Daniel Lubetzky

by Kim Walker on behalf of Daniel Lubetzky

British newspaper The Independent recently highlighted Natalie Portman for her new vegan shoe line and her involvement in good causes, including OneVoice!

[Read more →]

Sometimes in business you are faced with the decision to invest up front more capital resources but ensure that over the long term you see savings, vs. save up front, but at a steady higher cost of production per widget on an ongoing basis.

The problem with choosing the path that is "inexpensive" up front is that it not only creates higher costs for the enterprise over the long haul, but it can also generate externalities (costs to society that the enterprise avoids paying).

A case in point is illustrated by this Edge shaving cream picture:

The travel-size version has less product but just as much waste in plastic on the cap and the outpouring device.

You can picture the team responsible for designing the travel-size version figuring that it made all the sense in the world to take advantage of existing infrastructure and just making a smaller bottle for travel by just cutting its height/size.

But years later and millions of cans later, so much more waste – AND COST – is generated because you are using such an inefficient means to provide a product: a fraction of the size in product but as much in caps etc.  It should not have necessarily been this way.  They could have designed a less expensive disposable version – but it would have required an upfront investment in capital.

Too bad.

A lot of "convenience" products like travel

We came to America for the American dream – to do good and to make good.

- K.R. Sridhar

(As quoted in a column by Tom Friedman in the NYT)

If you haven’t seen the documentary Food Inc. – you have to.  Like Michael Pollan’s books, this movie will change the way you see food and the world.

If we as consumers and citizens don’t do something quickly to fight back against the food industrial complex, by voting with our dollars, by informing and educating others, and by advocating to the government for more transparency, freedom, and a level playing field for natural foods producers, then the epidemics of diabetes, obesity, environmental degradation, food contamination and inhumane treatment will threaten us further.

Some highlights:

• Chicken and meat processing is so inhumane, and scary, it makes you feel you can’t avoid but to become a vegetarian – unless you live near Joe Salatin
• The Food Industrial Complex is abusive, greedy, and scary;
• corn engineering has created high fructose corn syrup, and the corn lobby has resulted in subsidies for obesity-inducing products;
• Price distortion from government subsidies causes poor people to buy cheap unhealthy foods made up of corn-derived empty calories – contributing to diabetes and obesity;
• Otherwise herbivore cows that naturally should feed from grass are now primarily fed corn, causing e-coli contaminations and diseases;
• Chicken die from the fast weight they put on; and they are treated as tools in an industrial machine – no lives;
• Monstanto is evil. They hold a ruthless monopoly over soybeans.  They intimidate and sue farmers to use their genetically-modified seeds. Federal and state government agencies have been bought off and serve the interests of the food industrial complex.

Serious work ahead.

Yesterday I tried Softsoap’s Pure Cashmere Hand soap.  I was struck by the proposition that a soap could contain "cashmere extract" because a while back I had wondered what "cashmere" really was.  Most consumers just know Cashmere sweaters as exceptionally soft but don’t know where "cashmere" comes from, so I guess the marketing team at Softsoap’s parent company, Colgate, figured that they would make things romantic with the cashmere association. 

The trouble is, cashmere is the fur of a type of goat – the cashmere goat.  Colgate tries to connect to this silly gimmick by using "hydrolyzed keratin" – a protein extract from the goat’s hair.  This ingredient, besides being the least present in the formula (see label), has no discernible impact on the purported features of the product.  It is just used for smoke and mirrors.  Too bad that most consumers have not yet caught up with this deception – though I did find one colorful site that brought them to task on it.

You’d think Colgate would be a bit more responsible with its claims and advertising.

Then again, liquid soap is a modern invention that pollutes water at such greater levels than regular soap, for the sheer fact that it is used in much ampler and less efficient form than regular bars of soap.  The same reason why companies created shower gels and liquid soaps  – because they can command a higher price and accomplish more turns than using regular soap bars – is also the reason why consumers should avoid using such products, which harm the environment and are just wasteful.

This season many millions of pine trees are being chopped off to decorate Christmas living rooms.  With growing awareness about the harm of reducing the footprint of trees in our globe, this tradition (which I assume does not have any grounding in biblical or canonical precepts of Christian religion) must be getting questions more and more. 

One answer for environmentally-conscious Christians may be to just pass up the tree altogether – or to use an artificial Xmas tree.

But what if a company were to offer to go further: that for a fraction of the cost of buying such a tree, it would actually plant a new tree in the honor of the family foregoing the actual tree.

Or a company in business of making the artificial trees could sell a version that included this environmentally-conscious commitment – not only would buyers forego killing trees, but the company would actually pay to plant X number of new trees…

Leave it to a Mexican Jew to think this up…

I really liked this thought by Jonathan Safran Foer on his goal as a parent. He wrote it in the context of his journey as a vegetarian, but it has wider applications and resonates as a noble aim:

I’m not as worried about what [my children] will choose as much as my ability to make them conscious of the choices before them. I won’t measure my success as a parent by whether my children share my values, but by whether they act according to their own.

– Jonathan Safran Foer, in The Fruits of Family Trees, New York Times Magazine

[Read more →]

An interesting article here describes Sweden’s experiment with climate change impact labels on food items – including on restaurant menus and grocery item labels.  The effort to educate consumers about the environmental impact of their food consumption sometimes clashes with nutritional advice – ie, avoid tomatoes because grown in greenhouses – and sometimes is aligned – ie, red meat doesn’t just raise cholesterol but raising cattle also emits far more CO2 pound to pound than almost anything else you consume.

I wonder if 50 years from now this will be a widely implemented practice that all of us follow as obviously needed, or if some will look back at how silly we were – either because it was too little too late, or just the wrong approach.  But it is certainly an interesting experiment worth following.

[Read more →]

Time Magazine wrote a very compelling piece about "The High Price of Cheap Food." It should be required reading, as should the movie Food Inc. and Michael Pollan’s books, which presumably inspired this article.

[Read more →]

Julian Brody wrote an interesting piece for IPF about US Govt’ envoy Fred Hoff’s innovative proposal on how to resolve the Golan Heights controversy between Israel and Syria.  What is insightful and creative about it is that it takes each party’s core priorities into consideration and not only addresses them but potentially even resolves the issue in a way that creates the foundations for a warmer peace, and a more vibrant & ecologically-sound economy.

[Read more →]