This afternoon I received an email from Bill Carvalho, President of Wild Planet Foods, in response to my Sunday post about sardines and sustainability. I’ve included the full text of Carvalho’s very thoughtful email as a comment below my original post. I wanted to cite a couple of paragraphs from the letter here, and didn’t want to give the impression that I was taking his words out of context.

Carvalho takes time in his note to address all my points, even the point about creating “a fairer, and more equitable world order,” in the phrase of the Georgetown Agreement. “In my personal opinion,” Carvalho writes, “that requires much more than social and ecological audits; that would require that we all submit ourselves to a moral audit, something that we can leave for another conversation.” I hope someday we can have that conversation, here in New York, or there in Eureka, California, or maybe in Vietnam.

Who knows how that would all turn out. I don’t know about Carvalho’s qualifications as a father confessor (or, for that matter, my own); but he is a good correspondent: for the most part he doesn’t dodge tough questions or deliberately confuse things. He sets me straight about carbon footprints. And he even offers some insight concerning the Wild Planet canning facility in Vietnam.

We do consider the effects of our decisions on the environment and desire to treat our customers and business partners with dignity and respect. The one cannery we use near Ho Chi Min City [sic] is owned by a long-time acquaintance who lives in the San Diego area. We selected this facility for the same reasons we choose business partners here in the US: trust in their integrity and confidence in their competence. The facility is a small enterprise by global standards which is precisely what we needed in order to teach them the specialized handling techniques needed to produce the superior quality products featured in our line. Our increase in activity at their plant has meant the creation of many dozens of new jobs in highly respectable conditions. It is interesting that the cannery provides meals for all workers daily and also owns an apartment building in which they provide housing for many employees. Your comments on how a cannery can be an economical boon to a region or community are exactly what has happened in the case of our friend’s cannery in Vietnam. I don’t think it is out of line for U.S. residents to provide economic benefits to Vietnamese residents given the history between these two countries that has not been exactly mutually beneficial.

That last sentence requires some careful parsing and further thought. Luckily, there will be more on this point from Wild Planet soon:

We have decided to a post detailed explanation of our selection of our processing partner and address issues of carbon footprint on our website and that should be up shortly. We have also decided to fully disclose the processing country on our packaging. We were not seeking to conceal data from consumers and are comfortable explaining these points as we have nothing to hide.

For my part, I am going to start researching a trip to Ho Chi Minh City. I would like to meet and interview some of the cannery workers, visit the apartment block where they live, and see the cannery in Ho Chi Minh where they pack the sustainably caught California sardines. Who knows if I’ll get there anytime soon. But maybe, if I’m lucky, or persistent, I will.