The day will dawn when it isn't a two-hour trip each way to a Trader Joe's and then perhaps my supermarket loyalties will shift, although I'll still go the the farmer's market or local purveyors first.

Even cursory research gives us a pretty good picture of what is going on with conventional agri-business. Here in Maine the state just granted conventional farmers the right to grow a particular GMO corn. BT corn produces its own insecticide targeted toward a worm that can attack the ears. Of course, it also is toxic to a wide range of other insects and critters including monarch butterflies and a host of other beneficial organisms. Other patented GMO corn enables the plants to survive particular herbicides (patented by the same company), which are then applied to the fields in far higher doses than previously possible. Why it makes sense to shift agriculture toward a big business model where seed corn cannot be kept by farmers for planting next year due to intellectual property rights laws and where the recommended care of the crops means dumping loads more toxic chemicals on the land than previously possible without killing the crop seems rather short sighted.

When "tasty, convenient, or even novel" often mean Twinkies or Cocoa Puffs, and organic comes with the expectation that at least all of the ingredients are actually food rather than a blend of ingredients including various chemicals, choosing organic seems reasonable and prudent. When organic touts its health and environmental advantages it is simply using the same marketing practices as any other enterprise. If one wants healthier food and cares about protecting the environment they (we) might choose Newman's Own rather than Kraft when we reach for salads dressing. And if we then discover it tastes better we've found a new favorite brand.

I always love the way supporters of conventional agriculture and big business capitalism use the ways in which big organic does not completely live up to the utopian ideals of the most extreme supporters of organics as a reason to dismiss the entire enterprise. John MacKay has indeed made some stupid and unethical moves as Whole Foods CEO. Shareholders or the WFM Board might revolt and replace him with someone less controversial. Why, however, a company's CEO being less than heroically noble when seeking to build market share is either a surprise or reason to move ones business from WFM to Wal-Mart escapes me.

Posted by: Chris White on August 12, 2007 8:15 AM

Although my mother is American, she fed us growing up as if we we were French. She learned to cook from her French mother-in-law while being a stay-at-home mother in France for many years. I look at the emergence of organic grocery stores in the U.S. from my own perspective as a person with a French culinary upbringing. Therefore I value delicate flavors and textures and high-quality ingredients. I find the growth of Organic food stores as a generally good thing because they offer a higher quality product than your average grocery store, and have little by little improved the offerings at these cheaper stores. That being said, I still prefer products that are refined and industrially produced over those that proudly bill their organic/natural properties. Although the French (in my opinion) have unfounded fears about GMO's, Organic grocery stores make little sense over there. Their average "Intermarche", "Carrefour" or "Casino", the major boring grocery chains over a variety of highly processed food that is tastier and more wonderful than most of the organic brands I have tried, which I found to be quite unexceptional. That's why I prefer stores that specialize in importing food from abroad rather than touting its smug message as a somehow more healthy and socially responsible store...Central Market rules!!!

Posted by: corbusier on August 12, 2007 9:49 AM

Now you have to understand that Donald is living in a locale in which even a Safeway might physically resemble a Whole Foods so the visual difference may not always be that great i.e. being satisfied with the supermarket in an upscale Seattle neighborhood implies no indifference to pleasant surroundings.

Otherwise I took his comments as meant jokingly -- humorously provocative -- as no one could possibly not care about whether they eat poisoned food -- even if they pretend to. He's just a skeptic, which is not a bad thing.

Posted by: Seattle Man on August 12, 2007 12:14 PM

I'm trying to wrap my mind around how anyone "fed as if we were French rather American" ends up with preference for highly processed food. Even more curious is a preference for stores that specialize in importing food from abroad over those touting the amount of organic foods they carry. Of course, there is the internal contradiction that food imported from many EU countries is already more organic and unlikely to contain GMO ingredients because those countries have been slower to open their food production to high tech innovations whose long term benefits remain murky.

I'm also curious whether those who enjoy tasty refined and industrially produced foods are somehow managing to avoid all of the detrimental effects of that our current diet can lead to; obesity, heart problems, allergies, diabetes and on the list goes. Or whether they simply ignore all data on those effects as being distorted propaganda from government bureaucrats trying to scare us. Although, I have to say, I can only remember a handful of boys in my junior high with boobies, today I see packs of them roaming the mall on the lookout for their next sugar fix, wishing they'd get trainer bras and stop jiggling their mutant mammaries at the crowd.

Posted by: Chris White on August 12, 2007 12:44 PM

The most organic thing you can buy is a diamond, followed shortly by coal and gasoline. All "organic" means is "having carbon present in its molecular structure". Organic chemistry is not the study of food at Whole Foods, as anyone who's ever taken it can tell you...

I've always wondered where the marketing term "organic" came from?

Posted by: Foobarista on August 12, 2007 3:24 PM

Foobarista:
from [internal] organs that's going to be affected? From [musical instrument] organs that'll flow heavenly melodies all around you?

Posted by: Tat on August 12, 2007 6:49 PM

Seattle Man stole much of my thunder, as a good % of supermarkets throughout the Seattle area are pretty upscale with a diverse range of goods. My complaint is they often separate organics and "health food" in their own section away from other similar products on the main aisles.

As for organics, it is mostly a scam. Mushrooms are more toxic than your average non-organic vegetable. According to Dr. Bruce Ames of the University of California-Berkeley, the inventor of the Ames test which is the test that gauges levels of carcinogens:

"We get more carcinogens in a cup of coffee than we do in all the pesticide residues you eat in a day."

Also, organics are more land intensive than regular crops. It is the suburban sprawl of the food world.

Posted by: AP on August 12, 2007 7:30 PM

I find myself thinking about some of what appear to me to be internal contradictions between positions taken by Donald and others here at 2BH. Specifically I find myself comparing the anti-modernist stance vis a vis art and architecture and the nativist stance on immigration and culture, then attempting to figure out how the philosophy underlying those positions gibe with a pro-agribusiness as usual stance that is at best skeptical of the organic-slow food-local farmers' market movement in agriculture.

When a late nineteenth century portrait artist is highlighted the message is 'here's an artist who followed time honored traditions to make familiarly pleasing images that people like, isn't that better than supposed aesthetic progress for the sake of modernity?' Yet, when the 'doing it the old fashioned way, back to the land', agricultural movement is discussed the fruits (pun intended) of their return to traditional farming are scorned as some kind of leftist hippie scam.

Even if we set aside for a moment the global trade component (all those apples from New Zealand and bananas from Costa Rica) big agribusiness is about as 'modernist' as it gets. Virtually all the GMO tinkering being done is to create produce that will survive the modern, highly mechanized care, harvesting and distributions system, or to make crops that can withstand the extreme chemotherapy of massive use of herbicides and pesticides, not to increase the taste or health qualities of the food. And it also means that a couple of gene markers identify a seed as being patent protected, even if that seed was the result of cross pollination in a field three miles away. [Goggle Monsanto lawsuits sometime.] Big agribusiness also thrives on the use of semi-skilled labor at the lowest wage possible. By now we should all have a pretty good idea where the ingredients in those microwavable frozen Stouffers Beef Stroganoff dinners and Cap'n Crunch cereals come from.

So, can any of the Blowhard commentators who dismiss modernism in all its many guises and want to close the borders explain how those positions are consistent with a dismissal of organic foods and local farmers' markets?

Posted by: Chris White on August 13, 2007 9:48 AM

I see things like Whole Foods as the New Urbanism of agriculture. Whenever one pops up, people flock to it like mad and their brand loyalty is almost messianic. I use this analogy because New Urbanism has been touted much on this here blog, and I really don't understand the point of this post. So you went into a store you'd never been in and saw strange things that were unfamiliar to you, wherein your head began spinning until the welcome sight of some French's mustard coaxed you out of your reverie. I mean, what is with these dirty hippies, being industrious and all and coming up with their own brands without notifying you? The nerve.

I don't mean to be rude, but this comes off as nothing more than old fogeyism. I suppose it has sparked some more thoughtful comments from both sides of the aisle. Pun intended.

As for the topic at hand, I'd shop more at Whole Foods if it was cheaper. And closer. One is opening up a few miles away, so we'll see.

Posted by: the patriarch on August 13, 2007 10:10 AM

I agree that is interesting, CW, although the reverse could be said about you (and me). Why do us modernist loving art fans hate the modernist geniuses running big ag? We should be appreciating their deconstruction of the food form.

Posted by: the patriarch on August 13, 2007 11:09 AM

What I don't like about Whole Foods is that half the stuff there is processed. It was made from better ingredients I guess but it's still dubiously related to food. Also the vibe is creepy, as many other people have said.

What I do like are farmer's markets. Buying from local farmers means you get fresher food, for one thing. Also, they may not follow all the rules you need to be organic--they use conventional fertilizers/pesticides, maybe--but because they're necessarily smaller, they're not growing their foods in giant hydroponic tanks and they're not splicing lizard genes into your tomatoes. As a result, the food tastes better. I couldn't explain why but it is so.

My mother is European and she has totally embraced the organic/whole/local culture, because it is what she grew up with, without having any special words for it. In Europe they've done a better job of preserving traditional farming methods, so my grandmother for example still buys her bread from this one old dude in the next town who bakes a bunch of bread every morning. The last few decades in America are the aberration, not the ORGANIC movement.

Posted by: BP on August 13, 2007 11:38 AM

The patriarch - as you noted on another thread, I (and you) DO appreciate good traditional art, we do not ascribe to a 'modernism only' aesthetic. Furthermore, I have never tried to defend all modernism or all abstraction or, for that matter, all food labeled "organic" as being necessarily superior solely by virtue of those definitions. In fact, it is the vehement insistence on there being one correct aesthetic that causes us to react as we do to certain comments. So, I don't see any real contradiction with my distrust of big agribusiness when it comes to GMO corn and the like.

As I noted above and in nearly every food related thread, my hierarchy of preference is local organic, local conventional, big organic, big conventional. I am more likely to buy a warm baguette (made with processed white flour & without an organic certificate) from a local baker than a loaf of organic whole wheat bread from who knows where at Whole Foods which will in turn beat out Wonderbread at the Safeway any time. We eat our own home grown organic tomatoes for a month or so (I just finished a tomato sandwich made with an heirloom Zebra tomato ... now THAT'S what a tomato is supposed to taste like!) and augment that with organic tomatoes from the farmers market. the rest of the year we eat very few fresh tomatoes and those are generally from a local purveyor who uses a hydroponic system in a greenhouse. Conventional supermarket tomatoes now have virtually no taste and barely feel like tomatoes. They are, however red and pretty and don't bruise too easily.

As BP notes, "the last few decades in America are the aberration, not the ORGANIC movement."

Posted by: Chris White on August 13, 2007 1:44 PM

I was joking, CW.

Posted by: the patriarch on August 13, 2007 3:04 PM

I thought you were, but one can never be to careful around here ... and it gave me an opening to tout heirloom tomatoes. How much more traditional can you get than an heirloom tomato?

Posted by: Chris White on August 13, 2007 4:55 PM

I recently had a pretty similar experience that I blogged about here.

Posted by: Ilkka Kokkarinen on August 13, 2007 5:18 PM

So let's go past theory and get down to basics. What did you have to eat tonight? How much did you enjoy it? Was it an average meal or a special occasion dinner? What, if anything do you know about the origin of all the ingredients? Can you track it passed the retail market?

We had:

Eggplant (my way of frying slices uses cornmeal, egg and salt), rice, tomato sauce with carrots and summer squash, and corn on the cob. I had a beer and my wife lemonade.

We thought it was tasty, filling and very satisfying. My (gluten and dairy challenged) wife has been away for a week on an island where she ate more meat, dairy and wheat than she should out of politeness and necessity with minor health consequences, she was extremely pleased with tonight's 'comfort food' supper.

The rice, cornmeal, carrots and lemonade were all "commercial organic" from Whole Foods. The rice was from Lundberg Family Farms, a CA based company; the lemonade was from the company 'Santa Cruz', also CA I presume. I don't really know the sources for the cornmeal and carrots.

The corn was local convention also purchased at Whole Foods. Gillespie Farms is about fifteen miles from us and we sometimes go there to buy directly from them.

The egg was from Sparrow Farm, a local organic free-range operation; the eggplant and summer squash both organic from Fishbowl Farm (with whom we have a CSA share) & both selected at our local farmers' market. I won't say we're truly friends sharing intimate details about our lives, but we're on a first name basis with the farmer.

The salt was Maine Sea Salt given to us by a houseguest. And the tomato was a big heirloom variety we have going by the front door. The tomato plant came from the farmers market.

Posted by: Chris White on August 13, 2007 7:09 PM






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