Consumable Commodity Geography Project-- Interesting Global Product?

August 25, 2015 9:41 AM

So, I'm taking a course about the geography of economic activities. For a project, we're tasked with picking a "packaged food, a cleaning product, or a personal care product" (per the instructions). We are then tasked with using the label and the manufacturers' customer's hotlines to determine "where that product is manufactured; second, what inputs/components/ingredients are used to make the product; and then, where do those inputs/components/ingredients come from." Lastly we're supposed to creatively visualize our findings, most probably in map form.

So my question is, does anyone have an inkling over what an interesting and especially eye-opening product to research would be? Perhaps something that is surprisingly complicated (yet traceable), or really highlights the oppressive nature of a globalized consumer economy? The example provided in class was a jar of pickled okrah being broken down into pickling spices, and then ascertaining the likely origin of the individual spices, etc.

I've done a similar project before in an anthropology class and I've found dealing with consumer hotlines to be a pain, as well as highly informative/unhelpful on determining origins, so ideally a product idea would avoid this headache as well.

posted by Perko to Society & Culture (5 answers total)

Sounds like a great project. My recommendation is to pick something simple, because I think determining component origins is likely to be challenging.
posted by canine epigram at 9:53 AM on August 25, 2015

It might be interesting to pick a supposedly local/organic/natural/etc product and see if all the components really hold up to that promise. So for example, you could buy some local jam at a farmer's market and see where the sugar, the jars, the pectin, etc. come from. The difficulty would be finding a vendor who understands that this is a class project, not an expose of their product in particular, or who is sympathetic to the goal of your project (e.g, they're fine with telling you they use commodity sugar and explaining that local sugar is impossible to find or not feasible to use in their product).
posted by MadamM at 10:23 AM on August 25, 2015

Best answer: You may have already seen this, but Stonyfield Yogurt has used this tool to map out all of its ingredients. In terms of getting data, you might have the most luck reaching a similar socially-responsible business. Method (the soap company), for example. The hardest part of this type of project is getting the data, believe me.
posted by three_red_balloons at 2:32 PM on August 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, in a previous life, if you had called and asked where we sourced our ingredients from, I would have politely told you to take a hike. Manufacturers (especially food) keep supply chain information strictly confidential, not only for competitive reasons, but also for food safety / food defense reasons.

Almonds come to mind. A minimal number of ingredients which can be relatively easily traced. All (well not all, but all consumer almonds in the US) almonds come from California. Jars and lids (if they come in a jar w/ a lid on) generally are labelled by the jar manufacturer so you can trace those back to the manufacturer and perhaps from there you could ask where they source their resins and or preforms from (china) although, again, you probably won't get an answer there. Labels would probably not be labelled by the manufacturer, so might be difficult if you care about labels, although they're probably printed local to the almond packager.
posted by Barry B. Palindromer at 4:16 PM on August 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks for all the great, thoughtful ideas, guys! I'm particularly grateful for Sourcemap; I was not acquainted, but as a geographer in training it's right up my visual alley.
posted by Perko at 4:08 PM on August 26, 2015