No more stupid stunts please!
It was reported earlier this month that the city of Ghent, in Belgium, has declared a weekly ‘veggie’ day; council and elected officials will be served a vegetarian diet for one day a week in a move that it hopes will encourage the citizenry to do the same on the basis that meat production is more CO2 intensive than vegetable production, quoting the UN statistics that livestock produces 18% of global green house gases (including methane which is 23 times as warming as CO2).
Oh, grow up!!
If you want to know why they really launched this initiative, just Google the words ‘Ghent’ and ‘vegetarian’; the ether is thick with stories about this, as every lazy journalist copies and pastes the text of the announcement to fill columns devoid of a quick quirky story to fulfil their ‘green agenda’ quota… and with the summer tourist season about to get into full swing during a global recession, the novelty value of the place may just fill up a few more hotel spaces, eh?
So, in marketing terms, the move is a complete triumph; after all, even I’m quoting this cheap trick, adding to the Google returns you’ll get in your search.
As far as a serious CO2 reduction measure is concerned, it’s pathetic, bordering on the irresponsible and just serves to delay the moment when people, both private and commercial, come together in unison to take meaningful and sustainable action.
As far as the statistics are concerned – and I’m positing this as a well-balanced omnivore – if we reduce the number of livestock we slaughter as a result of wholesale adoption of this stunt, won’t there just be more methane going into the atmosphere? After all, and pardon my French here, dead cows don’t fart! The trucks that move the meat will just move more vegetables, so the CO2 output appears to me to be unaffected in the transportation sector… so enough, already!
Can we please get a little more serious about this issue? The time for using CSR and environmental issues as a means of selling more of… anything, is over; ‘greenwashing’ is a word that, if associated with your business, will only to serve to diminish your competitive edge in a market place with a more educated and sophisticated consumer. We all know that Mars is only working with the Rainforest Alliance because it is worried it will lose access to a ready supply of cocoa; we’ll still buy their chocolate, but we won’t switch from Cadburys, if that’s your favourite tipple (who, by the way are playing the same game), just because of this particular stunt (even if the outcome IS that long-term exploited workers now get a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work and we put a few trees back).
So here’s a call to action for the mainstream media; take your job a little more seriously and we, in the business community will take you a bit more seriously. It should not be left to me to have a rant about strange Belgians who are just ‘bigging up’ their town for tourism just because you can’t be bothered to scratch the surface of any story and add to the knowledge base in your rush to sell another rainforest of paper during the daily commute. Just grow up!
