Yesterday I took this brief snapshot of a Coke can.
My original plan behind this was to talk about how I distrust anything that a corporation says, and that I have taken to assuming that the truth is the exact opposite of anything a corporation says either on their product or in their advertising. This stems from my deep and convinced opinion that literally NOTHING is true in any of the commercials we’re bombarded with on the boob-tube.
For example, whenever some company has produced some shaky handicam-commercial featuring a dentist saying that THIS toothpaste, RIGHT HERE will make your teeth whiter and whatever, my instinct tells me that this entire thing is a carefully planned and executed ruse. I simply assume that the alleged dentist is in fact an actor claiming to be a dentist, and the commercial is cleverly planned to look like a spontaneous spur-of-the-moment recording despite not being it at all.
Thus, I distrust anything corporations say.
The print on the can says “Produced in Sweden” and I had originally planned to write a cynical post about how it most likely is NOT produced in Sweden, based on the aforementioned gut-instinct.
However, I realized that there was something much more interesting to this simple can.
Sweden is part of the European Union, EU for short. I don’t like EU, never have, probably never will. I tend to (very cynically) say that the EU managed to do peacefully what Hitler tried with war, which was to unite Europe into one nation. Yes, it’s a gross simplification but none the less it’s fairly close to the truth. I’ve always felt that the unofficial goal of the EU is to reduce patriotism inside it’s member-countries and instead turn everything into a gray faceless mush, a blend of all the countries.
However, while thinking about this simple little red aluminium can I realized that in many ways, EU had managed to do the opposite.
Due to the free trade available, it’s in many ways cheaper for many companies to simply produce something in a country where labor costs are lower than in Sweden, and then import it. And this is probably true in many ways, and I think there are literally thousands of companies who do it. Yet somehow, it’s become a mark of quality to show that a product has been produced domestically rather than imported from a cheaper country.
In a way, I think this has strengthened the swedish patriotism. Maybe swedes have started taking greater pride in products that are actually produced in Sweden rather than imported from some cheaper country? Because I see this everywhere, and it’s especially true about goods that you eat or drink. It’s impossible to walk into a grocery store and take a look at the meat-section without noticing that every single package of meat proudly proclaims to be domestic. Swedes shun meat that come from odd countries, and this is a result of the Mad Cow-scare a few years back.
But it’s not limited to dead animals chopped up and placed in neat plastic boxes. It goes for fruit and vegetables too. Sure, people buy apples from the Netherlands and same goes for tomatoes – but the first instinct is to look for Swedish apples and tomatoes. We look for the native alternatives, and only when we can’t find them do we shrug and sullenly go for the imported variety.
And now it’s spreading to other products as well. I’ve seen stamps of this on bags of potato chips, or ketchup. It’s quickly becoming a very important thing for producers to slap on their product, since people are becoming more and more distrusting of imported goods.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to everything. Sweden imports a good deal of the crap we buy and consume, and none of our auto-makers are Swedish any longer. Both SAAB and Volvo have been owned by American interests for at least ten years now and are Swedish only in name and heritage.
And sure, much of the reason for choosing domestic products when it comes to foodstuff is simply to avoid unknowns. We don’t know how the beef and pork that’s imported from Poland came to be. We don’t know what’s inside the milk from Germany. But at the same time, it’s becoming a way to embrace our own nationality.
With all that said, there is of course no way for the Average Joe to know if it’s really true. Sure, the Coke-can might say it’s been produced in Sweden, but there’s no way for us to know. For all we know, it might be imported from Romania and then poured into a pre-printed can. The beef that claims to be from Swedish cows might as well be from cows where the rules concerning growth-hormones and genetic tampering might be laxer, and then imported and slapped with a big ol’ lie of being produced in Sweden. There is no way for consumers to know, and we have to accept this statement at face-value since we’re left with no choice.
So in a way, it circles back to my distrust of corporations after all!
