We wrote recently about Whole Foods prez John Mackey’s letter to Omnivore’s Dilemma author and all-around Ethicurean rock star Michael Pollan, which politely took him to task for saddling Whole Foods with the “Industrial Organic” label, as a chain that dispensed pastoral fairytales of family farmers while quietly stocking its shelves with only products from enormous, mostly monoculture organic farms.
Well, Pollan has replied equally politely and at length on his New York Times blog (subscribers only, alas, but he’s been reposting his entries on his own website here after a few days’ lag).
Some pithy excerpts:
I see more signage about the importance of local produce than I see actual items of local produce. You write that 45 percent of your suppliers are local, i.e. located within 200 miles of the store — an impressive statistic, but perhaps a misleading one…As a percentage of sales (rather than of vendors), how much of the produce sold at Whole Foods is produced locally? My guess is that number is considerably lower than 45 percent, even if you count Cal-Organics and Earthbound as “local farmers” in California, a claim that strikes me (and would probably strike them) as a stretch….
In the same way we now need … 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 this is where the “reformation” now is headed; you are in a position to lead rather than to follow it there.
Bottom line: in the reformation (which we prefer to think of as the Ethicurean dietgeist), Whole Foods, while not bad as far as supermarkets go, cannot truly claim to be the farmers’ friend, or the consumers’ conscience. Judging from Mackey’s letter — and his appearance on “60 Minutes” — he wants to be the good guy. But he’s going to have to do more, and perhaps buck his shareholders to do so.
Update on June 15: Pollan reposted the rebuttal on his own website fairly quickly.–Man of la Muncha
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