farmwashing
-washing – suffisso
farmwashing – sostantivo
As the farm-to-table movement grows, so does farmwashing. What can we do about it?
The fast food giant McDonald’s will take farmwashing to a national scale starting next month with a truly groan-worthy advertising campaign.
‘Farmwashing‘ is not branding – it is plagiarizing farmers image for own gain and misleading to consumers.
L’altro giorno ho sentito alla radio un’intervista a un agricoltore che diceva peste e corna di un noto gigante della distribuzione alimentare; la catena di supermercati in questione aveva appena iniziato a etichettare prodotti provenienti dai quattro angoli del mondo con nomi che richiamavano alla mente l’idea di folcloristiche fattorie inglesi, tipo ‘Rosedene Farms’. L’arrabbiatissimo interlocutore non aveva dubbi: i supermercati si stanno appropriando dell’immagine nostalgica dell’agricoltura, della campagna, solo per profitto, un processo da lui descritto come ‘farmwashing’.
Dapprima ho pensato che l’agricoltore avesse creato il termine lì per lì, ma una rapida ricerca su Google ha prodotto una serie di risultati tipo quelli riportati sopra. Mi pare dunque che –wash e –washing siano potenzialmente dei suffissi molto produttivi.
Origini del termime
La parola farmwashing, in uso almeno dal 2009, è stata coniata per analogia con il termine greenwashing. La connotazione negativa è simile: pratiche disoneste da parte di aziende che pubblicizzano i propri presunti comportamenti di tutela dell’ambiente per risultare, agli occhi dei consumatori, attenti allo sviluppo sostenibile. L’antenato di entrambi i termini è whitewashing, nel senso figurato di occultare, insabbiare verità scomode.
-washing – suffix
farmwashing – noun
As the farm-to-table movement grows, so does farmwashing. What can we do about it?
The fast food giant McDonald’s will take farmwashing to a national scale starting next month with a truly groan-worthy advertising campaign.
‘Farmwashing‘ is not branding – it is plagiarizing farmers image for own gain and misleading to consumers.
The other day I heard an aggrieved farmer complaining on the radio that a prominent supermarket chain was labelling products from abroad with folksy English-sounding labels such as ‘Rosedene Farms’. There was no doubt in his mind that the supermarkets were, as he put it, trying to hijack the image of farming for their own gain, a process he described as ‘farmwashing’.
I thought at first that the farmer was being linguistically creative, but a Google search revealed thousands of citations like those above. So it seems that –wash and –washing have the potential to become productive suffixes.
Origins
The term farmwashing has been around since at least 2009. It was coined by analogy with greenwashing, which has similar connotations of sharp practice by firms wishing to seem more virtuous than they are by giving their activities and products an environmentally-friendly veneer. The ancestor of both is, of course, whitewashing, trying to stop people from discovering inconvenient truths.
