Curious ’bout how Nestle — the world’s most boycotted corp — got so much market share? Well, market researcher Clotaire Rapaille lets you know how, in a 2003 PBS interview.

This guy did some work for Nestle’s biz tactics, including getting the Japanese to get into coffee:

We started, for example, with a dessert for children with a taste of coffee. We created an imprint of the taste of coffee…. They start selling coffee, but through dessert, things that were sweet, get the people accustomed to the taste of coffee, and after that they followed the generations. And when they were teenagers they start selling coffee, and first there was coffee with milk at the beginning, and then they went to coffee, and now they have a big market for coffee in Japan.

And even in the US, the whole coffee market’s bizzare. For ex, according to Clotaire: “A large majority, 90-something percent of Americans, love the aroma of coffee. Only 47 percent like the taste.”

So now corps work on the aroma of coffee more than the taste….

It’s really hard to get consumers concerned about the actual quality — let alone enviro and fair trade factors — of the coffee they’re buying. It’s not impossible, but we’re battling against the rich marketing boys hired by big corps.

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Naomi Klein’s book, No Logo, has been quoted here before, by readers. This book’s an impassioned critique of marketing’s effects on culture and citizenship.

And it’s a book I haven’t read yet :( Though I’m planning to!

In any case, Naomi did an interview for PBS back in 2004, talking ’bout issues that’re still all the rage today.

Why’re people so into specific brands, for ex? Well, brands seem to care more ’bout people than the govt or work does. Sez Naomi: “you see corporations sort of fulfilling a role that probably should be fulfilled elsewhere…. These brands are constantly canvassing their most minute shades of opinion.”

Yet this consumer impulse becomes very, very easy for big corps to take advantage of. The idea of consumer choice, in many ways, is a myth. Sez Naomi:

You can choose a million things about your coffee, but Starbucks, at the same time, has been very resistant to any kind of scrutiny around how their employees are treated when their employees started to unionize, how their coffee is grown when there’s been pressure for them to switch to fair-trade coffees. They’ve made small concessions along the way, but you very quickly encounter a wall of obscurity [in] contrast [to] this perception of total openness and total participation when it comes to consumer choice.

To combat this, we have to make it easier for people to make different choices that may be more enviro or socially conscious. Sez Naomi: “if you become outraged about something but don’t have the ability to act on it, it sort of wears you down. If it isn’t possible to go to the mall and buy something that was produced under ethical conditions, which is actually hard if not impossible, then you get used to it. It’s the same as advertising: You get desensitized to that experience.”

This is the problem I see most often with promoting fair trade. People, when they first hear about the need for fair trade or the bad stuff about sweatshops, are all ’bout going for fair labor. But then they hit the malls, and pretty much none of the stuff’s fair trade. And they give up.

Certainly, the uber-committed folk will fight tooth and nail to get the fair trade, enviro conscious stuff. But it ain’t easy. And I can only imagine how NOT easy this task may be for, say, someone who has a full time job and kids.

Which is to say that yes, consumers DO need to take more responsibility for the choices they make. But companies and activists also need to make sure that these choices are actually feasible, doable options for people who’ve been conditioned all their lives to think that the dollar’s king, that time is money –

What’re your suggestions for making better consumer choices easier to make for Angelinos?

Naomi closes her interview by saying: “If you are shopping for community, if you are shopping for democracy, you actually are not going to get it at the mall. And you will only be cured of this particular malaise if you find ways to fulfill those desires elsewhere.”

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Excerpted from an article by Paul Salopek of the Chicago Trib. All bolds and links are mine (Thanks to reader Chris for pointing me to this article):

What are the hidden costs of America’s imported oil?

Milton Copulos, an economist with the National Defense Council Foundation, a right-of-center Washington think tank, spent 18 months poring over hundreds of thousands of pages of government documents, toiling to fix a price tag on America’s addiction to global crude.

He parsed oil-related defense spending in the Middle East. He calculated U.S. jobs and investments lost to steep crude prices. He even factored in the lifelong medical bills of some 18,000 U.S. troops wounded in Iraq as of March. (About $1.5 million each.)

The actual cost of gasoline refined from imported oil, according to Copulos?

Eight dollars a gallon, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last spring.

When he isolated hidden costs of Middle Eastern crude in particular, the price jumped to $11. This included a war premium that swelled the Pentagon’s spending to protect all Persian Gulf oil to $137 billion a year. In a truly transparent economy, by Copulos’ math, filling Rodriguez’s Jeep would run about $230.

Consumers pay for these expenditures indirectly, through higher taxes, or by saddling their children and grandchildren with a ballooning national debt — increasingly financed by foreigners. The result: Unaware of the true costs, U.S. motorists see no obvious reason to curb their oil habit.

“Gas isn’t too expensive,” Copulos said. “It’s way, way too cheap.”

In fact, many experts think Copulos’ Olympian feat of accounting is much too conservative. Nobody can calculate, they say, the future security cost incurred by funneling petrodollars to regimes that have incubated Islamic terrorism, such as Saudi Arabia. Or tally foreign oil’s role in global warming.

Damn. Drive less, people. I’ll be doing the same.

To read Milton’s whole 153-page study, titled “America’s Achilles Heel: The Hidden Costs of Imported Oil: A Strategy for Energy Independence,” download the PDF here.

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The Nation’s running a forum titled “One Thing to Do About Food,” featuring suggestions from activist-minded foodies.

What to do? We’ve got lotsa ideas here. Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, and Wendell Berry, poet and novelist, point to consumer knowlege and activism as deciding factors.

Marion Nestle (NYU prof.), Troy Duster and Elizabeth Ransom (both sociologists) focus on kids. Marion wants to end “all forms of marketing foods to kids–both visible and stealth,” while Troy and Elizabeth want schools to adopt a “engaged learning approach through agricultural production and consumption.”

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, wants people to pay attention to the Farm Bill, which he things should be called the Food Bill.

Environmentalist Winona LaDuke sez we need to recover a cultural relationship to food. Carlo Petrini, founder of the International Slow Food Movement, wants to focus on gastronomy, making food good, clean and just. Vandana Shiva, physicist-ecologist, argues “Citizens’ food freedom depends on biodiversity.”

As for farming: Peter Singer has a simple solution: “Don’t buy factory-farm products.” Eliot Coleman argues for organic farming. Jim Hightower sez food should be “agrarian, small-scale and local.”

Def. worth a read — Just pick an action to focus on and try not to get overwhelmed :)

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Jason of Gristmill makes a valiant effort at determining what exactly needs to be done to “fix” the environmental issues that agriculture — as practiced now — presents. His ideas:

1. Remove all agricultural subsidies, tariffs, and quotas across the globe (this, by the way, is one of the stated goals of the WTO);

2. remove all associated subsidies, such as subsidies for water (especially) and energy;

3. heavily regulate and/or restrict agriculture in especially sensitive ecological areas, i.e., near rivers, on marginal land, etc.; and

4. impose carbon taxes on fuel use and taxes on the most toxic pesticides that reflect the damage they cause.

On the one hand, I’m like — Yey! Just 4 simple rules!

On the other hand, I’m like — Tee hee! Ha ha ha ha ha! Good luck with getting any of those ideas implemented! :P

And of course, Jason knows these things’re tough to achieve — He writes: “Although what I have laid out is the ideal circumstance, any steps in this direction should be warmly embraced and advocated.”

Your thoughts?

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