How Consumer Trends Flow From One Stage to Another

Cage-Free Eggs: An Aug. 12 news feature about this topic showed that consumers' impulses to buy eggs produced in humane circumstances is causing demand to outstrip supply and is driving up the price of such eggs. Secondly, the feature stipulated that freeing hens from cages and crowding them by the thousands on a floor is not much of an improvement. Let's hope that subtle fact is spread too, and that a real solution to production conditions follows.

Food Miles: The concept that food that travels fewer miles to arrive in consumers' pantries is better than food that travels more miles has taken on much currency in recent time, partly in a bid to foster reductions in fuel consumption. There's validity in the concept, at least to the degree that it's as efficient to produce product locally as it is to produce it at a distance. As was pointed out in an editorial on Aug. 6, such is not always the case. The editorial cited a study claiming that efficiently produced New Zealand lamb can be shipped to Great Britain with lower net energy consumption than the production of lamb locally requires because local producing conditions are so poor. Again, this type of subtle analysis can stand to be spread.

Bottled Water: Now let's return to that great bugaboo, bottled water. News articles and broadcasts make the point that bottled water has an environmentally undesirable by-product: bottles by the millions, all petroleum-based and transported far. Indeed, it seems obvious that bottled water is unnecessary for most consumers in this country, since most jurisdictions provide pure tap water, or water pure enough to use with light filtering. In essence, bottled water is a convenience buy and fashion statement of sorts. Proponents of bottled water have pointed out that myriad other products come in plastic bottles too. True, but no fluid other than water flows from household spigots.