Thursday, May 10: Katy Kaesebier

View KK- 5/10 in a larger map Visit the routes of Katy's food on May 10.  Be sure to click on each pinpoint - there's lots of info in there!

Distribution centers aren't open on the weekend so I can't get in touch with anybody. But, my map is ready unless I can get more detail (i.e. where Peter Pan Peanut Butter grows their peanuts) on a couple of items.

I'm (semi) happy to report that, thanks to the Farmers Market supporting my salad for lunch, my average food distance traveled was 625.34 miles! Not too shabby but definitely room for improvement. UPDATE:

I eat Market Pantry (Target brand) oatmeal for breakfast a few days a week. It was easy to locate the information for the distribution center (on the side of the package), but much more difficult to track down where the oats were grown. In a 15 minute phone adventure, I spent about 3 minutes pushing buttons and yelling at the voice recording attempting to get to a person, another minute explaining what our project is and why I was curious as to where my oats were grown, about 10 minutes on hold, and another minute being told that the specialist (one of my transfers) will call me back. This is the information I was left with for the time being: They aren't exactly sure where the oats are being grown, so they need to do some research with the grocery store team, but once they find out the exact location they're not sure how much information they will be able to share. When I asked if I could know the city or even the state, she commented that she didn't think she would be able to get that specific, but she would tell me what she could when she called back.

My next phone adventure was to track down where the peanuts are grown for my Peter Pan peanut butter (with no high fructose corn syrup!). This time I took the approach that I was completing a school project with the hopes that I would be able to secure a bit more information than being just a random consumer that is concerned with the growing location of my food. Perhaps it was irony, or maybe fate, that I was connected with a very nice woman who answered as many questions as she could in a 13 minute conversation, but I was still left with mostly unanswered questions. When I explained my "school project" and asked if she could help me figure out where their peanuts are grown she laughed a little awkwardly then said, "Well, that is a tricky question." What ensued was a flurry of questions (to get enough information for my school project) and broad answers or a response of "I'm sorry, I can't be that specific." Here is what we discussed:

ConAgra, the owner of Peter Pan peanut butter and 41 other food companies, is a power house of food. When I commented that I didn't realize how large they were, I was informed that it is a point of pride that they have gotten so large and they are working hard to let people know how broad their reach is within the food world. At this point, all of their products are only distributed domestically, but they are in conversations to go international due to the international market expanding quicker than the domestic market. The decision of which products will go international will be based on the results of viability surveys they are currently completing to determine cultural impacts on the potential success of the product.

Back to the peanuts. They acquire all of their peanuts from FDA approved suppliers but that is about as specific as the answer got. With a little prodding, I was able to find out that they prefer to get their peanuts from the United States but sometimes, based on the success of the annual US peanut crop, they need to go international in order to get as many peanuts as possible. So, like most processed foods, the peanuts in my jar probably came from a large number of locations with a reasonably high likelihood that they are all from the United States, but she couldn't be certain if that was the case. See what I mean about indirect "answers"? That was as specific as she could get for the location of where my peanuts were grown. Naturally, I decided to take this conversation further since she was friendly and proceeded to ask about the farmers and corporations with whom they work. I was hoping they at least on some level worked with small scale farmers, but she couldn't answer this either. Most likely it is a mix of small scale and larger corporate farms with the chance that the corporate farms were working with local farmers to source out some of the growing.

When I was unable to learn where my peanuts were grown, I decided I would seek out more information about the distribution center- again to no avail. The address listed on the side of my container is for the corporate ConAgra offices located in Omaha, Nebraska. There are many distribution centers for ConAgra foods across the country organized by how the foods are preserved: refrigerated, shelf stable, and frozen. She wasn't able to answer how many distribution centers they have or any of the locations of these centers since she doesn't work with them directly. I asked if the distribution centers were focused on distributing food regionally and she said they used to be but they really aren't anymore and she honestly had no idea from where my peanut butter was distributed. Which means I will be moving that pin on my food map to the Bermuda Triangle- the metaphorical home of all untraceable foods.

I just spent 30 minutes on the phone (thankfully with very nice people) trying to find where 2 foods were from and all I received were round about "answers" that didn't tell me anything. Every avenue I took trying to get a response was a dead end which was incredibly frustrating. What if they needed to do a recall on one of these foods? Because of the massive number of crops represented in my containers, any recall would need to include my product costing the industry probably millions of dollars. Wouldn't it be easier to take the food mafia (I don't actually know that the mafia is involved in the food industry, it just feels like it) out of this picture and just track the food a bit better? These huge food companies are an impenetrable fortress. I am having the urge to grab an armful of containers from the pantry and spend the next 3 hours on the phone to see if any of these companies will give me any information or if it is a larger conspiracy meant to protect the food behemoths of the world.