The Whole Foods compromise

The New Yorker recently ran an article on Boulder/Austin resident John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods. (Food Fighter, Jan 4, 2010.) I found in it common ground between socialists and capitalists, where each of us must give up something to get something.

First, the down side. Whole Foods is a very expensive place to shop. Consequently, there is no reach-out to people of ordinary means. When they scout locations for new stores, they count the number of college graduates within ten miles of the store. Score one for the capitalists.

John Mackey is a very conservative man who is pursuing a business model that embraces lefties, in a sense manipulating us. He caters to our tastes and fetishes with granola food and aisle upon aisle of cultural abundance, much of it shipped in daily from hundreds, if not thousands of miles away.

Mackey also made an untimely remark about national health care in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. He’s against it. This sparked the usual left-wing uprising and calls for the usual futile gesture, a boycott.

Mackey is anti-union. This again flies in the face of his constituency. He is a believer in free markets, and believes that workers are amply rewarded without unions. China aside, I will leave that alone today.

But here is the upside: Whole Foods pays its help well and gives them good benefits, thereby marginalizing unionization efforts. It’s a nice compromise.

Whole Foods tries, as best it is able, to buy locally and pay fair prices for its products. There is a natural clash in this philosophy simply because of its success. It has to feed many mouths, and to do that must operate on a large scale. Consequently, we have the phenomenon of mass-market “organic” food, which pushes the line towards compromise to achieve efficiency.

So if you buy a dozen brown eggs from Whole Foods, it is probably wise not to go too far back down the food chain to see if those chickens really were allowed to wander freely and pick and peck at bugs, their favorite activity.

But Whole Foods is sincere about its ethics. Organic food may not be more nutritious than processed food, but it takes less toll on the land, introduces less petroleum and insecticides into the growing process. Organic cows have better lives before slaughter, actually getting time to enjoy being cows. Organic pigs are not docked or kept in miserable pens prior to slaughter.

Paying extra at Whole Foods may be a conscience-salving exercise for we of the gray pony tail set, but it has real benefits for hired help, animals, the land. and the farmers who raise our food.

In Whole Foods I find that not all is good or wholesome, that we are making compromises. But unlike a Democratic Party “compromise”, Whole Foods does not demand that we give up all our values, and I shop there willingly knowing that both the right and the left have gained something in the process.

And, we can afford it. That’s a stickler.