Whole Foods’ John Mackey on the purists vs. the pragmatists

Those in the Bay Area who are planning to attend tonight's conversation at UC Berkeley between Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and "Omnivore's Dilemma" author Michael Pollan might want to whet their appetite with this Marketplace interview of Mackey from yesterday.

Far down in the interview, following a long and not very interesting discussion of Wall Street's disenchantment with Whole Foods' stock, Kai Ryssdal asks Mackey about the criticism that the natural foods grocery chain has gotten so big that it's lost touch with the organic movement's precepts of sustainability, and has instead become a mirror of the industrialized food chain.

Mackey's answer (in the complete transcript) hints at the probable direction of tonight's talk:

You know, it's a difficult question. Because I'm sympathetic to both points of view. On the one hand you might say there's an ongoing battle, and there's always been an ongoing battle in organics, between we could call them purists and the pragmatists, and the pragmatists adopt the attitude of hey, we want to spread organics to as many people as possible. In order to do that it has to get bigger, in order to be able to distribute them everywhere.

And the purists are very mistrustful of it being corrupted by agribusiness and big corporations. So I think both perspectives have a certain validity. The reality is that it's … they're both happening simultaneously. Are bigger corporations getting into it? Yeah, they are, because that's to be expected because the market is demanding more organic foods, so the corporations are trying to respond to it; that's the way capitalism works.

On the other hand, the great majority of organic products, particularly organic produce, for example, are not being produced by large corporations. They're being — and that's the same for organic dairy — they're mostly smaller farmers or middle-sized farmers. One of the things that's left out of this dialogue it's not either little tiny five-acre, ten-acre family farms, or you know, 10,000-acre farms. The great majority of this stuff is being produced by farms that are a few hundred acres.

A reminder to the rest of the country: the "The Past, The Present, The Future of Food" discussion will be webcast live here. In case you're feeling envious of us, we'll be shivering in line, hoping to score a decent seat as we're being pelted with rain and hail.

I will be covering the event for my real job, with UC Berkeley's news team, and will have an account up tomorrow. As just about every blogger and reporter in the Bay Area with an interest in food politics will be here tonight, there should be a cornucopia of stories from which to choose.

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