Yesterday I attended an interesting event with k7, mcd, and Jill: a live conversation between author, journalist, and professor Michael Pollan, and John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods. Pollan has criticized Whole Foods for failing to adhere to the pastoral, humane, and environmentally sound image they tout in their marketing, but over the past year he and Mackey have been engaging in a public dialogue on the issues (which I still have to read). Last night was another, more public step in that dialogue.
Anyway, I think many of us are interested in food (most of us, I think, eat it), so maybe we can use this space to register thoughts, answer questions, and try and validate some of the assertions made. Editors, feel free to add stuff to the body of this post if you don’t think content belongs in a comment.
- It was sort of amazing to see a bicoastal academic sitting down to talk (civilly) with a Texan businessman, and even though they were both talking about organic food and the travesties of industrialized food, cultural differences still seemed apparent. Mackey seemed stiff and reserved, but it was an amazing gesture for him, a CEO, to come talk with Pollan on a stage in a locus of liberal partisanship like Berkeley. Just more marketing, or a genuine show of good faith?
- One thing Mackey said that piqued my interest was that if you live in Berkeley, eating rice from Bangladesh actually consumes less energy than rice from California. Anyone know if that’s true, and if so, how?
- NYTimes today has an article on Whole Foods’ tarnished image, citing Pollan and some very ad-hoc investigation (by the reporter I assume) on the falling standards at the markets.
- Pollan mentioned an in-market system somewhere that let you scan a barcode for a package of beef and a monitor would should you a live webcam of the farm the beef came from. Has anyone hunted this down? Sounds sort of like iBuyRight…
the conversation will soon be posted here http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=19147
how can we keep whole foods accountable in the initiatives they’re announcing (such as the whole trade standards)? when things get tough on whole foods (and judging by the entry of wal-mart and safeway, things won’t get easier), will these nice grants be the first thing to go? stay tuned.
and also re the ibuyright, pollan was talking about a proposed system in europe (or was it new zealand?); i didn’t get the sense that anything had been implemented yet.
re: bangladeshi rice, he specifically referenced peter singer, the author of “the way we eat.” check page three of this interview: http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/05/08/singer/index.html
The spirit of selfless sacrifice that made you guys blog and comment in this hour of brutal deadlines in order to provide much needed escapism to your fellow sufferers and encourage further procrastination is really laudable and appreciated. Now, back to work!
Yes, I am sort of interested in food (I personally eat daily).
I overheard a brief conversation about industrialization vs. organic production of food. I think those two worlds need to converge. That is, we probably can’t feed the world on organic food the way it’s produced now (although apparently, in general, it would be no problem to feed the world). So, to address the demands of billions of people to a large variety of foods, some degree of industrialization is needed, and I don’t think anyone opposes that.
We all know that our daily products aren’t actually made the way advertising sometimes suggests, but rather in factories. That doesn’t say anything about their quality, though. So, mass-produced food doesn’t have to be of a lower quality of healthiness than locally produced.
As for transportation costs, it’s in most cases probably true that shopping online (for books, groceries, anything, really) is likely to consume less energy than by going to a retailer. In a way, the food industry has adopted the long-tail philosophy a long time ago, when they started assembling tens of thousands of products in single grocery stores, driven by logistics.
So what needs to change? We probably need to eat less meat, just like we need to use our cars less. From what I’ve heard, the planet couldn’t possibly sustain seven billion people eating those quantities of meat we consume here in the industrialized world.
We probably also need to learn more about weird agricultural policies by our governments, subsidizing overproduction of food and flooding third-world markets, promoting high-yield, industry-compatible crops that will in the long run diminish quality and variety; and so on. And then openly oppose what we don’t like, lobby against it, vote accordingly.
I am mainly reflecting a picture I’ve formed in my mind over the years, mainly, drawing from popular media, and I am certainly not an expert. But I think it’s a topic worth keeping informed about. In fact, I hope the documentary “We feed the world” will make it over here (or made available to download with subtitles). It provides a good overview over some of these issues.
Interestingly enough, Whole Foods and I have a history. Don’t believe a word Mackey says.
/comic relief
A back of the envelope comparision of Bangladeshi Vs. Californian rice: Bangladesh uses less amount of fertilizers, hardly any fuel for pumping water and tractors ( River Ganges is all around; Bangladesh has millions of people living on rice field jobs and primarily uses cattle for ploughing). There’s not much energy spent on storage too, mostly because there is not a lot of surplus crop. But that doesnt seem to completwly offset thousands of miles of container transport unless Bangladesh imports stuff in the same containers. According to the CIA fact book, Bangladesh’s import partners mostly include India and China. Somehow the numbers just dont add up. Am I missing something? Subsidies? Carbon footprints of workers?
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_17/b3880016.htm
Mackey also got some jabs in about Trader Joe’s, being subject to inhumane suppliers, and demonizing them for being owned by the “richest family in German.” I personally was a bit turned off by that, he was being borderline xenophobic.
But I do think Trader Joe’s has ducked a lot of criticism because they’re so damn affordable, their workers are affable, and they are apolitical and stay out of the media. That’s skillfully done, shining in every facet where consumers experience the grocer.
also, the webcast of this event is live.
also, i’ve never been in mcsweeney’s :jealous:
Hannes: have you read Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma? It deals with pretty much all the issues you raise, including how well organic can scale. For many it was a cogent coalescence of the debate that has been raging over these issues, and for most everyone else it has sparked the beginnings of debate. It’s also well-written, fascinating, and all those good things. And Pollan lives here so if you don’t like it you can egg his house. With un-cage-free eggs.
Kesava: as usual, your back of the envelop beats my lazy research. As k7 mentioned Mackey was citing assertions in The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. As quoted on Mackey’s blog, they wrote,
As this Berkeley food blogger points out, though, there are other concerns, like transparency (another topic broached in the talk).
k7: the Trader Joe’s comment was pretty ad hominem. In general, I thought Mackey was rhetorically sloppy, but that, of course, is itself an ad hominem criticism. Still, always good to call out BS.
More link madness:
I have some answers and some questions, most of them fairly off-the-cuff and unresearched. First, an answer, and maybe it’s the only one. If memory serves, the iBuyRight-style alternate bar-code shopping experiment was in Denmark, but some aggressive Googling of various combinations of “Denmark,” “grocery,” “experiment,” “’see the farm,’” and “barcode” proved fruitless.
Now questions:
While dutifully applauding Mackey’s “I’m announcing tonight…”s, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the added price of the initiatives (Whole Trade, Artisinal support, etc.) would outpace the added cost to the company. In other words, to what extent might these initiatives be excuses to charge more for these products, given Whole Foods’s reputation?
There was thunderous applause at Pollan and Mackey’s appeal to end farm subsidies in the U.S. My understanding is limited, but I think of such subsidies as price-fixing, in a way, to keep farms in business and to sell food cheaply (I welcome corrections from the economists in the audience). Therefore, I wondered how the budget for these subsidies compares to the total budget for support programs such as Food Stamps, WIC, etc. (Given more time, I reckon I’d start here.) How big would the resulting spike in food prices be?
Lastly, when I mentioned the talk to a friend, she said, “Did he talk about how he hates unions?” Trader Joe’s, too, is known for anti-union policies. I guess that one’s not so much a question as another perspective.
What do y’all think?
mcd: on the subject of farm subsidies, my understanding (largeley based on Pollan) is that farm subsidies persist due to a) lobbying from agribusiness, not independent farmers, and b) competetive advantage in international trade. No doubt the audience cheered because they’re all Smithian free trade hardliners and would like to end all protectionist economic policies (right), or maybe they’re just frustrated with America’s insistence on having its cake and eating it too, and then sweeping up the crumbs and eating them so the bunch of starving kids watching don’t get any ideas. I don’t believe (and this is totally unfounded belief, here) that the American poor have enough of a voice in the government to maintain farm subsidies so they can afford to eat. If they had that kind of power, affording food probably wouldn’t be one of their problems.
#6: I didn’t know Trader Joe’s was owned by Aldi. That explains the $2 chuck, I suppose, as Aldi know to be Germany’s first large discounter chain.
#8: I once threw (organic) eggs at people who were noisily playing football in my street at night. I think I hit one of them… in the crotch. I don’t know if I should feel bad, because I think they were tourists.
regarding the energy cost of bangladeshi vs. california rice:
since the u.s. is the most energy inefficient country in the world, it’s no big surprise that we also waste energy when we grow our rice. the solution shouldn’t be to ship in rice from countries who do grow it efficiently. instead, we should make our own farming practices more efficient. i suspect it’s only because our farming energy costs are so high that the energy cost of shipping pales in comparison.
also, the point of eating locally isn’t only to avoid shipping costs. eating locally also means eating what’s locally available SEASONALLY as well. so, if we insisted on having ripe tomatoes all year round, it likely would be more energy-efficient to ship them in from china (or wherever) than it would be to grow them locally inside a hothouse.
IANAE (I am not an economist). But I like to pretend I have a reasonable understanding of international political economy
Subsidies are more or less a price-influencing kind of measure, but in theory it doesn’t gain you anything at all. From the perspective of classical liberal economy theory, food would be cheaper across the board if there were no subsidies, because farm subsidies is basically an artificial means to screw around with market competition. When the market already provides these agricultural products at cheap prices (from, say, developing economies), if you’d simply import them, you wouldn’t need to introduce inefficiencies via subsidies.
Ricardian comparative advantage implies that every nation needs to produce what it does best, and agriculture is where developing economies tend to have comparative advantage. The cost of the U.S. spending its time doing agriculture is very high. The supposed better alternative is to leave that activity to someone who can do it better, move to an area where the U.S. does best (hi-tech, services, or whatever) and trade with other economies. Because everyone is producing that they do best, there is simply more stuff out there. High supply, lower prices, market efficiency, blah blah invisible hand.
Now, the question becomes a more realist analysis when you think, well do I really want to trust my agricultural base to another state. Are there security issues involved in this? Are there power implications if I lose an entire sector of economic activity?
It is also said that the farm bloc is often a very powerful constituency in democracies, because they tend to be very reliable voters, and they tend to be single-issue voters. If you provide generous agricultural subsidies, you’d earn their votes very easily. The low-hanging fruit of election calculations, some would say.
Whatever the reason, the end result is that agriculture is the one sector that is NEVER opened up for free trade. Whether that’s inefficient protectionism, security concerns, or social consciousness, that depends on who you ask
It also introduces an element of hypocrisy into international trade negotiations, when developed states are pushing free trade in everything that they have comparative advantage in. When it comes to a sector that they’d lose, suddenly, free trade doesn’t apply there anymore.
for people looking for more information, there is a film series about this on campus (@ Wheeler, right next door to South Hall)
http://tinyurl.com/345yxb