Force of Nature

Walmart changed when Jib Ellison convinced Lee Scott that sustainability simply meant reducing waste, reports Bryan Burrough in the New York Times (5/15/11). This story, which began with a meeting between Jib and Lee in 2004, is the subject of Force of Nature by Edward Humes.

To confirm his point, Jib showed Lee how reducing the cardboard packaging on toy trucks not only “saved millions of dollars” but also spared “hundreds of thousands of tons of cardboard that otherwise would find its way into landfills.”

That success “led to a Walmart crusade to reduce packaging size across its product lines, saving the company an estimated $3.4 billion a year.” Walmart has since brought in “eco-friendly consultants who have helped find innovative ways to reduce waste almost everywhere.”

Between 2005 and 2008, Walmart managed to reduce carbon emissions by 16 percent. It donated 127 million pounds of food that otherwise would’ve been discarded, and saved 350 million pieces of paper by reducing “printouts of store reports.”

None of these initiatives was taken to appease environmentalists, but all of them were consistent with Walmart’s cost-cutting culture. Beyond that, Lee Scott, who retired in 2009, recognized that Walmart’s future depended on a commitment to sustainability. This is because most of its shoppers are women, the next generation of which “would quickly go to Target” if Walmart did not quickly go green.

Food Trucks

Truck-based street-food vendors tend to fall into one of two camps — authentics and hipsters, suggests Paul Lukas in a Wall Street Journal review of Food Trucks by Heather Shouse (4/30/11).

Paul bases his observation on a pattern in Heather’s book: “On one page she’s profiling a Colombian woman who sells arepas (griddled cornmeal patties) beneath a Queens subway overpass after midnight on weekends … Four pages later she’s writing about … a Julliard-trained bassoonist who drives around Manhattan in something called the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck.”

Where the authentics usually are just trying to scratch out a living, the hipsters, says Paul, seem to be in search of “a kind of cultural irony on wheels.” In any case, the book profiles “more than 100 operations in 20 American cities,” and as such serves as a “de facto overview of the current state of American street food.”

Although technically a “guidebook,” Food Trucks obviously can’t compete with the real-time updates courtesy of Twitter, etc. But it “does a good job of explaining the factors that made the food-truck phenomenon possible (social media, the recession and low costs for purveyor and customer alike). It also captures a moment, which, ten years from now, might be remembered “as the time when street food started becoming gentrified.”

David Crockett

“The mystery is not who Davy Crockett was but how he got that way and why,” writes Henry Allen in the Wall Street Journal (5/29/11). Michael Wallis explores this mystery in a new book, David Crockett: The Lion of the West. (He refers to “Davy” as “David” because that’s the way the man, himself, signed his name.)

Even Davy — or David — couldn’t fully grasp the reasons behind his fame. Yes, he had been a soldier, but not one of particular distinction. He has been elected to Congress three times, but “failed to win passage of a single bill.”

He failed as a businessman and left for Texas — at the time the last refuge for losers — after his wife and kids left him. And yet Davy had a knack for explaining himself: “I’m that same David Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride upon a streak of lightning,” he once wrote.

In a way, Davy Crockett was famous for being famous — just like so many modern-day celebrities. However, he also “helped teach Westerners who they already were and gave them a proud self-consciousness ... He spoke the American language, funny and sly in the frontier style that would later make Mark Twain famous, too.” And, 175 after his death at the Alamo, “we still want to hear about him.”