Who Came First? The Egg or the Carton? An Analysis of Organic Packaging for Italian Retail Chain Esselunga - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 105

6.1 Background: Consumer Citizen Within Green Marketing

Healthy, natural, organic, sustainable, ethical, authentic, tasty, and humanitarian
are common words used to label organic food, providing a recurrent persuasive
marketing discourse for consumers of natural products. The choice of organic
discourse whether in the form of text or image has twofold functions. One is to help
consumers in making a product selection among the many competitors (Caswell
and Padberg 1992 ; Hughner et al. 2007 ; Brent and McMullen 2008 ) and the other
is to empower the buyer (Holder 1991 ; Johnston 2008 ). In theory, the distinction
between the two is that while the first aims to maximize the profit of a company,
eliminating competition, the other serves to educate the buyer on the benefits and/or
harms of the product, allowing a consumer to exercise agency (Holder 1991 ;Winson
2004 ; Brent and McMullen 2008 ). The first function of organic discourse is usually
associated with corporate marketing practices, while the second can be associated
with the involvement of governmental agencies in protecting people's interest (e.g.,
food policies) (Holder 1991 ; Zinkhan and Carlson 1995 ; Libery and Kneafsey
1998 ;Winson 2004 ; Peattie and Crane 2005 ). However, in many cases, the state
has failed to protect people's interest, favoring entrepreneurs who are entering the
organic market (Lockie 2009 ). According to Lockie ( 2009 ), “in the domain of
food consumption, the role of the state has shifted somewhat from protecting the
public

to helping “consumers” and “entrepreneurs” make the correct choices
by providing them with technical assistance and information” (p. 195) (Draper
and Green 2002 ). Food labels on packages are an example of the adopted role by
state that aims at protecting consumers, while at the same time favoring companies
(Nestle 2002 ). As Caswell and Padberg ( 1992 ) note,

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labels are designed for their impact on the whole food marketing system rather than simply
as a consumer information [

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] Food labels and media advertising are closely linked
because firms coordinate label and advertising messages to produce a consistent product
image. (pp. 463-465)

Nestle in her topic Food Politics , explains further the close relationships between
food firms and politics. She calls attention at interlocks between governmental
agencies and corporations by providing an overview of the food industry and how
this latter has influenced every aspect of food style, including food-labeling policy.
According to the author (2002),
food package labels, (said Dr. Kessler,) were the result of politics, not science, and had
become “so opaque or confusing that only consumers with hermeneutic abilities of a
Talmudic scholar can peel back the encoded layers of meaning. That is because labels spring
not from disinterested scientific reasoning but from lobbying, negotiation, and compromise”
(p. 249).

There are two important points addressed in the above quote. First, there seems to be
an overabundance of information that appears on food packaging, which can lead
to confusing the buyer. Marketing text is alternated with technical terms imposed
by governmental agencies (e.g., nutritional labels). This latter form of discourse
aims to appease legal litigations between food firms and the government, rather