Just stumbled on this fabulous website and wanted to share it. It’s called The Good Guide, and it’s brand new in the beta stage. Basically, it uses various health, environment, and social impact assessments to rate products based on their ingredients and their impacts on the environment and the communities that produce them. So cool!

With all the environmental marketing claims being thrown around with little to no regulation, the instance of greenwashing is very high. Green washing is when a company uses environmental or health words to create the impression that their product is healthy or good for the environment.

One example of this I just read about on NPR’s Greenwashing Brigade is Horizon Foods, which is going to come out with a line of ‘natural’ yogurt and dairy products. The FDA definition of ‘natural’ food is “produced without added hormones, artificial sweeteners, artificial colors, flavors, preservatives or high fructose corn syrup.” So, ‘natural’ vegetable and plant inputs can be GMO crops, sprayed with pesticides, and meat and dairy products can be raised in the fantastical squalor of large feed lots, injected with antibiotics, and fed anything. And they seriously feed those animals ANYTHING.

‘Natural’ is apparently a big buzz word right now, like low-fat or sugar-free were at different points in our recent food history. However, it’s all suggestion and inference, and does NOT mean the food you’re buying is healthy or pesticide free. High fructose corn syrup, as Michael Pollan pointed out in a recent interview with Amy Goodman, is an indicator that food is super processed and full of chemicals, but food without high fructose corn syrup is not necessarily healthy or good for the environment.
A lot of food packaging can be ambiguous. Unless the ingredients have ‘organic’ in front of their name, you don’t know the circumstances surrounding their production, harvest, and process.

Sites like the Good Guide can help you there by doing the company and practice research for you, so all you have to do is plug in the item and learn about it (one quick and easy way to tell if edible consumer items are good for you, or if they are what they claim to be, is to look at the ingredients. Michael Pollan recommends eating foods with fewer than 5 ingredients).

The Good Guide will hopefully be a great resource for learning about the companies that make and distribute our food and other consumer products and cleaners. Included in the analysis of each product is information about each company’s efforts to reduce their impact on the environment and their contributions to global warming, which isn’t typically found on product packaging. That way, you can vote with your dollars for companies that are taking extra steps to mitigate climate change as well as providing good, healthy, quality products.