With Hillary running for President, I feel like the expression "love to hate" is growing old from overuse quickly. That said, I'll use it one more time to describe Whole Foods (or what some call Whole Paycheck), the store we love to hate. I buy my fruits and veggies from the farmer's market every Sunday and I try to get everything else I need from my local co-op. That said, I drink Whole Foods coffee nearly every day.
My love of the Whole Foods experience has been a guilty pleasure for me ever since I first read Michael Pollan's critique of the place, along with his nickname for it - "Supermarket Pastoral." Well, there's lots that has happened since Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma came out.
After exchanging emails, the two met up at Berkeley in a public debate. More on the flip...
Off-Topic: Announcing Vegetables of Mass Destruction T-shirts. The art is the genius work of The Gryffin. 10% of profits will go to Union of Concerned Scientists. (Even if you don't want to buy it, take a look - it's laugh out loud funny.)
I've been re-reading The Omnivore's Dilemma lately. Pollan really took a good swing at "Big Organic." He describes "organic" factory farms, "organic" TV dinners and other processed foods (which require synthetic ingredients to even exist), and all of the fossil fuels used by Big Organic to truck food all over the country from California - or even Argentina! Big Organics still seem better than conventional food, but maybe only marginally so. Is that worth the hefty price tag?
The alternative of course is the kind of organic we think of when we talk about sustainable agriculture. Family farms, locally grown, seasonal foods. Using crop rotation and beneficial insects to manage pests. Working in harmony with nature, leaving the soil at least as rich and healthy as we found it (if not better), and minimizing our fossil fuel use.
Perhaps the most fair way to present the two sides - Whole Foods' version of sustainable foods vs. the hippie vision that started in the 1960's - is to remember that Whole Foods does have to deal with reality, with customers, with shareholders, and with bottom lines in order to exist, whereas our ideals have no such limits. That doesn't make everything Whole Foods may do 100% justified, but we should also keep it in mind before we judge harshly.
Most likely, you've been to a Whole Foods before. The prices, when compared with conventional produce in other grocery stores or with local, organic (but not always certified) farmers' markets, are extremely high. The quality at Whole Foods is usually excellent (at least, in my experience). I give them credit for labeling where all the food is from - and for denoting which items are local. Their selection is broader than any co-op I've ever visited, too. However, that is partially due to their willingness to carry both conventional and organic forms of many foods and to ship products in from other countries and continents.
I enjoyed shopping at Whole Foods far more before I got heavily involved in promoting sustainable food. For years now, I've enjoyed going to grocery stores. Call me crazy but in college a friend and I would go to the grocery store as a social outting. And not to a nice, organic market, either. I didn't really know the difference at the time - we'd just go to the regular chain grocery. Once I found Whole Foods and I was in a stable place financially, I switched my loyalty to Whole Foods, despite the cringe-worthy prices.
The joy of shopping at Whole Foods comes from what Pollan labeled "Supermarket Pastoral." My retail management professor in business school would call it "a lifestyle retailer." You stroll around the store and everything you see gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling. The store is a window into a certain type of lifestyle. People with the Whole Foods lifestyle eat organic food, use natural beauty products, do yoga, perhaps they are vegetarians, etc. More than anything, they are educated shoppers, as the store and the products in it serve to teach them about what they should support in a sustainable food system. I used to go to Whole Foods alone or with a friend every weekend - for fun!
Once I woke up from the dream world Whole Foods lulled me into, I started to see things more objectively. Whole Foods really does source some foods locally in each store. I've been a fairly regular shopper at their Madison, Phoenix, and San Diego locations and all three have some local foods. That said, the bulk of their products are the same, all over the country. Most of the big organic brands are owned by enormous mainstream companies. And, of course, a lot of the processed organic food is still junk.
The Pollan vs. Whole Foods debate begins with a long letter written to Pollan by Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey (see it here). Here are a few quotes from the letter:
However, Whole Foods Market has done more to advance the natural and organic foods movement in general and local organic growers and artisanal food producers specifically than any other business currently operating in North America.
Our company continues to operate on a decentralized model wherein each of our 11 regions, as well as each store, has a high level of autonomy. Differences in product offerings, suppliers, and seasonal availability result in a significant variation of items on our shelves from region to region and even store to store within the same city.
We screen our offerings by the quality standards I mentioned earlier and try to offer as many natural and organic products as possible, but we don't try to channel our customers into adopting any particular dietary regime. Instead, we provide opportunities for each to make individual choices that satisfy their everyday demands and lifestyle needs.
Pollan responded in a positive manner. Because Mackey's visions and ideals are so closely aligned with Pollan's (even if the reality that his Fortune 500 company embodies isn't quite there yet), Pollan congratulated Mackey on his successes and urged him to continue improving, instead of focusing on Whole Foods' areas of improvement. You can see the full response here.
I confess I am of two minds in deciding how to respond to the substance of your letter: whether I should attempt to cast doubt on your claims that Whole Foods wholeheartedly supports local, artisanal, and grass-based agriculture, or whether to simply applaud and encourage your inclinations in that direction. I take heart in the fact that you feel compelled to defend a commitment to these forms of agriculture, not only because I share it, but because you are in as strong a position as any individual in America today to help rebuild local food chains and build a market for pasture-based livestock farming.
After visiting a great many large organic farms to research my book, many of them your suppliers, it seems to me undeniable that organic agriculture has industrialized over the past few years, and that Whole Foods has played a part in that process-for good and for ill.
In the same way we now need (as you pointed out in our meeting) to raise the bar again on American agriculture, we need to raise it on the American eater too, teaching him about the satisfactions (and nutritional benefits) of eating in season, from his locality, and from a food chain based on grass rather than corn. I think we agree that this is where the "reformation" now is headed; you are in a position to lead rather than to follow it there. To do so is also, I daresay, in your company's self-interest: as competitors like Wal-Mart and Safeway move into selling industrial organic food, Whole Foods can distinguish itself by moving to the next stage, doing things they can't possibly do. "Local" surely is one of those things: and your buyers already know exactly how to do it. All Wal-Mart knows is how to source industrial organic food from China.
Mackey came back once again with another letter (see it here). He was still ticked that Pollan never interviewed him (or anyone else from Whole Foods) before writing his book. One point he makes that I love is:
Your letter to me, however, does raise some interesting questions about scale that your book never addresses: when is a farm too large to be considered "small?" How far can food be transported before it is no longer considered "local?" How much machinery is a farm allowed to use before it becomes "industrial" (and therefore no longer "good")?
I wonder that myself. I've got a document here that compares small, medium, and large farms and the communities around them. They define "small" as having annual gross sales of less than $50,000 and "large" as having annual gross sales of over $500,000. In that same document, a "family farm" means that the farm household own and controls the majority of farm production factors, land, labor, capital, technology, and management. "Industrialized" is the opposite - it's a non-household based production unit with absentee ownership and a division of labor that means that one group of people do the owning, a second group does the managing, and a third group does the working.
Obviously, the large-scale farms are more likely to be industrialized than the small ones. I'd have to go back and do some reading, but I believe the results of many studies show that communities benefit the most from mid-sized family farms. The industrialized model leads to towns with a gap in wealth and lifestyle between rich and poor and all the problems that come with that.
Mackey moves on to address Pollan's accusations that Whole Foods' distribution method is an impediment to working with small local farms:
Michael, let me agree up front with you that Whole Foods Market needs to do a better job of helping more local growers sell directly to our stores without going through our distribution center. This is true for the Bay Area as well. I know that over the years some smaller farmers have stopped selling to us and have been frustrated with our Regional Distribution Centers. We should and will do a better job of this in the future because we are making it a company priority. That being said, neither your book nor your letter is fair to Whole Foods Market on this issue. You can always find frustrated ex-suppliers for just about any company in the world and Whole Foods Market is no exception.
The letter ends very nicely with a number of initiatives Whole Foods is engaging in to bring their walk more in line with their talk. As Pollan points out, Mackey is truly in a position to take sustainable food to the next level, and that is the challenge he faces. It's refreshing to see that his heart is in the right place - he's not just some greedy corporate asshole who sees ripping off yuppies as his own particular gimmick.
The Berkeley Debate
This past Tuesday, Mackey and Pollan met up in front of a large audience at Berkeley. You can see the webcast here. Mackey began with a 45-minute intro - since Pollan had the advantage of writing an entire book to state his point.
You can also read a write-up about the event here and that's where I'm taking some excerpts from.
As Mackey said in a Marketplace interview the day before the event, there’s always been an ongoing battle in organics, between what he called "the purists and the pragmatists." Pragmatists like him "want to spread organics to as many people as possible," a growth strategy that often requires compromise, while "the purists are very mistrustful of it being corrupted by agribusiness and big corporations."
Although Whole Foods almost singlehandedly developed the mass market for organic food, he said the company recognizes that organic no longer means what it originally did to consumers, and thus plans to lead the charge into the next phase, or "beyond organic." The beyond-organic buzzwords: local, ethical, sustainable, and humane.
I think the lesson we can take from this event is that Whole Foods may not be perfect - and the companies who make the products they stock certainly all do not operate under the vision of sustainable foods that we here on dKos do - but Whole Foods is committed to the same vision that Pollan wrote about in his book. As we go forward, they will be an important business to work with because they are such a large retailer of organics that they can influence their suppliers' practices and hopefully even nudge the government in the right direction too. With Mackey's openness to constructive criticism and willingness to adapt, I think we should all continue the dialogue that Pollan has now started.
Last - if you're in the Bay Area, check out the March 21 "Farm Bill Teach-In" (Michael Pollan will be there moderating). Details here. If I can afford it, I'm going.
Here's the VMD T-shirt:
You've gotta see it close up to get the full comedic value... think Dr. Strangelove :)
Warning: The shirts RUN SMALL
If in doubt, check the size chart below...
Sizing (inches)
S - 36 Chest, 24 Length
M - 40 Chest, 25 Length
L - 44 Chst, 26 Length
XL - 48 Chest, 27 Length
XXL Chest: 52" Length: 32" (the XXL is not organic)