The Whole Dilemma: John Mackey Debates Michael Pollan

Last year, Michael Pollan published a bold critique of Whole Foods in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma, taking the natural foods giant to task for selling what he dubbed industrial organic food.

Exhibit A: a limp bunch of organic asparagus flown in from South America rather than the local foods burgeoning at places like farmers' markets.

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey responded, thoroughly engaging his critic in a spirited debate. (Somewhere in there Mackey also handed Pollan a $25 gift certificate for the asparagus &#8212 not sure if Pollan spent it, but we'll check it out).

This was all followed closely in foodie circles, with the back-and-forth discussion at both Pollan's and Mackey's web sites.

Now, the two are back, meeting Tuesday evening at the University of California Berkeley, where Pollan teaches in the journalism program, for a "discussion" about the past, present and future of food. The event proved so popular it had to be moved to a larger hall to accommodate the audience. Now it's sold out.

It should be entertaining. The inside word is that Mackey will be provocative - but it's unlear what that means.

U.C. Berkeley will be running a live Webcast of the event here.

A new contributor to Chews Wise will also be blogging from Berkeley so stay tuned for our take on it.
- Samuel Fromartz

Whole Foods Eats Oats

Whole Foods decided to have Wild Oats for its latest meal, gobbling up its distant rival in a bid to stave off competition from the Safeways, Giants and Wal-Marts of the world.

Short story: Organics and natural foods are hot, Wild Oats has been adrfit, and another player could have swallowed it up and created more formidible competition for Whole Foods.

What none of the news stories note, however, is that there was a traditional antipathy between these two companies, more than a competitive rivalry and something closer to extreme distaste. One could imagine that this very smart merger could have happened years earlier, without it.

The October 2006 exit of former Wild Oats CEO Perry Odak (who came from Ben & Jerry's in 2001) cleared the way for Whole Foods to make a merger overture - something that was aided by Wild Oats continued inability to gain significant traction.

Although Wild Oats had remodled stores and opened new ones - including, finally, a large store to compete with Whole Foods in its home turf of Boulder, Colorado - growth never really kicked the way it had at Whole Foods. It was always a distant second.

Wild Oats's sales per square foot - a typical industry measurement - are only 49 percent of Whole Food's. That means the typical customers visiting Whole Foods are buying twice as much stuff.

Downsides? Merging the culture of two companies who have a history of bad blood. But then again, "it's just bizness" and I imagine the Oaties will get along fine in Whole Foods.

Who Sucks Energy: Conventional or Organic Farming?

The London Telegraph dutifully reported the results of a study by the Manchester Business School, comparing energy use in organic and conventional farming systems. In a life cycle assessment - farm to fork - it found that many organic crops use more energy.

The energy needed to grow organic tomatoes is 1.9 times that of conventional methods, the study found. Organic milk requires 80 per cent more land to produce than conventional milk and creates 20 per cent more carbon dioxide, it says.

One note of caution: this was a government commissioned study, not one published in a peer reviewed journal. One of the longest-running studies comparing conventional and organic ag methods was published in Science in 2002. This Swiss study compared organic and conventional farming systems over 22 years and it found that organic farming used dramatically less energy. Why? Because one-third of the energy in agriculture goes into the production of pesticides and fertilzers.

The Research Institute for Organic Agriculture (FiBL) found that while organic systems tend to use slightly more energy in tractors and fuel, they use dramatically less energy overall.

Since crop yields were considerably higher in the conventional systems, the difference in energy needed to produce a crop unit was only 19 percent lower in the organic systems. Per area unit this difference accounted for 30–50 percent. Most of the difference was due to external production factors.

Organic farming needs only slightly more energy for infrastructure and machinery as well as for fuel, whilst markedly lower energy input for the production of fertilizers and pesticides.

Here's a graph of energy use, with K2 referring to conventional systems and O2 to organic.

<img src="http://www.fibl.org/english/research/soil-sciences/dok/img/direct-indirect_energy.jpg" width="315" height="287"

That said, once shipping and distance is taken into account, the picture gets muddy quickly. Do heated hothouses and local transport use more energy than unheated greenhouses in the south where the food is shipped longer distances? There's no easy answer to these questions.

What the Manchester study appears to do is to look at the entire lifecyle, but even the executive summary is filled with qualifiers about the actual lack of studies on life cycle assessment. Secondly, it admits that the analysis does not take into account benefits of organic farming such as biodiversity.

The full study is here:
http://www.defra.gov.uk/science/project_data/DocumentLibrary/EV02007/EV02007_4601_FRP.pdf

Organic Sexuality

"PASA includes farmers who see the growing of nutritious food as an end in itself, not just a way to eke a living from a patch of dirt." - Kim Miller, PASA president 2000-2007

This past weekend, I was in State College, Pennsylvania, for the annual Farming for the Future Conference, the largest sustainable agriculture gathering on the East Coast and among the biggest in the country, with about 1,700 attending.

The conference was organized by the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture and drew all sorts of farmers and artisans out of the hills and gulleys: from Amish draft-horsesmen to biodiesel proponents, from grass-fed beef ranchers to organic herb farmers, from bee keepers and mushroom culitvators to back-woods denizens of hand hoes and makers of tomato sauce, organic flour and artisanal cheese.

There wasn't an agribusinesses in sight.

I participated in a couple of panels, on the growth of organics and where this movement is headed. As might be expected, there were misgivings about the onward corporatization of organics and concern that the label would be devalued. At the same time, farmers expressed a strong desire to protect the "meaning" of organic, fight to maintain the integrity of the organic label, and welcome corporate players, if they played by the rules. Well, that last point might be overstating it - there was a clear distrust of the mainstream food companies.

One of the more enlighting talks of the conference came from Michael Ableman,who delivered a keynote on the need to elevate the recognition of farmers and draw new ones into the fold. He also talked about ways to better faciliate the farmer & consumer connection (one thing this blog aims to do as well).

His solution - don't hit people over the head with a sense of all that's gone wrong, rather entice them with what can go right. For consumers, that might come through the food and an understanding of how it was grown and who grew it.

He also talked about the need to attract younger farmers to the land, perhaps with a sexual enticement. Ummm, not actual, but building on the idea - as one bumper sticker from the 60's put it - that "organic farmers are more fertile." Sexuality is humming through the farm, not just among the animals, but among the bugs, the seeds, in the soil itself at a microbrial level. He drew out this metaphore to many laughs, but made the point that there was a richness, even, at the extreme, an eroticism in this relationship with the land. Isn't this what marketers have known all along? Sell the sizzle? Actually, I've met quite a lot of young farm interns who matched up during their apprentice years and went on to start farms of their own.

The other interesting thing - aside from the workshops on how to butcher an animal, make your own sauerkraut, start a farmers' market - was the absolute buzz around biodiesel.

Recall, this meeting is the epitome of the do-it-yourself set and finally, in energy, biodiesel gives these farmers one more opportunity to cut their ties with The Man - Big Oil. Long live the french fry!

One farmer, though, who picks up gallons of the stuff every week, said he's around the fry oil so much, belching out of his tractors and trucks, that he has sworn off fries. "I won't eat 'em," he said. But that's probably not a bad thing.

I suggested, for variety, he try fry oil from a Chinese restaurant.

"That's a good idea, except when you get frying oil from a Chinese restaurant the trucks never seem to get full," he replied.

Ba-Da-Boom.

This kind of summed up the ethos of the conference: a "Buy Fresh, Buy Local" Toyota Prius.-

Echoes at Eco-Farm

At the Eco-Farm conference last week in Asilomar, on the coast of California in Monterey, the sun was shining. For one day at least, then it began drizzling and I didn’t mind being indoors listening to a host of engaging speakers and panelists.

A theme kept arising - where are we headed? It’s a pertinent question for organic and sustainable agriculture, looking back over 30 years of progress with both pride and misgivings. Common themes were voiced and common quesions about whether the movement was being corrupted by the mainstreaming of organic food.

Michael Sligh of Rural Advancement Foundation International, a longtime participant in this movement, talked up the concept of “multistreaming” as opposed to “mainstreaming.” It’s a good concept, since that’s where we’re headed - food with various values and characteristics sold in a variety of ways and channels. There’s no mainstream these days, just ever more segmented markets which is why the be-all-things-to-all-people retailers are struggling. Small and focused is beautiful, and profitable.

My message - or the one I tried to convey in a plenary - was that a lot of energy gets expended on anxieties about bigness. I think more work needs to be put into “What’s Next?” Whether it’s a more vibrant local scene, social justice, fair trade - whatever it is. But judging by the number of people on hand, I’d have to say those issues are being discussed in a way that will create the next wave in this movement.

Wal-Mart Unmoved

Wal-Mart has issued a response to the Cornucopia complaint about its labeling practices. "Wal-Mart officials say that the company has done nothing wrong," according to Business Week.

The company notes it has has more than 2,000 locations that offer up to 200 organic selections, in addition to thousands of nonorganic offerings. It called the mislabeling an "isolated incident."

But many retailers sell far more than 200 organic offerings but seem to get the labeling right. Why doesn't Wal-Mart simply admit it made a mistake and plege to correct it? Instead, they are facing two potential investigations on mislabeling by the state of Wisconsin and the USDA.

Organic but not Natural?

Center for Science in the Public Interest, the nutritional watchdog, has said it withdrew its threatened lawsuit against Pepsi after the company announced it was dropping an "All Natural" claim for 7up.

At issue, the use of high fructose corn syrup, which CSPI notes "is made through a complex chemical industrial process in which corn starch molecules are enzymatically reassembled into glucose and fructose molecules."

A couple of years ago, a company tried to make "organic high fructose corn syrup" by using the same process with organic corn. I heard the company halted work due to a lack of demand, but have also heard annecdotally that organic HFCS is available from a European company. (I have not confirmed this).

This became an issue a couple of years back, when the USDA gave a blanket approval for "food contact substances" - some 500+ FDA-allowed chemicals - for use in organic production. One was styrene-divinylbenzene, necessary to manufacture HFCS. The issue though never got on the front burner because no one came out with a product with Organic HFCS.

Presumably, if a company uses this sweetener with a natural label they will come on CSPI's radar screen, being forced to argue either that Organic HFCS is "natural" or to justify that an organic product could be "un-natural." This will prove a very interesting debate ... perhaps too interesting, which is why no one yet has tried to sweeten an organic product with organic high frustose corn syrup.

Seedy

I was speaking to one organic seed company rep recently, who told me they source no corn seed from the Midwest because it's likely contaminated with GMO - that is with genetically modified seed.

I also recently came across this Nation article by Lisa Hamilton, who says that virtually no corn seed in the US is GMO free. But what the article points out is that there are in fact traditional breeding techniques - through mating one plant with another - that could insert a shield to prevent GMO contamination. The only problem is, that method is now patented too.

The issue here is the privatization of seed, which is one major problem I see with sending GMO seeds to the Third World. The farmers there will be tied into the seed and chemical companies, like any addict. They will also need to invest in chemicals and irrigation networks, which only concentrates farming and takes more people off the land and into cities.

Hello USDA? Check Up on Wal-Mart

The Cornucopia Instiute, a small farm advocacy group, has filed a complaint charging that Wal-Mart is passing off non organic food as organic. At the very least, the retailing giant may be causing consumer confusion if you take a look at the pictures Cornucopia has posted on its web site.

So what's the big deal?

Well, one of the reasons organic regulations were written was to make sure that consumers got what they were paying for. There's a whole system of inspections, certifications and labeling requirements that each producer and retailer must meet in order to sell organic food. Now, a retailer doesn't have to be certified to sell organic food, but they are required by law to label the stuff correctly (among other things). You want the fine print, check it out on the USDA web site here. The bottom line: mislabeling can lead to a $10,000 fine per incident.

Although Cornucopia complained to the USDA several weeks ago, the USDA apparently took no action. Nor did Wal-Mart, although Cornucopia also fired off a letter to Bentonville about the labeling issue. With everyone apparently asleep, Cornucopia - pitbulls that they are - racheted up the action by filing legal action.

Now, it would be easy to cry fraud. More accurately, it's probably a case of ignorant stocking clerks and managers slapping the organic signage on any and all products. Not too keen - but hey, that's what you get in the absence of adequate training about the organic marketplace.

So two things needs to happen. The USDA needs to check this out. And Wal-Mart needs to take some corrective action. They might be able to change the world by embracing sustainability, but first, they've got to get it right.

No wonder some organic types are likening the company's entry in the market as the arrival of Wal-Martians.