Growers and Grocers

I attended the long anticipated debate/cage match/love fest between author Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods Market (and one of the founders). After a public exchange of letters (links here) following the publication of Pollan’s book, a public face-to-face was set up. Originally planned for a 700 seat auditorium, after tickets sold out in a few hours, and so the organizers moved it to a 2,000 seat auditorium. That venue also sold out quickly.

I was impressed by Mackey’s passion for the business of selling food. Unlike some CEOs, who are simply steering a ship until a better offer comes along, Mackey knows the industry from top to bottom and seems to love being part of it. He was also quite honest, as CEOs go, generally talking in plain English, and never digressing into corporate speak (e.g., “To answer that question, let me just say that we’re seeking synergies between brand loyalty core competency and positive feedback revenue enhancement restructuring.”

The initiatives he described were promising, such as new labels for artisan foods (one label for food produced nearby, and one food from far away), a $30 million venture capital fund that will help create or sustain artisan food producers, and the Whole Trade Guarantee, which will act as an enhanced fair trade program. All of these programs require funds and effort, and I wonder if Wall Street will lose patience with Whole Foods’ long term thinking and start demanding better quarterly numbers.

In this post, I’ll cover some of the parts that I found to be interesting and thought-provoking. For a comprehensive review of the event, try Bonnie Powell’s article in the UC Berkeley News.

“Organic”

Mackey bemoaned the fact that the current organic labels are about prohibitions: do not use chemical pesticides, do not use chemical fertilizers, and so forth. But the standards do not account for positive behavior, like ensuring humane care of animals, just treatment of workers, or how soil fertility is maintained. For example, pork from a CAFO that severely abuses the pigs can get the same organic label as a farm that ‘lets the pigs be pigs’ by allowing them full access to pasture and forest (note, however, that the pastured pork would be eligible for additional labels, some of which are explained at the Humane Society).

Mackey said that the organic label is still important, but that Whole Foods wants to increase the amount of information on the organic label through a multi-star rating system. For example, a huge industrial feedlot milk operation that follows organic guidelines but doesn’t allow the cows access to pasture might get one star, while a small farm where the animals and the workers are treated very well and have full access to pasture might get four or five stars. This is definitely a welcome proposal, and ideally the rating system can be transferred to a credible third party so that all producers can be rated, instead of simply labeled.

Late in the conversation, Pollan asked Mackey if perhaps the publicity (and criticism from Pollan, among others) of Wal-Mart’s entry into the organic market has encouraged Whole Foods to look beyond the organic label to the next steps, like consideration of animal welfare and local foods. Mackey’s answer was that continuous striving to the next level is an indispensable part of the Whole Foods mission. That sounds great, but we’ll see if consumers and Wall Street agree. (Mackey seems to be very cognizant of the fickleness of grocery shoppers — ‘leasing customers for a day’ is how he described it.)

Food Miles

One of Mackey’s slides cited a calculation from Singer and Mason’s The Ethics of What We Eat that for a SF Bay Area resident, the carbon dioxide emissions and fossil fuel consumption are lower for rice grown in Bangladesh and shipped across the ocean than for rice grown in California and trucked across the Central Valley. This assertion prompted a few disapproving yells from the audience (one of the few negative outbursts of the night). At first glance it seems unlikely — a several thousand mile journey vs. a one-hundred mile journey — but if one considers the entire production cycle, I can see how the results turn out that way. California rice growing is highly mechanized, requires large fertilizer inputs and generally requires a complex irrigation network. Rice growing in parts of Asia, in contrast, is less mechanized, uses the natural rain cycles for irrigation, and goods movement by ship is actually far more fuel efficient than trucking. But then again, by tweaking the input variable slightly, one can significantly alter the final answer.

However, there are many other issues to consider besides carbon dioxide and fossil fuel consumption: for example, the concentration of air pollution around ports, transparency (it is a lot easier to find out how California rice is grown than how the Bangladeshi product is grown), local laws (how many pesticides that Bangladeshis use banned in the U.S.) and preserving traditional foods (traditional French cheeses, for example). In addition, Mackey pointed out that as much energy can be used cooking the food or driving a car to pick up groceries, as producing or transporting the food to the market.

Complicating the Issue

Pollan mentioned that many people have asked him “What should I eat?” When writing The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he made a conscious decision to not write a “what to eat” chapter for O.D. because he wanted to complicate the issue. He wanted to encourage thinking and probing, and believes that the process of examining is perhaps as important as the final choice (as part of an evolutionary process).

Transparency

Letting consumers know more about where their food comes from (i.e., transparency in the food system) was one part of Pollan’s ideal food system (which he provided in response to a question from Mackey. Other parts were “grow less corn” and “biodiversity” in the marketplace). He gave the example of a Danish experiment in which customers could bring a package of food to a scanner and then obtain more information about how the product was produced, such as photos of the farm. Late last year, Treehugger had a short post about using cell phones in Japan to obtain food information using a cell phone which have built-in QR code readers. This sounds like a good project for Google to undertake with their billions.

Spending on Food

Pollan said that one of the important “cultural contributions” of Whole Foods to the evolution of the food system is to persuade Americans to spend more money on food (Americans currently spend about 2/3 as much on food as the French, Japanese, British or Italians, according to the ERS/USDA International Food Consumption Patterns Data Set), and to start thinking more about quality than about quantity. Whole Foods might also be encouraging consumers to think about ethical issues.

To watch a webcast of the event, click on this link. There are also plenty of archived interviews with Michael Pollan on-line (NPR’s Science Friday, or NPR’s Fresh Air), Pollan’s website collects his newspaper and magazine writings, and Mackey has a blog at the Whole Foods site.