Green grows connections.

Perhaps it has something to do with the onset of a May that is bursting with especially green leaves and grasses. Whatever the reasons, politicians, journalists, marketers, and shoppers are suddenly paying attention to the connections of green to health, wealth, safety, and just about everything. Green has gone from being the color of money to becoming the color of the health of families, communities, nations, and our globe. Some of the green talk sounds and smells like hype, but no can afford not to care about it. More shoppers are ready to support a war for planetary health than a war in Iraq.

No matter where shoppers and businesses turn, they are seeing and hearing reminders about the importance and value of thinking and shopping green. Businesses are being advised to think green for the sake of their bottom line and their reputation. Shoppers are thinking green as a way of doing something about the creeping degradation that could change the world around us like a plague. Global warming is the primary fear, but not the only one.

Green thinking is connecting with food worries, especially when it comes to big brands. Small producers seem to be outside of the big-brand danger zone, while food scares have become the kind of everyday occurrences that get reflected in high school term papers. "She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef" was voted one of this years best analogies by high school students.

One of our shoppers forwarded the following marketing message from her local food store:

* "Dole is raising prices to cover food safety efforts. E-coli and other food-borne problems are a concern for all of us. There is not a day that goes by with reports of food problems. Responding to what it calls substantial costs related to enhanced food safety programs, Dole is adding 22 cents per carton to strawberries and all vegetables, including bagged salads, lettuce, broccoli, and green onions. While this is not a huge amount, if you consider the millions of cases shipped yearly by Dole, this should either help increase their bottom line or might cover the costs of protection."

Most of the recent scares have been associated with foods and ingredients that are associated with major brands and have traveled across the country or across the world. In an article in the April '07 Reader's Digest, Al Gore advises readers to "Shop at farmers' markets and food co-ops to fight global warming with your knife and fork." And farmers markets are charging three and four times as much for locally grown products as they are for organics that have traveled a long way.

Concern about environmental degradation isn't limited to global warming. Some shoppers are concerned about the depletion of resources, others about the safety of our water, air, and soil. Reminders of our Katrina-proven inability to fight natural disasters provide yet another reason to be concerned.

Here is what some of our adult shoppers had to say:

* "Food is getting scary. Big companies should do more testing to assure the quality of their products. Small companies and local food are sounding safer."

* "Peanut butter! Olives! Spinach! Burgers! Pet food! What in the world is safe to eat this year?"

* "Where in the world are the agencies that oversee quality in products today? Has it all been outsourced to India? What, exactly, do the employees of these companies who produce these products do all day? Obviously they are not hard at work producing a quality product!"

* "We need many more inspections and therefore inspectors of both human and pet foods. Less money to Iraq would provide more than enough."

* "The U.S. used to have the cleanest food in the world. As a result of ill-conceived Free Trade agreements, people and pets are now at risk, thanks to countries whose standards are lower than ours and multi-national companies who are only interested in the bottom line."

* "From rats in fast food restaurants to killers in pet food and spinach, eating is no longer safe. I'm sure that some of this has to do the war in Iraq--our government doesn't have the money to pay for inspections and we're turning into a 3rd world food country. I may be safer eating in Mexico than eating here now."

* "The U.S. used to have the cleanest food in the world. Now, as a result of ill-conceived Free Trade agreements, people and pets are at risk because of countries whose standards are lower than our, and dis-loyal multi-national companies who're only interested in saving a penny or two toward the bottom line."

* "It's really not right. Animal food should be just as safe as what is served to people. Even expensive brands like Iams were part of the recall."

* "There are just too many products. The sheer number of them make quality and safety control hard and maybe impossible."

* "The government isn't doing anything, and big companies aren't policing themselves. Instead of putting some of their profits into food safety, they are putting more money into advertising, claiming the superiority of big brands which is no longer true! They just aren't."

Not surprisingly, bloggers are having a field day with food safety.

* "Our food safety structure is collapsing and endangering public health."

* "The General Accounting Office has designed food safety as a high risk area warranting immediate attention from Congress and the Executive Branch."

* "The FDA conducts only half as many food safety inspections as it did three years ago. Between 2003 and 2006, FDA food safety inspections dropped 47 percent, according to a database analysis of federal records by The Associated Press. That's not all that's dropping at the FDA in terms of food safety. The analysis also shows: * There are 12 percent fewer FDA employees in field offices who concentrate on food issues. * Safety tests for U.S.-produced food have dropped nearly 75 percent, from 9,748 in 2003 to 2,455 last year, according to the agency's own statistics."

The local bandwagon will be getting additional attention from three books, one by best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver, coming out this spring. "Locavores" is emerging as a name for people trying to eat locally. An article in the N.Y. Times food section of April 25th reports that "the number of small farms that cater to their neighbors has increased 20 percent, to 1.9 million, in the last six years." Fostering small farms is becoming more American than apple pie and white bread. Observation and invitations suggest that the number of restaurants featuring locally grown foods has grown even more.