Lesser Evil?

I was standing in the socially distanced line at the co-op the other day when my eye fell upon a couple of bags on top of one of the nearby cases.

I admit it's a current-looking design in an eye-catching color, but I immediately thought, Lesser Evil? Buddhist monk? Dark chocolate popcorn? What?

Well, it turns out it's probably mostly Zen-washing. The company started out as a regular snack company, selling stuff that was bad for you. After about five years, it started selling stuff that pretended not to be bad for you (low-fat, low calorie). Then after another few years, it went organic and added "gurus" to its packaging. Last year, the story got even more overblown:

Yes, that copy really does say "Snacking as a vessel for mindful moments" so that you can have snacks "to enjoy in your daily ritual."

Other things about this company, its website, and its products that bug me:

• If I have to wait one more time while their website shows me the animated drawing of that dang logo (it's done on Every. Single. Page.)
• The use of the word "clean" to describe food. I know they're not the only ones who use that, but it irks me.
• The fact that they're so holier-than-thou about all this, while selling empty calories in packaging that will go into landfills and pretending they aren't. Since 2019, the packaging has been made with NEO plastic, which, according to the LesserEvil website "includes an additive that accelerates the microbial activity in landfills, converting discarded plastic into bio gases and ultimately into a clean, renewable energy source. You can discard this packaging as you would other rubbish and it will then work within the landfills to create a clean, renewable energy." There is no information on their site or any other site I could find that says that landfills are actually capturing that methane (which is what the "bio gas" is) or if the NEO plastic actually works. It's a proprietary system, of course.
  

The only good thing I can see about this company is that they employ 80 people in Danbury, Connecticut. I hope they're living-wage jobs. The factory photo shown on their site is, I assume/hope, from pre-covid days.