John Mackey, CEO of the upscale supermarket chain Whole Foods, has concluded his epistolary battle with writer Michael Pollan by pledging greater support for local farmers via some pretty impressive initiatives. Frankly, even though I know Whole Foods customers and Omnivore’s Dilemma readers probably overlap quite a bit, I’m amazed that one journalist could bring about this much change in a major corporation. Woot!
Mackey has all the details on his blog on the WF website, at the very end of his latest opus to our favorite food detective. Before I get to the actual announcements, I have to give Mack some props for the blows he manages to land on the Pollanator:
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”)? Your book doesn’t hesitate to assign heroes and villains to a very complex story, but unfortunately it never defines its terms so the reader is left wondering when a hero slips over to the “dark side” and actually becomes a villain.
Good question. I haven’t been thinking of Whole Foods as a villain at all, by the way, even as they hide Rosie under a Whole Foods Organic Chicken label. It’s a publicly traded corporation; its responsibility, ultimately, is to its shareholders, and therefore it has to give consumers what they want. And it’s our responsibility as consumers to buy it or not buy it, and ask them to carry more of what we prefer.
Mackey also takes on the Pollanator’s poster boy, Joel Salatin, by introducing special guest Peter Singer, the animal rights writer and controversial ethicist. Singer and other animal welfare experts, Mackey says, have issues with Salatin’s mobile chicken coops, which are “confinement systems with a grass floor” and rate last out of five sustainable poultry systems investigated. I have to say, I saw the exact Salatin model — 100 birds in a low, 10×12-foot pen — last week at Marin Sun Farms, and was put off by it. When someone on our farm tour asked why the broiler chickens don’t roam around as freely as the laying hens, rancher David Evans said, “Because they’d be so tough no one would want to eat them” — an argument familiar to me from feedlot beef.
(Miss Steak is reading Peter Singer’s new book and will just have to give us a full report on whether better alternatives to Salatin exist.)
Anyway, back to the good news. Mackey (who is vegan, by the way) has these things to announce:
- He’s hired “our first animal compassionate field buyer,” Andrew Gunther — a former organic farmer himself — who will seek out sources of animal products that meet “our new strict animal compassionate standards.”
- Regional Buyers will be encouraged to source more local products for their stores.
- WF has set aside $10 million a year for small loans, primarily to “producers of grass-fed beef, goat milk dairies, organic pasture-based eggs, animal-compassionate dairy cows, chickens, turkeys, sheep, pigs, etc.” with some support for vegetable farmers, as well. Mackey sez, “We are going to “walk our talk” with financial support for local, small scale agriculture.” As the money is paid back it will get added to the $10M base for more loans.
- “Soon” (we’ll be watching for this), Whole Foods markets that don’t share their parking lots with other retailers will close off major sections of the parking lots on Sundays for farmers’ markets. Mackey says he hopes the foot traffic will make up for lost produce sales.
So, pretty cool stuff. We could be cynical and say that it’s mostly good public relations — and it definitely is that — but the loans especially could have a real seed effect. I wonder what our local farmers think, and whether they even want to sell to WF. We’ll have to ask.
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July 3rd, 2006 at 6:21 am
I would not want to take sides on this, in part because some of the checks that keep my farm going have JM’s signature, but I would say one thing to both these fine gentlemen.
Had MP gone into the store here in Austin, he would have found my eggs (if he looked carefully; no product placement for me) and then used one of my chicks for his big picture in the AAS, which I hatched myself, instead of a factory broiler, just a day old and destined for a CAFO, which purely by luck ended up at my friend Kim’s farm.
WFM is buying eggs from me, and I in turn use the money to restore a critically endangered chicken breed called Mottled Javas. Supposedly less than 500 in the world, and I have some 250 on the ground here just east of Austin, in part due to WFM’s purchasing of my product.
So perhaps JM has claim to the wild pig; I am farming wild and stretching the Salatin model to the limits. Come see us!
Time to watch the grass grow.
Be well.
July 3rd, 2006 at 10:51 am
Wow, that’s great that WFM is buying chickens from you. Now I have to go to my WFM and see if they have chickens from local farms. I usually shop at Berkeley Bowl, which is better than WFM on almost everything but only has Petaluma Poultry, Clover, Horizon eggs.
Chickenman, I’m nominating you for Ethicurean poster boy. And we would all LOVE to take a field trip to come visit you and see your operation. Tell the Omniho to get married again (to the same guy, I mean) and I’ll be back.