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Green marketing, and get it off your chest: complaints central

It’s hard being green, and don’t we all know it? Everything’s so complicated. Local or organic? Paper or biodegradable plastic? On and on.. For some perceptive insights into the advertising angles, catch while you can the Green Marketing podcast on one of CBC‘s very best radio shows: The Art of Persuasion. From Rachel Carson, to BP’s rebranding errors – well in advance of the Deepwater Horizon fiasco, to green pizza, to Marks & Spencer’s Plan A, it’s a good, pithy story well told.

And the website now offers visual content, like this fabulous ad:

Well. Once you’ve mastered your green strategy you still have to cope with the rest of life’s irritations. It seems sometimes that things go well beyond annoying. For those still looking for a new year’s resolution, might I suggest direct consumer action? It has the double benefit of being a stress reliever for the complainant, and a public education service for the industry in question.

The Consumers Association of Canada provides a most helpful list of agencies to complain to, arranged by industry, as well as tips on complaining effectively.

Those of you not happy to be test dummies for Canadian airport security geeks wanting to play with their new body scanners can vent your spleen at the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority.

The Advertising Complaints Authority is the place to go to complain about advertising by email, mail or fax.

We can’t believe…

How did it happen? A year flits by and all of a sudden it’s tearful farewells and no more pig farms, Unisg cheers, bus rides, charter airlines, wine tastings… how will we cope in the months to come?

The final week shaped up kind of like last week’s, commencing with an exam and then moving swiftly through food marketing, journalism and a great big party. We had lunch on a riverboat on the Po


(photo from Andy)

with Carlo Petrini and our university staff and dignitaries.

After the food we had a little wisdom from the brow of Petrini,

and then some goofy awards and another gem of a slideshow (so there WAS a reason for taking those – must be literally millions of frames – cameras everywhere we turned all year) by our animators Don and Marta.

Next stop was Polesine Parmense, where we revisited the scene of last winter’s visit when we learned about culatello di zibello.


(Photo from Andy)

We were attending the annual Spigaroli Awards (to local food heroes of various kinds) at the beautifully refurbished Antica Corte Pallavicina, which was about half finished on our last visit. It’s now ready to roll as a swanky agriturismo for visitors who want a short and scenic walk to their dinner at Al Cavallino Bianco.

But on Wednesday tables had been set up around the perimeter of the courtyard and the Spigaroli brothers, Massimo and Luciano, were busy seeing to the comfort of their hundreds of guests. The hay bale corral in the middle holds a flock of black piglets who made up part of the award, one for each recipient: the Spigarolis would raise, slaughter and cure them, so the prize – in good Slow Food form – would be years in the making. We had some wonderful culatello, of course, including two kinds made from white and black pigs, each culatello aged 36 months.

And a wonderful tortelli in brodo with some exquisite cheese filled pastas in a light and warming broth – bliss to be in the cooling air eating such things. Fortified, the guests then enjoyed the awards ceremony, which included a special prize for Carlo Petrini.

And then it was the last couple of classes – marketing and wine tasting from Matteo Baldi, journalism from Clodagh McKenna, the last lunch together,

the last bus home,

the last visit to Tabarro,


rounds of signings (our brand new copies of Slow Food Nation, serving as school autograph albums)

and some emotional farewells…

Hazelnuts and poetry reviews

At the Feast of Fields the other weekend, we noticed a bowl of hazelnuts at the Dunsmuir Lodge stand. We paused, we tasted, we tasted again. They were amazing! We asked about them and were told they had been shelled the day before, then blanched in water, dusted with icing sugar and deep fried. Spectacular. Another (get thee behind me Satan) reason I’m so glad I don’t own a deep fryer…

I have been reading a book mentioned earlier on this blog, 101 Ways to Sell Poems and was struck by the sections (they are several) to do with reviewing. In my experience writers here spend almost as much time uselessly deploring the state of reviewing as dissing our teeny tiny publishers for not being more powerful marketing machines. This book answers both questions with the suggestion we just get off our duffs and wade in there to help.

Reviewing, as Chris Hamilton-Emery points out, needn’t be limited to the already limited space in newspapers. We can be both reviewers and reviewees, and both positions are helpful to our own literary presence. We have the power of the net behind us. Blogs, of course, are good places to air our allegiances to books that impress us (and hey — what am I doing now?); so are online bookseller review spaces (e.g. Amazon.ca); online journals and e-zines, listservs, our own web pages are also good places to do this. And there’s nothing to stop us from starting another online reviewing journal anytime we want. Implicit in his discussion is the suggestion not to waste time and newsprint/webspace trashing other writers’ works: you do more good by promoting your interests through positive action.

Some of the many remarks I found noteworthy came from the publisher side of Hamilton-Emery’s brain, where he addresses that question we get from our publishers: to whom should we send review copies? Hamilton-Emery tells you to stop and think carefully about that one, because it serves nobody’s interests to simply send copies to every newspaper and journal around. Profit margins on poetry are low enough, he observes; the last favour you want to do yourself and your publisher is to “flush their profits down the drain [by sending] too many unsolicited review copies to the benighted leagues of literary editors.” He urges poets to “Think of all the junk mail you have ever received and how delighted you were in opening it all up and reading it.”

He assures us that there is nothing untoward in cultivating reviewers to talk about our books. Other people are already doing this. All you are doing is helping out the journal by focusing their ability to match the right reviewer to the right book, instead of leaving them to wade through the accumulations and randomly assign, let’s say, absolutely the wrong book to the wrong reviewer.

Plum Wonderful

Ooh, even better than Lightning Cake – but not as good a name – is Dutch Plum Cake which I found in my mother’s 1955 edition of Good Housekeeping, a book in even worse physical condition than the Boston cookbook. This one has silver duct tape on the spine and crumbling pages. Luckily someone else has copied out the recipe for me. I didn’t make the vanilla sauce; it was lovely warm and on its own, or with ice cream. And a good way for me to use up a little of my personal warehouse of home made jams and jellies!

I’ve been enjoying a blast of end-of-summer reading. A wonderfully easy and useful book on my table just now is 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell, by Chris Hamilton-Emery, a poet himself as well as the publishing director of an excellent UK press, Salt Publishing. In a neat demonstration of zeitgeist, it’s appeared at the same time as Wendy Morton’s memoir about the poet as self-promoter, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Hamilton-Emery’s book gives some incredibly useful background on the poetry publishing industry (if that is the word for this labour of love) and a host of well-organized and practical suggestions for poets and publishers alike to get this slowest of all selling genres out into the world.