“Today’s food system is unfair, ineffective and operates beyond ecological limits,” Mark Lee says, via email.

“Unfair in that some 925 million are malnourished…

“Ineffective in that there are enough calories out there to feed everyone, but we fail to do so (and if we fail to do so for 7 billion, how will we cope with 9-10 by mid-century?)…

“Beyond ecological limits in too many ways too count – freshwater use, soil degradation, climate impacts, you name it.”

Mark is not an environmental activist. He’s the executive director of SustainAbility, a think tank and strategy consultancy that has worked with such food industry clients as Chiquita, Coca-Cola Kellogg’s, Mars and McDonald’s, Nestle, Starbucks and Unilever. He approached me because Sustainability recently released a report called Appetite for Change, about the food industry and how to fix it.

I’ve been writing a lot about food lately because it interests me, because food and agriculture matter a great deal if you care about climate or global poverty or health, and because there’s so much debate about what the path forward should be. Organics? Farmers markets? Genetically engineered crops? Vegetarianism? Local?

This 41-page report, based on interviews with about two dozen business people, environmental experts and government officials, finds an emerging consensus, inside and outside the industry, that “the food system needs to be dramatically transformed.” The report says:

We need a food system that produces enough, for everyone, within ecological limits, while treating all players fairly.

With a bit more specificity, SustainAbility defines a sustainable food system as “one that is reliable, resilient and transparent, which produces food within ecological limits, empowers food producers, and ensures accessible, nutritious food for all.”

But, while big companies and small are experimenting, sometimes creatively, with new approaches,  there’s no agreement on how to get from here to there.

I talked the other day with Mark and Jennifer Biringer, a SustainAbility director and an author of the report, and they pointed me to a few areas where business and environmental imperatives are coming into alignment.

To insure a secure supply chain, big companies are increasingly builder closer ties with small farms in poor countries, working with them to improve their environmental performance, their efficiency and their business viability.

Starbucks has worked for more than a decade with Conservation International to develop ethical sourcing guidelines that reward coffee growers who conserve water and energy and protect biodiversity. Mars is working with academic partners to sequence the cacao genome, hoping to improve yields and lift the standard of living for coffee farmers. (See my 2010 blogpost, The man who would save chocolate.) Costco has had a pilot program in which it sources fresh produce from smallholder farmers, such as green beans from Guatemala [PDF, download] for its U.S. stores.

And then, of course, there’s Walmart, which among other things, is seeking to buy more local produce for its stores. “I do see Walmart as a disruptor,” Jennifer said. The giant retailer is bringing pressure on food manufacturers to get a better handle on the environmental footprint and to drive transparency down their supply chain.

Companies that aren’t in the food industry stand to profit from some of these trends, the report notes. More than six million people in India, China and Indonesia have become subsribers to Nokia’s Life Tools [PDF, download], a subscription service designed for mobile phones in emerging markets that provides agricultural information (weather, market prices) as well as education and entertainment. IBM, which sponsored the SustainAbility report, along with Nestle and Sodexo, has a technology platform called Smarter Food that can trace food from “farm to fork” which both promotes food safety and environmental accountability.

One obvious problem with the food system, as the report notes, is that food policy and politics “are driven by who is in power” and  aren’t designed to promote sustainability or healthy eating. Experts interviewed by Sustainability

listed new and better policy as prerequisite to progress before closing. Distressingly, few are optimistic that improvements will come without major disruptions to the food system occurring first, sharing a perception that we likely will stretch the current system to (or beyond) its limit before acting.

For a variety of reason, the price of food at the supermarket doesn’t reflect its true cost. [See my 2010 blogpost, The high cost of cheap food] Farm price supports, cheap energy and cheap water all drive down the prices of commodity crops (corn, soy) and meat. Meanwhile, few subsidies go to vegetables and fruits. Farm subsidies and trade barriers also make it hard for farmers in poor countries to compete with those in the U.S. and EU. “Government does a huge amount to pick winners and losers,” Jennifer said.

In today’s New York Times, food writer Mark Bittman has a provocative article arguing that the U.S. should tax “bad” foods (like sugary sodas and fatty, salty fries) and use the money to subsidize fruits and vegetables and provide nutrition education. He quotes a study that found that

a penny tax per ounce on sugar-sweetened beverages in New York State would save $3 billion in health care costs over the course of a decade, prevent something like 37,000 cases of diabetes and bring in $1 billion annually.

I’m not inclined to favor more government intervention in markets–just the opposite–but this idea is worth considering, I think, because it’s a way of adjusting the price of food to reflect its true costs. [See my 2010 blogpost, The high cost of cheap food] Big companies, of course, hate the idea of a “junk food” tax. While Coca Cola and PepsiCo offer healthy options, they also benefit from corn subsidies and want to maximize sales of sugary soft drinks. The trouble is, particularly as medical expenses become socialized through Medicaid and Medicare, all of us are paying the costs of the obesity epidemic.

The food system is so broken that maybe it’s time to think about radical fixes.

Little things matter.

Like squeeze packs.

I’ve surely tossed away hundreds, maybe thousands, of the little silvery plastic packs of ketchup, Gu and Power Bar gels, but I’d never thought much about the environmental impact of squeeze packs.

Then I was introduced to Justin Gold, the founder and CEO of Justin’s Nut Butter, a small but fast-growing company that sells gourmet, organic peanut, almond and hazelnut butters in 1.15 ounce on-the-go squeeze packs that retail for $0.69 to $0.99. These packs were great for business at the Boulder, Colorado-based company, which now gets about 80% of its revenues from single servings. But squeeze packs are a blight, albeit a small one, on the environment because they are made out of several layers of different materials that are welded together and can’t be recycled or composted.

Most small-company CEOs  would have shrugged their shoulders at this problem and moved on. Not Justin.

A 20o0 graduate of Dickinson College who majored in environmental studies, Justin, 33, is an outdoor enthusiast who enjoys backpacking, back country skiing and mountain biking. “My mom, God bless her, fed me lots of natural products as a kid,” he told me, when we talked over Skype. “I believe that what you put in your body is very important, and where it comes from is important.”

So he had to do something about the packaging.

“It comes from petroleum. It doesn’t compost,” he says. “It’s kind of silly to have a wonderful, organic product inside this non-sustainable crappy packaging.”

With the help of the aptly-named Catherine Greener, a top-notch  sustainability consultant (who introduced me to Justin),  and Alex Bogusky, a Boulder neighbor and investor in Justin’s (who formerly led Crispin + Bogusky, the cutting-edge Miami ad agency), Justin looked for help tacking the packaging problem.

Last fall, he organized the word’s first ever “sustainable squeeze pack summit” to figure out how to address the problem. He invited everyone in the squeeze pack industry and, surprisingly, a bunch of them showed up, including packaging firms, the people who make GU, big companies like General Mills and Cargill, and retailers including Walmart. (One conspicuous no-show was industry giant Heinz, which sells about 11 billion squeeze packs of ketchup a year, about which more in a moment.)

I’ll spare you the details about the complexity of devising a sustainable squeeze pack; suffice it to say that Justin and his colleagues  have got manufacturers, film converters, and resin suppliers working on the problem. (If you want to know more, he’s chronicling his progress in mind-numbing detail here.) Justin’s has also created a website called The Least You Can Do to muster consumer support for the cause–check it out here. Meanwhile, the company has pledged to source one third of its packaging from renewable energy sources by Earth Day 2011. The goal is to devise a pack that’s sourced from renewable sources (probably plants) and 100% compostable.

Now–let’s be clear–squeeze packs are not coal plants. They’re not a threat to the planet. But the entrepreneurial spirit–and willingness to take responsibility–that Justin is showing is what we’ll need to deal with the big problems of energy, climate and waste. Maybe that comes naturally to someone like Justin, who started his company in 2002 after playing around in his apartment in Boulder with flavored peanut butter and finding that his roommates loved it. He took a few jars to local natural food outlets, they sold well and the rest, as they say, is history. Justin’s Nut Butter now has about two dozen employees and sales of between $5 and $10 million, he told me.

How does he hope to compete against the likes of giants Skippy and Jif? “We’re positioning ourselves as the first premium peanut butter ever,” he said. “We’re trying to create a whole new category.”

The squeeze packs help introduce consumers to Justin’s products at an entry-level price. Sixteen-ounce jars of the nut butters cost up to $10, but they’re selling nicely at retailers including Whole Foods, Starbucks and REI, where Justin used to work as a sales clerk . “How many products do you know that can sell in a grocery store, a coffee shop and the premiere camping store?” he asks. People seem to like the product–at the end of this blogpost, I’ve uploaded an adorable love song to Justin (who’s happily married) from one of his fans.

As for Heinz, the company didn’t show up at Justin’s summit but it’s working on sustainable packaging of its own–a good thing since the company sells 11 billion (!!!) single serve packs a year. In an email, Michael Mullen, Vice President of Corporate & Government Affairs at Heinz, tells me:

Heinz is committed to being a leader in sustainable packaging that protects the planet and its natural resources for future generations. Our company is taking a holistic approach, evaluating every brand and product for opportunities to enhance sustainability through innovation.

For example, Heinz has just launched a more sustainable alternative to the traditional foodservice packets — squeeze packs of Simply Heinz foodservice condiments, including ketchup. The Simply Heinz foodservice packets are made of 30% renewable material.  The renewable content in the film structure comes from the structural component of plants.  Trees and cotton pulps are also used in the converting process.  These raw materials are naturally grown and more readily available in the supply chain compared to petroleum based films.

Overall, Heinz is accelerating packaging innovations that will substantially reduce waste and our carbon footprint, as we are doing with Heinz Ketchup through the U.S. launch of the PlantBottle™ in partnership with the Coca-Cola Company.  Developed by Coca-Cola, the PlantBottle is more sustainable because up to 30% of its packaging material comes from plants while traditional PET bottles are made from non-renewable fossil fuels.  Using Coca-Cola’s proprietary technology, Heinz Ketchup is going to convert globally to the PlantBottle globally over time, starting with a U.S. rollout of more than 120 million retail and foodservice bottles this spring, in our best-selling 20-ounce variety.

Heinz deserves credit for supporting the PlantBottle, a large-scale effort. The Simply Heinz foodservice packs are, for now, an alternative to the conventional packs, so they are a step in the right direction but far from a solution.

Here’s the video, as promised. How many brands inspire fans to write songs?

Peanutbutter Song Remix from Justin’s Nut Butter on Vimeo.

Seth Goldman, the president and Tea-e-0 of Honest Tea, made it official today:. The Coca-Cola Co. will exercise its option to buy all of Honest Tea, the Bethesda, Md., maker of organic, healthy beverages.

Coke bought 40% of the firm for a reported $43 million in 2008, a controversial move at the time for the upstart company that positioned itself as a challenger to the conventional way of doing business in the beverage industry.

Seth broke the news in a letter to his shareholders last night, in a blog post this morning and in an interview today with me at the State of Green Business Forum 2011 in Washington, arguing that his mission to “democratize organics” will be supported by Coke..

In an unusual twist to the deal–one that amounts to a vote of confidence in Seth’s leadership–Coca-Cola will allow him to repurchase most of his own equity stake in the company. His name will remain on the bottle, along with that of his co-founder, Yale prof Barry Nalebuff, and the company will continue to operate out of its offices in downtown Bethesda, a short bike ride away from Seth’s home. [Disclosure: I've known Seth for years and we attend synagogue together.]

“This is absolutely still my baby,” he said.

Honest Tea didn’t say how much Coke will pay for the remaining 60%, which was tied to the company’s sales. Those Sales have just about tripled in the last three years–they’re still shy of $100 million–in part because Honest Tea has been able to ride on Coca-Cola’s powerful national distribution network. The brand can now be found not just in natural food outlets like Whole Foods but in supermarkets and drugstores like CVS and Rite Aid. Honest Tea is now sold in about 75,000 outlets, up from 15,000 before the Coke deal, and the company grown from 38 to 125 employees. Green jobs!

Of course, we’ve seen this story before, as one “green” or natural foods company after another is swallowed up by global giants. Sometimes it ends well–Gary Hirshberg, an Honest Tea board member, has been thrilled since his Stonyfield Farm became part of the much-bigger Group Danone. But the acquisitions of White Wave (Silk Soymilk) by Dean Foods or Ben & Jerry’s by Unilever did not bring happiness to the founders. Seth quoted one entrepreneur who told him: “For the first few weeks, they want to know your opinion, for the next few weeks they want to know your phone number, and after that, they don’t want to know you.”

So far, Seth told me, his experience with Coca-Cola has been excellent, if not always friction-free. Coke supported Honest Tea as it expanded its Fair Trade offerings across its full line of teas and juice drinks. And, of course, as the company’s sales grow, so do its purchases of tea from organic farms, most in the global south.

Packaging is “by far our single biggest footprint,” Seth said, and his work with Coke helped Honest Tea move to lightweight plastic as opposed to glass bottles. The company is developing a better bottle, using plant-based materials, which it will bring out later this year.

Tension did arise when Honest Tea brought out an Honest Kids product which proclaimed, with an exclamation point, that it contained  “No high-fructose corn syrup!” Coke’s Minute Maid division, which distributes Honest Kids, vetted the language on the packaging and suggested changing it to “sweetened with organic cane sugar.”

“Is that a regulatory request or is that just a preference?” he asked.

“It’s a preference,” he was told. “But it’s a preference from a high level.”

Honest Tea’s brand promise is to be as natural as possible, he explained. The company likes to say: “Nature got it right. We put it in a bottle.”

“High fructose corn syrup is quite a few steps from nature,” he said. The original wording remained.

The other worry about the Coke sale is the potential for consumer backlash. Some people complained back in 2008 that Honest Tea was selling out–Inc. ran a story headlined Did Seth go to the dark side?.

Seth takes the concerns seriously. “We’re selling a lot more tea than we were, but I don’t want to lose a single consumer,” he says.

He tried to respond to phone calls and emails about the transaction.To the critics, he poses questions like: “What’s your strategy for changing corporate America? What’s your plan to get organic and sustainable products to consumers who don’t have access to them?”

“It’s easy to fall into the ‘big is bad, small is good’ trap,” he says.

I agree: To magnify their impact, the better companies have to go beyond small and local to get big and global.

Seth is confident that this story will have a happy ending–not just for Honest Tea and its shareholders, but for its customers and for the planet.

“If we’re serious about making change in the American diet, and about making change in the way agriculture happens in the developing world, then we have to take this to scale,” he said.

“The Power of One” is a series of stories about people who have helped their companies become more sustainable. (See earlier stories on UL Environment, eBay, and Union Pacific.) They can’t do it alone, of course. But by coming up with a good idea, enlisting the help of others and making persuasive arguments, one person can change a company and, sometimes, more. Today’s story — the last in the series, at least for now — is about a manager at Coca-Cola who knows what it feels  like to have the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Meet Bryan Jacob. Back in 1990, when he made the cover of Weightlifting USA, he was a 21-year-old  student at Georgia Tech, hoping to represent the United States in Olympic Games. He did so, twice–in Barcelona in 1992, when he finished 18th in the Featherweight division and in Atlanta in 1996, when he finished 8th in the  Bantamweight  competition. He was the top U.S. performer in his weight class both times. He’s still fit–with a firm handshake.

It’s a good thing that Bryan is accustomed to heavy lifting  because his current job, as energy and climate protection manager for Coca-Cola, is a big one: He leads Coke’s global effort to reduce the greenhouse gases that are emitted from the 10 million–yes, 10 million!–vending machines and coolers that are part of Coke’s global bottling system. The company and its bottling partners have begun to replace coolers that use the  most common refrigerants, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are also called   fluorinated gases (F-gases), with so-called natural refrigerants such as CO2, propane or isobutane.

Last year, the company and its bottling partners said they expected

that 100 percent of their new vending machines and coolers will be HFC-free by 2015. We’re hopeful our aggregate demand will encourage supply as a means of accelerating the transition to HFC-free refrigeration equipment. This announcement is a direct result of work with Greenpeace that began in 2000.

Yes, that’s right–Coke’s key partner on its journey to natural refrigeration is Greenpeace, which is better known for civil disobedience than corporate partnerships. “The Greenpeace relationship went from very confrontational to one of the most collaborative we have,” Bryan says.

Bryan, in fact, says he’s learned that NGO partners can deliver a lot of value when you are trying to ,spark change in a sprawling company like Coca-Cola. He’s worked with Greenpeace, WWF, the World Resources Institute and even Dr. Rajendra K. Pauchari, the sometimes-controversial chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Bryan once brought “Pachy,” as he’s called, to speak with a convention of Coke bottlers in Boca Raton.

Like politics, the environmental movement can create strange bedfellows.

I emailed Amy Larkin, who leads business partnerships for Greenpeace, to ask about her work with Bryan and Coca-Cola. She replied:

Bryan Jacob is the kind of colleague everyone wishes they had.  He is determined, indefatigable and inventive.  Bryan is also open to new ideas — even big crazy ideas that will require a huge amount of work to make real.  Maybe those are his favorite ideas…….not sure.

Greenpeace has worked with Bryan for many years on HFC-free refrigeration and some of our meetings were rather difficult.  Bryan’s entire demeanor and way of working always encourage constructive engagement and he is a central ingredient in our successful outcome with Coca-Cola.

As it happens, Bryan is not one of those environmentalists who grew up green. He figured that he’d one day build dams, bridges, highways and airports, as he worked towards a degree in civil engineering. (“Most of the time, I’m civil,” he jokes, “but when I get agitated I can get hostile.”) Instead, he took a job during college with an environmental consulting firm, got excited about the field and then found his way to Coca-Cola.

This was 1993, three years before the Olympics were coming to Atlanta. Bryan got the job, in part, because Coke’s sports marketing department had set aside budget to hire Olympic athletes. But he was assigned to work on refrigeration because the company was then undergoing an earlier transformation, away from ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to hyrdrofluorocarbons (HFCs) which would not damage the ozone layer. This was a result of the global treaty known as the Montreal Protocol, which has succeeded in allowing the ozone layer to repair itself.

The trouble is, HFCs are potent greenhouse gases, thousands of times as potent as carbon dioxide. (HFC-134a, for example, a common refrigerant, has a global warming potential that is 1,430 times that of CO2.)  While they currently have a relatively small aggregate impact on global warming, some people project that HFC emissions will represent 9-19% of projected greenhouse gas emissions in 2050.

“Almost as soon as we began converting to HFCs,” Bryan recalls, “the environmental community started telling us that there was another alternative. Greenpeace in particular.”

An HFC-free cooler

The challenge, since then, has been developing cost-effective alternatives to HFCs and persuading the bottlers across the vast Coca-Cola system to adopt. Like so many environmental issues where science and economics are intertwined, this is complicated. The company has had to develop new technology and cooperate with its competitors, at a time when there’s no regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

In Coke: The Green Thing, a long story about the company’s sustainability efforts than ran on Fortune.com in 2008, I wrote this about the refrigeration work:

Coke has invested $40 million in research and testing, published a 900-page technical study and organized a coalition of companies that sell cold drinks and ice cream, including Unilever, McDonald’s and (gasp!) PepsiCo., to attack the problem. Last year, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Coke declared victory: E. Neville Isdell, the company’s chairman and CEO, and Gerd Leipold, who leads Greenpeace, unveiled a new, HFC-free, super-efficient vending machine. About 8,000 of the climate-friendly machines have been deployed, most to high-profile venues like Davos and the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

..But HFCs are still being used as a coolant in nearly all coolers and vending machines because the alternative developed by Coke and others–a coolant that uses carbon dioxide–is more expensive. It requires retooling the industry, with no direct payback.

Since then, Bryan tells me, Coca-Cola has rolled out another 220,000 units of HFC-free equipment. That’s progress, but it’s a long way from 10 million. By working with a coalition called Refrigerants, Naturally! to stimulate more demand for the HFC-free equipment, Coca-Cola hopes to bring prices down.

As if that weren’t enough, Bryan is also focused on driving energy efficiency in the system’s manufacturing plants around the world and in exploring more energy-efficient, low-carbon distribution options for Coke and its bottlers’ fleets.

Bryan Jacob

I asked Bryan what he’d learned from more than a decade of working on climate and energy issues inside the world’s largest beverage company. Here’s what he told me:

First, collaboration with NGOs is valuable. “Nothing is accomplished by an individual,” he says.” “It’s always a team effort.” He took WWF officials on a road show to visit Coke’s seven largest bottlers around the world, and helped organize “greenhouse gas mitigation strategy workshops” for the bottlers. He brought in Jonathan Pershing, then of the World Resources Institute, now a top climate negotiator for the government, to explain how climate change might affect Coke, and how Coke could contribute to solving the problem. Interestingly, even though Coke’s CEO, Muhtar Kent, and his predecessor, Neville Isdell, have been visible environmental advocates, they needed outside experts to help them make the case.

Second, set ambitious targets and don’t be afraid to fail. The company has said it will grow its business, but not its greenhouse gas emissions, throughout the system and it has promised to cut absolute emissions in the developed world (Annex I countries, in UN-speak) by 5% from a 2004 baseline by 2015.  “Transparency and disclosure and committing yourself to targets are the hallmarks of any leading company,” Bryan says. Setting hard-to-achieve targets spurs innovation.

And if the company fails to meet its goals? Bryan says he hopes that “we will be rewarded for what we do achieve, rather than criticized for what we don’t.”

His experience as an Olympic athlete taught him to reach for a big goal, and then feel good if you’ve worked hard to achieve it. “I didn’t win a medal,” he says. “I finished ninth. Does that mean I’m a loser. No. I’m a winner.”

Hard to argue with that, whether we’re taking sports or weightier matters.

Have you noticed? A food revolution has begun—with the goal of making our food and agriculture systems better for us, better for the environment, maybe even better for workers and democracy.

So, at least, says Marion Nestle, the author, activist, NYU professor and corporate critic, who gave a rousing closing speech at Cooking for Solutions, a mind-stretching, belly-expanding conference and foodfest organized by the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The revolution will be inspired, in part, from the top—symbolized by the White House organic garden, First Lady Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign and some encouraging legislation, including a requirement in the health-care law that fast food restaurants put calorie labeling on menus.

“I can’t remember every having a First Family that was interested in the issues that I’m interested in,” said Nestle, a veteran of the food wars and author of six books, including a new volume about pet food.

More important, the energy for a food revolution is being generated by diverse, decentralized grass roots (pun intended). Signs include the robust growth of organic food, albeit from a small base; the slow food movement; the rapidly increasing number of farmers markets across America; strong interest in local agriculture; Jamie Oliver’s broadcast TV prime time anti-obesity crusade; other celebrity chefs who tout “green” practices; the battle to reform school lunch programs; the campaign against bottled water; the animal welfare movement; and the obsession with food issues in so much of the media, ranging from Michael Pollan’s bestsellers to indie movies like Food Inc. to the  legions of food bloggers, many of whom came to Monterey.

When you look at it that way, there’s a lot going on.

Says Nestle: “The food revolution is about is democracy by the people, of the people for the people. It’s very bottom up.”

I think she’s onto something. The obesity crisis, in particular, implicates our industrial food system and its overproduction of cheap calories as a cause of big, expensive and worrisome social problem, with terrible human costs. No longer is food a concern only to the white wine and argula crowd; it’s everybody’s problem.

Since this blog is focused on business, I asked Nestle after her talk how she would advise a big food company like Kraft, PepsiCo or Coca Cola to get on the right side of the debate.

“They have to be willing to take less profits,” she replied, without a pause. “That’s the answer.”

Of course, she’s smart enough to know it isn’t. But her view is that shareholder capitalism, with its demand for steady growth in revenues and profits, is one cause of the obesity crisis. She traces the problem back to the 1980s when farm subsidies and productivity gains led to huge harvests of corn and soy, more than Americans wanted or needed. At the same time, short-termism reigned on Wall Street.

“There’s still a great surplus of food in this country, and food companies have to sell it,” she said. “Obesity is the Achilles heel of the food industry. It’s something they have to deal with every day. If you want to do something about obesity, you have to either eat less or move more. And eating less is very bad for business.”

Do companies really want to make us fat? Certainly not deliberately, but it is in their interest to make portion sizes bigger and bigger. It’s in their interests to sell food not just in grocery stores and restaurants but in gas stations, liquor stores and drug stores, too.

“When did it become OK to eat in bookstores?” Nestle asked.

Like cheap credit drove the mortgage crisis, cheap food drove the obesity crisis.

While we’ve all seen outrageous examples of how food is marketed, Nestle can still come up with examples that are shocking. Kellogg’s, she says, spent $66 million one year selling Frosted Flakes. PepsiCo and Coke distribute  soda in small villages miles from the nearest city (and dentist) in Latin America, rotting kids’ teeth. South of the border, Cocoa Puffs become “Choco Zucaritas.” Peanut butter, mayonnaise and cookies are promoted as healthful because they contain Omega-3 fish oils.

My favorite example is Enfagrow PREMIUM Chocolate, a chocolate flavored infant formula for toddlers 12-36 months. Mead Johnson, the manufacturer, says on its website that Enfamil, introduced in 1959, “has undergone several significant formulations – each one designed to bring it nutritionally closer to breast milk.” How adding chocolate brings it closer to breast milk is unclear.

The company has the nerve to promote this as a health food:

As your child grows from an infant to a toddler, he’s probably becoming pickier about what he eats. Now more than ever, ensuring that he gets complete nutrition can be a challenge.

That’s why we created new Enfagrow PREMIUM Chocolate with Triple Health Guard™. With over 25 nutrients, Omega-3 DHA, prebiotics, and a great tasting chocolate flavor he’ll love, you can help be sure he’s getting the nutrition he still needs even after he outgrows infant formula.

No wonder Nestle is a cynic about big business.

If, indeed, there is a food revolution, it’s will have to make itself felt in Washington. Right now, U.S. food policy is designed to subsidize cheap calories from corn–with direct farm payments, by promoting ethanol, by erecting trade barriers against sugar cane. This is why burgers and soda, both derived from corn are cheap. Fruits and vegetables don’t get as much of a helping hand from Uncle Sam.

“If you go into McDonald’s with $5, you can buy five burgers or one salad,” Nestle noted.

“What you really want are fruits and vegetables to be cheaper—what the Department of Agriculture refers to as ‘specialty foods,’ ” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

I’m leaving Monterey more hopeful about the possibility of change in the food system. Lots of people — organic farmers, chefs, activists, the people here at the Aqaurium whose Seafood Watch iPhone app has been downloaded by 200,000 people — are working to make it happen. I’ll tell you about more of them in the days ahead.

So is BPA–the controversial, much-debated chemical that, right now, is almost surely lurking somewhere inside a can in your kitchen cabinet–dangerous? Or is it safe?

Scientists can’t come to agreement. Nor can regulators. Nor, unsurprisingly, can corporate America.

Fact is, it’s a daunting job for companies to figure out how to deal with BPA, as recent events at General Mills and The Coca-Cola Co. show. General Mills inched away from the chemical, by agreeing to keep it out of its Muir Glen brand of organic tomatoes. By contrast, Coca-Cola opposed a shareholder resolution asking the company to report on its plans to deal with BPA. The resolution got 22 percent of the vote at Coke’s annual meeting last week.

While the science of BPA remains clouded, there’s growing evidence that consumers aren’t willing to wait around for a decisive verdict from the lab. So smart companies at the very least should explore alternatives.

As Rich Liroff of the Investor Environmental Health Network wrote recently in a guest post here:

smart companies will change the way they communicate about BPA and as well as search for alternatives to better align themselves with consumer concerns. Some companies could gain reputational benefits and free media attention from supporting proposed legislation restricting use of BPA.

The IEHN supported the Coca-Cola resolution on BPA.

Some background for readers who haven’t followed the debate:  Bisphenol A is a chemical that’s widely used in products ranging from plastic water bottles to eyeglass lenses. As I wrote (How Wal-Mart Became The New FDA)  back in 2008:

BPA is everywhere, used to make polycarbonate, a rigid, clear plastic for bottles, bike helmets, DVDs and car headlights. It’s also an ingredient in epoxy resins, which coat the inside of food and drink cans. About 93% of Americans tested by the Centers for Disease Control had the chemical in their urine.

Since then, the debate over BPA has only intensified. Canada and Denmark have banned the chemical’s use in baby bottles, toys and other products for infants. Regulators in Japan and the EU looked at the evidence and decided that the chemical is safe. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in January that it had “some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children,” and that it would join other federal agencies in studying the chemical in both animals and humans.

In the meantime, some companies have paid a heavy price for their use of BPA. SIGG, the Swiss maker of shiny aluminum bottles, got into hot water last year when it got caught using BPA.

Until recently, General Mills assured consumers that they had nothing to fear from BPA, calling it a “critical component” of the coatings inside its cans. Here’s how the company responded in December to a customer inquiry, as reported by the La Vida Locavore blog:

But in its new 2010 corporate responsibility report [PDF], after saying that “General Mills continues to believe that BPA is safe,” the company announced a shift:

Viable alternatives have not yet been identified for all types of foods, including some of the packaging applications used by General Mills, but we are optimistic that safe and viable alternatives may be identified in time. For example, one alternative has proven safe and viable in our processing of tomatoes – and General Mills will transition to can linings that do not use BPA on our organic Muir Glen tomato products with the next tomato harvest.

After I emailed General Mills to ask why, spokeswoman Heidi Geller replied by email:

We made this decision because we know that some of our consumers would like us to pursue alternatives.  We have been working with our can suppliers and can manufacturers to develop and test alternative linings that do not use BPA for some time.

So why just organic tomatoes? Because “viable alternatives have not been identified for all types of foods,” she wrote.

Still, some companies are evidently working harder than others to eliminate BPA. Eden Foods says it has eliminated BPA from all its cans of organic beans and chili, while noting on its website that BPA-free cans cost about 14% more than those with the chemical.

Over at Coca-Cola, meanwhile, the shareholder resolution asking for a BPA study won over some impressive backers–not just IEHN, but CalPERS, the big California pension fund, and shareholder advisers RiskMetrics and Proxy Governance.  The resolution was introduced by social investment firms As You Sow, Domini Social Investments and Trillium Asset Management.

Coca-Cola said:

All available scientific evidence and testing shows that drinks in aluminum and steel cans are safe. BPA levels in canned beverages are extremely low, and it is physically impossible to consume enough canned beverages to ever approach the daily BPA limit established by leading health authorities, including those in the United States, Europe and Canada.

That may  be, but for better or worse, a small but growing number of consumers, some of them stirred up by the scare tactics of environmental groups, have decided to try to avoid BPA.

This makes life tough for corporate decision makers who would prefer to wait around for a scientific judgment. The trouble is, scientists can’t even agree on the best way to study the chemical’s effects, as this article in Nature reports, although researchers are now trying to  forge a consensus on experimental protocols.

The trouble is, once a chemical gets tagged with the adjective controversial — including by journalists like me, who don’t claim to understand or even to have read the science — it’s very hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube, or, in this case, the tomatoes back in the can. The result? Companies that don’t seek out safer alternatives could find themselves trying to catch up those that do.

That’s Muhtar Kent, the CEO of Coca-Cola, on the right. On the left is a polar bear. They got together about six weeks ago in Churchill, Manitoba, the polar bear capital of the world, where Kent traveled for a couple of reasons–to run with the Olympic torch as it made its way across the remotest parts of north Canada and to see first-hand the impact of climate change. No roads lead to Churchill, which is a port on Hudson Bay–you have to get there by plane or train. Another fun fact about Churchill–the newspaper there, the Hudson Bay Post, comes out once or a month, or less, depending on the news.

Anyway, I caught up with Muhtar Kent over the weekend in Copenhagen, where he was one of the very few Fortune 500 CEOs to show up in an effort to influence the climate negotiations unfolding here. Give him credit for that. (The only other CEO of a big U.S. company that I ran into here was Jim Rogers from Duke Energy.) Kent has spoken in favor of a global climate treaty and, more importantly, since becoming CEO of Coca-Cola last year, he has strongly supported the company’s sustainability initiatives–around climate, packaging and especially water.

My story about Muhtar Kent was posted today on Cnnmoney.com. Here’s how it begins:

Polar bears have been featured in Coca-Cola’s holiday advertising for nearly a century. Last month, Muhtar Kent, the company’s CEO, traveled to the Arctic to see the furry creatures up close.

It must have been cold up there, I remarked.

“Not cold enough,” replied Kent, who has emerged as a prominent corporate advocate for a global treaty to curb climate change.

“There were a lot of hungry polar bears waiting for the ice,” he said. “They were coming out of hibernation, they’d been on land for months, and they can’t feed unless they are on ice. The ice was late in forming, and we saw that with our own eyes.”

Kent sat down with Fortune in Copenhagen, where he spent the weekend. He was one of a handful of Fortune 500 CEOs to come to Denmark to throw his support behind a global agreement to regulate carbon emissions.

“It is absolutely imperative that our commitment to a low-carbon future be fully understood,” Kent said. “We’re here to lend a Coca-Cola voice to the public and political debate on getting to a fair framework, an inclusive framework, an effective framework so that we can achieve climate protection.”

We go on to talk about Coca-Cola’s sustainability work, which has a wide scope and is not cheap. The company has spent more than $50 million just researching climate-friendly refrigeration. You can read the rest of the story here.

As humans, we’re wired to focus on the now. I want a new gadget now. I want a slab of pie now. I’m busy now, so I don’t have time for politics. The consequences—consumer debt, a sagging waistline, a Congress beholden to special interests–all arrive later.

You can think about global warming as a now-and-later problem. Governments need to take unpopular actions now to deal with a problem that will do most of its damage later. Businesses need to look beyond the next quarter to the next quarter century.

This evening in Elsinore, Denmark, top executives from such companies as Coca-Cola, Duke Energy, Goldman Sachs and Google took the long view in a fitting venue: Kronborg Castle, a 15th century castle best known as the setting for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Sitting in a magnificent castle that’s been preserved for six centuries makes you wonder what impact the goings-on on Copenhagen this week will have on the world in 60 or even 600 years.

In that context, it seems prudent to invest now to insure against a climate catastrophe, no matter how distant–even if the short-term result is  a slight drag on short-term economic growth

As Tracy Wolstencroft, global head of environmental markets for Goldman Sachs, put it: “The economy is a wholly owed subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.” That is, if we ruin the environment, there’s no economy left.

Or, as Muhtar Kent, the CEO of Coca-Cola said: “It is absolutely imperative that our voices be heard and our commitments to low carbon be fully understood.”

It turns out there’s a big contingent from corporate America in Copenhagen.  Among the high-profile companies here: GE, Microsoft, Cisco, DuPont, Johnson Controls, Nike and North Face. (Here’s a column by Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, about efforts by some companies to lobby for a strong climate deal.)  Not surprisingly, most favor a global agreement to regulate carbon emissions.

A strong agreement, they said, will drive companies  to make the investments needed to usher in low-carbon economy.

As an example, Wolstencroft recalled that China’s five-year released in 2005 made a commitment to low-carbon energy. What followed, he said, was a $5.4 billion acquisition by Toshiba of Westinghouse’s nuclear energy business and capital investments  of another $5 billion in Chinese solar power companies, which have since emerged as world leaders.

“What we hope comes out of Copenhagen,” Wolstencroft said, “are even clearer rules that help give investors the confidence…to put money into clean technology.”

Clean tech, he said, is “one of the largest emerging markets the world has seen.”

Duke Energy’s CEO, Jim Rogers, also said that China has the ability to both plan long-term and act rapidly. “They lead in the production of solar panels and wind turbines,” he said. “They’re building 13 nuclear panels with more on the drawing board. They’re ahead in battery technology.”

Duke has a joint venture with a Chinese firm to build a coal plant that, if all goes according to plan, will capture and store carbon emissions.

“The Chinese can scale and deploy this faster than in the U.S.,” Rogers said. Duke’s investment in so-called clean coal won’t pay off in the short run, he said, “but we need a full-court press to make that a reality.”

Google, too, is investing in energy and climate projects with long-term horizons, said Dan Reicher, the firm’s climate guru. Its engineers have reconfigured Toyota Priuses into plug-in electric cars, and they are deploying Google Earth software to track deforestation.

Google’s Power Meter, which is being tested with utilities around the world, gives consumers real-time information about their electricity use, to incentivize them to conserve energy. Waving his cell phone, Reicher said: “I can get information about electricity use at my home in California on this smart phone.”

Several of the execs noted that many low-carbon technologies are available today, albeit at a price. Denmark gets 20% of its electricity from wind turbines, but wind-powered electricity costs more than coal-fired power. Denmark also has big plans for electric cars, but they require just-as-big government subsidies.

In theory, at least, there’s a future payback for those current outlays. Anders Eldrup, president and CEO of Copenhaven-based Dong Energy, which has 1 million customers in northern Europe and is shutting down many of its coal plants, says clean energy technology has surpassed agriculture as Denmark’s leading export.

While there’s no way to know for sure, my sense is that the companies here in Copenhagen don’t reflect the mainstream of corporate America, where big lobbies like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers oppose the climate bills pending in Congress. They’d rather pay later than pay now.

That’s a big a gamble, of course. It’s been a long time since I studied Hamlet but, to the best of my recollection, at the end of the play, just about everybody dies.

Let's hope the Copenhagen climate talks are not much ado about nothing

There’s good and bad news from a sweeping new report on the world’s water scarcity out today from McKinsey & Co., commissioned by such water-dependent companies as Coca-Cola, Nestle, SAB Miller and Syngenta, along with the World Bank/International Finance Corp.

The bad: Global demand for water already exceeds supply—about 1.1 billion people don’t have access to clean water—and the so-called water gap is increasing at an accelerating rate.

The good: Cost-effective, sustainable solutions are available to close the gap, particularly if governments and business focus on reducing demand rather than trying to generate additional supply.

The challenge: Getting beyond the nostrum that water is a “human right” so that water, which is obviously a scarce resource, can be priced in a way that drives conservation.

One more thing to know: Water issues are at least as complex as energy, and all water problems are local, so generalizing about water, while inevitable, is invariably misleading.

As Martin Stuchtey of McKinsey put it: “We are not saying there is one way to close the water gap, and we fully acknowledge the complexity of the water arena.”

The 185-page report, published by the 2030 Water Resources Group, was released this morning at a sparsely-attended news conference at The World Bank. While water isn’t a headline-grabbing topic, it’s emerging as a real business risk. Recently the Carbon Disclosure Project, a coalition of institutional investors that asks global companies to measure their greenhouse gas emissions, said it would undertake a similar effort for water usage. And press releases from NGOs the India Resoure Center. which is targeting Coca-Cola, arrive regularly in my email, posing pesky reputational issues for global brands.

Water shortages will also create business opportunities, which explains the presence of Michael Mack, the CEO of Syngenta, at today’s event. A Swiss-based agribusiness firm, Syngenta is developing genetically engineered, drought-resitant strains of wheat and corn.

“They are literally two years away,” Mack said. Biotech crops, he said, will help not only in poor countries but in water-rich regions of Canada and Russia which will be able to grow more wheat per acre, then sell the output to countries that water-constrained. “Getting more productive agriculture on the existing farmland is the highest priority,” Mack said. This is known in the trade as more crop per drop.

Because agriculture accounts for about 70% of global water use, biotech crops could have a big impact on the water gap. But they will only scale up if governments and environmental groups, particularly in Europe, can be persuaded that genetic engineering will generate more good than harm—no easy matter.

Mack and Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestle, who joined in the news conference by phone, both questioned whether the idea of water as a “human right” is useful way to frame the conversation. (Nestle, it must be noted, is the leading U.S. seller of bottled water through such local brands as Deer Park and Arrowhead, and as such it has come under considerable fire.)

Brabeck-Letmathe said people have a right to water for their basic needs—perhaps 25 liters a day. But he argued that adequate pricing of water will be needed to curb waste. “It’s not a human right to wash your car, to fill up your swimming pool, to water your golf course,” he said.

Some countries are smart about pricing. tool. In South Africa, according to Brabeck-Letmathe, residential users are given a monthly allocation of “free” or subsidized water—presumably enough for drinking, cooking, bathing and sanitation—and then charged a premium for usage beyond that.

By contrast, the McKinsey executives and others said that free or subsidized electricity in rural India contributes to water shortages there because farmers have no reason not to pump as much water as they can out of the ground.

Even normally-cautious development executives said that markets have a role to play in allocating a scarce commodity like water. “Demand is outstripping supply, especially in developing countries,” said Lars Thunell, CEO of the IFC.

Pricing alone, though, won’t solve the water crisis, as McKinsey executives explained to me after the event. We talked about drip irrigation—basically pipes with holes–which is both a more effective and more efficient way to deliver water and fertilizer to crops. The payback on investment in drip irrigation is quick, sometimes as little as one year.

The trouble is, subsistence farmers in poor countries India don’t have the capital to invest in a drip irrigation system, so charging them more for water won’t do any good. They may need access toifinancing, or the ability to share the costs of an irrigation system with neighbors, or government or NGO subsidies for the pipes, which would provide a more sustainable solution that subsidizing electricity or water.

There’s much, much more in the McKinsey report, which focuses on four countries with big but differing water issues—China, India, South Africa and Brazil. Collectively, they will account for 40% of the world’s population, 30% of global GDP and 42% of projected water demand in 2030.

That doesn’t mean that water isn’t an issue for those of us fortunate enough to have access to cheap, clean water. If you haven’t noticed, California is suffering from several years of drought, which will eventually drive up the costs of groceries for anyone who wants to consume fresh fruits and vegetables year round.

By the way, do you have any idea how much you pay for water? I certainly don’t. Before too long, I bet we all will.

Photo credit: Axrainman at www.flickr.com/photos/azrainman/1798824344/ via Creative Commons

Roughly 75% of plastic soda and water bottles end up in landfills, by some estimates. What a waste. We could argue about whether to blame lazy consumers, governments that fail to promote recycling, or the beverage industry. We could debate whether bottle bills will solve the problem. (They won’t, by themselves.) We could try to persuade people to give up bottled water. (They won’t.) Or we could look for market-based solutions, and see if they have the potential to scale.

That’s what the The Coca-Cola Co. is doing. This week, Coke stages a grand opening for the world’s largest bottle-to-bottle recycling plant in Spartanburg, S.C. (The plant’s been running at less than full capacity for months.) The facility is a $60 million joint venture of Coke and the United Resource Recovery Corp. (URRC), which calls itself the world leader in transforming waste bottles into new ones. URRC has a patented process for recyling food and beverage containers made of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET.

The plant will have the capacity, when fully operational, to produce 100 million pounds of recycled PET plastic chips—enough to produce 2 billion 20-ounce bottles of Coke or Dasani or whatever.

It’s a small step toward the goal of sustainable consumption—the idea the we can buy and consume stuff in a ways that don’t degrade the environment or create waste. Coke has said that it ultimately wants to recycle or reuse all of its plastic bottles and cans.

I spoke earlier today with Scott Vitters, the director of sustainable packaging for Coke. Scott is passionate about the environment, albeit in a geeky way, and he’s proud of the plant, which has been in the works for years.

“It’s an important milestone for us,” he said.

The best thing about the plant is that it is intended to make money for Coke and URRC. That means that the project can be duplicated elsewhere.

Here’s how it will work, as explained by Scott: A separate recycling company, led by Coca-Cola Enteprises, the world’s biggest Coke bottler (don’t ask me to explain the interconnected Coke system), will recover PET from a geographic area stretching from the northeast to Florida. The used PET bottles will come from its own manufacturing system, from government recycling centers and from high-profile venues like NASCAR events, college football stadiums and the House of Representatives. As the “official recycler” at the Democratic national convention in Denver, Coca Cola Recycling even collected waste from the arena known as the Pepsi Center. “All that material went back into our bottles—gleefully,” Scott says.

Another source for feedstock is a Coke-backed startup called RecycleBank, which rewards consumers who recycle more and throw away less. VC firm Kleiner Perkins is also an investor in Recycle Bank.

Getting enough feedstock into the plant is crucial to its success. “That traditionally has been a major hurdle to recycling,” Scott said.

The plant will produce a plastic chip, which will be sold to yet another Coke-backed company. Most of the chips will be refashioned into plastic bottles. Coke also makes T-shirts, tote bags, fleeces and other stuff from recycled PET, mostly as a way to encourage consumers to recycle and burnish its own image.

How will the new plant make money? “Explaining the economics around recycling is always an adventure,” Scott said. “You have to keep in mind different things. One is the evolution of the technology. This is about the fourth generation of recycling technology, and earlier generations were costly and environmentally ineffective. Second is the question of feedstocks, and how much they cost. Third is the cost of virgin PET. Today, that’s dropping.”

In other words, it’s hard to know today whether the investment will pay off. “The driver for this program was environmental,” Scott said. “It’s not going to make anyone wildly wealthy. But we’re looking to turn a profit, long term.”

That’s good news, for obvious reasons. If the Spartanburg plant makes money, more will be built. Right now, there’s a need for a similar plant in the Midwest. Plastic bottles that are recycled near the west coast wind up in China, of all places, since it’s cheap to send them over there on container ships that have delivered Chinese imports to west coast ports.

None of this is truly sustainable. Not even close. Think of the trucks, powered by gasoline, moving all of those bottles around. I didn’t think to ask Scott how the plant is is powered, but chances are it’s operated by electricity made by burning coal.

But Coca-Cola, to its credit, is doing its part to solve a big and needless waste problem. Now we need governments to do more to promote curbside recycling–maybe with “pay as you throw” programs, that charge wasteful people more money. And, of course, we need consumers to think twice before throwing a bottle in the trash or, worse, by the side of the road.