Romy
speaker
233 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Romy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Just to say, Shelley is, of course, focusing on just the environmental impact here. Obviously, there's a whole other conversation to be had about the possible health impacts of plastics or microplastics that we're just not going to get into today.
But when it comes to sustainability, Shelley thinks that plastic's reputation as public enemy number one kind of just boils down to how visible its environmental impacts are. Whereas with other materials like glass, metal, terracotta, a lot of these things require a ton of energy to produce and to transport, and much more than plastic. But their impacts are just more abstract and less visual.
Well, I actually never thought of that, honestly. It kind of goes back to this idea that if you see a yogurt in a clay pot and a yogurt in a plastic pot, you're going to think, oh, yeah, plastic is bad, while clay has this idea of, like, oh, it's natural. Yeah, it's probably better for the environment.
And so you, as a very well-informed, conscientious consumer, you're at the grocery store, you have a choice between a yogurt that comes in a plastic container and a yogurt that comes in a terracotta container. Which would you feel better about picking up on a random Tuesday?
It doesn't scream up market. Yeah. But... It just turns out that if you get into the nitty gritty of the environmental trade-offs here, like the thing that doesn't look environmentally friendly, it doesn't have the aesthetic of environmentalism, oftentimes can be more environmentally friendly. But. But. This is an important but.
Shelley goes on to say that this whole conversation we're having about packaging kind of misses the point entirely.
She says plastic's typically less than 10% of the total environmental impact of the food product that you're consuming. The food itself, far more important to whether or not you're actually making a sustainable decision. What's the carbon footprint of yogurt? This is a good question, and this invites a whole lot of other questions on the other side of it.
But what she's saying is that packaging's kind of a red herring. And also, like, La Fermiere's marketing is kind of encouraging you to follow that red herring. Like, they're not saying, look how sustainable our yogurt is. They're saying, look how sustainable our packaging is, which is another reason for me to at least believe that this is primarily a marketing decision.
You're with the teenagers in this one. I'm with the teenagers. And also, the funny thing is that La Fermiere's yogurt, which is the thing actually driving whether or not it's a more sustainable option than its competitors, seems to be pretty environmentally friendly.
And there's a couple reasons for that. One is that the company operates on a kind of make it where you sell it principle, meaning the company's two biggest markets, France and the US. The dairy is produced and processed locally in both of those countries.
So you're not adding a bunch of transport miles inside that part of the supply chain, which is going to lower the carbon footprint that's mostly invisible to the consumer. But also, at least in France, where this data is public, La Fermiere is sourcing its dairy from small local farms with an average of only 35 cows.
And farms like these, if they're using certain agricultural practices, they could be better for the environment than large-scale dairy farms.
Yeah, you could eat non-dairy yogurt. And this is kind of the quality of this kind of sustainability conversation. It's a hall of mirrors. Being human is bad for the environment, and all sorts of decisions we make inside of being human are also bad for the environment. So yes, you could say, I no longer eat full dairy yogurt. I eat
oat milk, yogurt, or whatever else is out there, and that would be better for the environment, and you wouldn't have to have this conversation at all. But this is the conversation we've chosen. But this is the thing I hadn't understood when the teacher, David, first posed the question. He wasn't just asking about the packaging.
He was asking about all the difficult ethical choices involved, which is actually something that teenagers like thinking through. And I think as Romy and Anouk grasped that, this question had become their question, too.
Thank you so much for your time again. Honestly, you have no idea how far this has taken us from just a stupid little yogurt question. So thank you so much for your help.
Again, here's the teacher, David Freeman.
We were in the same classroom Shruti and I visited months prior. Romi and Anouk seemed, and I'd never actually seen the sight of them, a little nervous to speak in front of the class.
So, and now we are back to the last CDM class of the year ever. Not, well, not ever. There's going to be classes next year. And so, yeah, I think this has confirmed a lot of our initial theories, so on how it could... It's a brand thing. It's a brand thing. It's a brand DNA thing and also a marketing decision over sustainability, maybe. And, yeah.
And Romy and Anouk just walked the class through the steps of their reporting, everything we had done along the way.
Showing 141–160 of 233 · page 8 of 12
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