My new book, The Gospel of Sustainability: Media, Market and LOHAS is set for U.S. distribution on Nov. 7th. It’s a cultural study of sustainability, and it examines sustainability as a spiritualized discourse and lifestyle, one achieved through the media and marketplace that falls under the very porous umbrella called LOHAS, or Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability.
It offers a historical tour through the development of this landscape, particularly looking at how the two ideological markets labeled as “alternative” and “mainstream” have converged in recent years.
Here’s an excerpt from Chapter One:
It wasn’t so long ago when you wouldn’t have even imagined Ford Motor Co., or Coca Cola or Wal-Mart execs sitting in the same room with organic food farmers, herbal tea manufacturers, and yogis and yoginis. They would have been instead contentedly ignoring one another across the ideological chasm of the American marketplace known as the “alternative” vs. “mainstream” market.
The natural and organic products marketplace–on the alternative side– experienced seismic changes during the 90s. Back then, those of us on the “alternative” side of things were casting furtive glances across the border. As journalists for the natural and organic products industry press throughout the 1990s, we watched with a sort of mesmerized horror as the “mainstream” supermarkets started tossing into their mix the odd organic carrot (they were almost always wilted) or the sad, lonely little box of unsweetened Cheerios-pretender cereal. They’d never get it right, we sniffed. We had our values, after all. Would “they” ever understand the complexity of what “we” stood for? Meanwhile “they” were chuckling over their morning Folgers with nondairy creamer at our itsy five-thousand-square-foot grocery stores, which we considered nigh to nirvana. They stopped stirring and sipping, however, when they realized that they hadn’t seen Whole Foods Market marching up on their flanks, on fire with organic and fair trade caffeine and full of the vim of the socially responsible.
That got their attention.
The fact was that sales of natural and organic foods and products, dietary supplements, mind/body/spirit goods, and New Age books were skyrocketing. Wall Street had caught the scent of success and was happily pumping millions of investment dollars into these tiny “alternative” industries. We now had the momentum of a tsunami. The mainstream market had no choice but to respond. Flooded by investment capital, the natural, alternative, and eco-markets expanded, sold, and merged faster than we journalists could publish the news. But it was a topsy-turvy world: the new consumers in the “healthy living” space still wanted some conventional product choices. Natural foods supermarkets started to bend to their wishes. I can still recall the day when a staff member at Natural Foods Merchandiser came in shaking his head telling us he had just seen Heinz Ketchup in the local Whole Foods store. Meanwhile, the mainstream stores were carrying on their own subterfuge by providing unheard of monstrous orders to natural foods manufacturers (and offering along the savings of these economies of scale to consumers) in ways that made the mom-and-pop health food storeowners wring their hands in despair.
–From The Gospel of Sustainability: Media, Market and LOHAS; by Monica Emerich. University of Illinois Press, 2011. 