had to cooperate

with a number of policy, activist and nonprofit organizations to get the data

sets necessary to make crosscutting evaluations. Among the groups who gave or

contracted out their information are the Environmental Working Group for

food-safety information, the Cornucopia Institute for its dairy scorecard,

TransFair USA for Fair Trade products, the Center for Food Safety for GMO-free

food and Food and Water Watch for rBGH-free dairy products.

 

Apart from bruised feelings in one instance, due to apparent miscommunications

about use of the data, the experience of most groups working with GoodGuide was

positive. " We were very happy to be a part of it, " says Heather Whitehead,

director of the Center for Food Safety's True Food Network.

 

" The format is really good, " says Whitehead. " The GoodGuide is a really good

one-stop-shop for people to go to, to find products they feel comfortable with.

.... It is very difficult for people looking for specific things when that

information is not on the label. Given all the food-safety problems we are

having now, it is even more important for people to know what is in their

products and where their food is coming from, so they can have a choice and vote

with their wallets. "

 

One organization that gave data to GoodGuide did offer a note of caution and

declined to offer an endorsement. Pointing out that there are dozens of

consumer-interest Web sites, rating hundreds of thousands of products, that

group's policy analyst says, " We can't make judgments about which metrics are

better or worse, it would be a full-time job just to compare those consumer

sites. It is really complicated, that is why we are not endorsing or sponsoring

them. "

 

Jean Halloran and Jorgen Wouters of Consumers Report are also withholding

judgment until the food section of the GoodGuide goes live. Halloran, director

of Food Policy Initiatives at Consumers Union, stressed that quality of data

going into the site in critical. " How are they distinguishing between products

they say are OK or not OK? ... Things like meaningfulness of the data; are the

things that go into the label actually important to the consumer, or

irrelevant? "

 

Wouters, senior producer of the Consumers Report Webwatch, said the two things

he always rates Web sites on are their privacy policy and contact information.

He said GoodGuide's privacy policy was fine, but he dinged them for not having

address and contact information easily available.

 

" It is mentioned that it is affiliated with [uC] Berkeley, " he says, but warned,

" If you only have an e-mail address, this company could be located across town

or in Romania. "

 

A Daughter, a Science Experiment, a New Business

 

GoodGuide was born of two agendas close to O'Rourke's heart. As a UC Berkeley

academic and researcher, he has spent years investigating consumer product

supply chains with the goal of making corporations clean up their acts in terms

of pollution, human rights and environmental degradation. As a parent, he is

concerned about his daughter's health.

 

During the late 1990s, O'Rourke worked for the U.N. Environmental Program in

Southeast Asia, where his research exposed conditions in Vietnamese and Thai

factories. As a result of New York Times and other media coverage, major brand

names like Nike were forced to take responsibility for labor conditions and

toxic releases from their subcontractors' factories. (Readers may remember the

Doonesbury series that satirized the subject.) Despite such success, he often

felt his reports became doorstops, used once and forgotten. He wanted give his

work a longer shelf life and more punch.

 

Then, a few years ago, he had an epiphany as he applied sunscreen to his

daughter's skin realizing, " I study this, yet I know almost nothing about the

products I use every day, " says O'Rourke. " It annoys me as a parent to be

unknowingly doing a health study on my own daughter. " He was even more annoyed

to find out that one of the ingredients in the sunscreen was a photo-carcinogen,

i.e. a chemical that has a carcinogenic effect when sunlight hits it. " Not the

most logical thing to put in a sunscreen! "

 

At the same time, he was finding that his UC Berkeley students wanted quick

answers to their ethical shopping dilemmas: Nike or Reebok? Berkeley Bowl or

Whole Foods? Palmolive or Dr. Bronners? His carefully nuanced academic answers

just didn't cut it.

 

That got him to thinking, and GoodGuide was born.

 

What originally started life as a UC Berkeley project quickly became something

quite different. At first, GoodGuide got funding from the Wallace Global Fund,

Overbrook Foundation, the National Collegiate Investors Association, the Ford

Foundation and others. But when he went back for a second funding round --

pitching spiffy new functions like the cell phone and iPhone browsing

application -- he was rebuffed.

 

" They said we love it so much that we don't want to fund it. We want you to spin

it off campus, " recounted a smiling O'Rourke. " They pushed me off a cliff to

make this more real. "

 

GoodGuide became a " for benefit " start up -- a business model where the

shareholders and beneficiaries are the public at large. It also moved to

downtown San Francisco, allowing the start-up to be taken seriously by venture

capitalists, who then coughed up $3.73 million. Investors are not the only ones

to take note. GoodGuide has won prestigious awards, including a 2008 Crunchie

for Web site " Most Likely To Make The World A Better Place " and a Web 2.0 Summit

Launchpad award.

 

Of course, initial funding does not a business plan make. The current strategic

plan remains a trifle fuzzy, particularly given the self-imposed restrictions

GoodGuide puts on itself.

 

As only an academic could put it, O'Rourke says, " We are not really focused on

revenue. We hope to hire someone soon. " That new hire will have his or her work

cut out for him/her. O'Rourke does not want to endorse particular products, have

advertising on the site (specifically, no dancing mortgage brokers) or engage in

marketing. One possibility is to license the GoodGuide data to large

institutions and retailers for a fee, leaving public access free.

 

Given that large corporations assessed by the site have already complained

to/contacted GoodGuide about their ratings, the retail licensing idea might have

some legs for companies desirous of pre-emptively protecting their brand.

O'Rourke remains coy about which companies have been in touch, but notes they

could generally improve their score simply by being more transparent about what

is in their products.

 

A GoodGuide, Now More Than Ever

 

It is a well-known fact that labeling a product green or organic these days is a

selling point. It is also a well-known fact that as some corporations are making

a genuine effort to change their practices, others are greenwashing. That makes

it all the more essential to have accurate information, particularly as the

organic health food sector consolidates rapidly.

 

Horizon milk is owned by Dean Foods, a company that has gotten flak for not

pasturing its cows, something Horizon once took pride in doing. " They ship milk

from five different factory farms, " charges Mark A. Kastel, Cornucopia

co-founder, co-director and senior farm policy analyst. " They are discounting

prices. They are putting the real organic farmers out of business. "

 

That is just one example of the information available. " People are hungry for

this information, they are ready to change their buying based on this

information, " says GoodGuide's front-end software designer Joel Lewenstein.

" Right now it is hard to get, it is either expensive, not easily accessible or

hard to understand. " Lewenstein wants GoodGuide to impose a " tyranny of

transparency " on companies. " Once consumers have the information, they can shop

the way they want to. "

 

This is not to say consumer shopping patterns can change the world. " We don't

think you can shop your way to sustainability, justice and ethical behavior, "

says O'Rourke. Shopping is, however, one lever that can help change corporate

behavior.

 

Smart companies recognize " greater transparency " is becoming a reality, and

GoodGuide can help nudge them in that direction, be it around food products,

children's toys, household chemicals or skin products.

 

For smart consumers, the GoodGuide.com is a great information source. O'Rourke

acknowledges there are numerous other ethical shopping sites, but says, " We are

aggregating all these issues in one place. You could take 12 hours and click to

50 different sites ... we have turned a massive research project into a

one-click guide to find a good product. "

 

 

Tim Kingston is a freelance investigative reporter in Oakland, Calif.

 

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/131752/