Pollan says health-care reform will fail unless we change the way we eat

From The Grist

NPR’s Guy Raz: What if health care is overhauled and it doesn’t change the American diet in any way?
Michael Pollan: We’ll go broke. If we don’t get a handle on these health care costs, the new system or the old system, we’ll go broke. And that’s why I think that really food is the elephant in the room when we’re talking about health care.

First in The New York Times last week and then on NPR this weekend, Michael Pollan made that point that if we want to fix our health-care system, we have to fix our food system.

From his op-ed in the Times:

[T]he fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. …
That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry. …
Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

But even with that grim diagnosis, Pollan is optimistic about the future, arguing that if insurance companies are required to accept everyone, as called for by even weak health-reform legislation now in Congress, then the insurance industry will become a powerful ally in fight for better food and against the agribusiness lobby.

Grist’s Tom Laskawy is less optimistic, noting that the poor and the elderly—the most unhealthy groups—are likely to keep getting their health coverage from the government (Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA) and not the insurance industry.

Still, both Pollan and Laskawy are encouraged by New York City’s new anti-soda ad campaign, which Laskawy says is supported by health insurance companies.  Will we see more such public-health campaigns around the country, no matter what happens with health-care reform in Washington, D.C.?

Here’s an ad from NYC’s campaign:

I say low fat milk is as bad a choice as the soda…both are products of corn!    Eat grass fed meat and only eat dairy if it’s organic and straight from the cow!

The Voice of Reason Concerning the Whole Foods Boycott

Michael Bluejay’s site has long been a favorite of mine. I don’t think there is a better blog out there that covers how to conserve electricity. Following is what he wrote about the Whole Foods Boycott.  Now, frankly, I do not shop at Whole Foods for many reasons.  I support local business as much as possible. I realize some folks in some areas of the country have no choices, in Jacksonville, Fl, we do.  I support businesses who keep the money in our community, I support those who treat their employees well, I support those who buy locally as much as possible and I support those businesses who have honest, open corporate practices such as Publix, who do an amazing amount of community service and also truly care about their customers.

I do not support Winn Dixie because of the horrible way they treat their employees; of this I know about personally after working as a Food Service Manager with them.

I do not support Native Sun because of their dishonesty and the way they treat their employees.

The only health food stores in Jacksonville that I do support are Grassroots, Bio-max and The Good Earth.  I have long supported Southern Nutrition but their mostly empty shelves nowadays have made me give up on them. Grassroots is by far my favorite, it has an old fashioned, homey feel to it, it is in way cool 5 Points…and best of all, it’s a great, well stocked store by people who know tier stuff. 

But, back to what Michael has to say about the whole thing..I have to agree.

Whole Foods Market: What’s wrong with Whole Foods?

Whole Foods Market does some good things. For starters, they practically created the modern market for organic foods single-handedly. Organics would likely still be hard to find and a lot more expensive (rather than a little more expensive) were it not for their efforts. Whole Foods also requires its suppliers to meet standards for humane treatment of farm animals, which has greatly improved the lives of millions of creatures. They also support the Fair Trade movement and have a more democratic workplace than can be found in just about any other organization of its size. So giving credit where it’s due, Whole Foods has often been a force for good.

But just because a company sells natural foods doesn’t mean it can do no wrong. Many of Whole Foods’ actions have been controversial, especially where their labor practices are concerned. As the Texas Observer put it, "People shop at Whole Foods not just because it offers organic produce and natural foods, but because it claims to run its business in a way that demonstrates a genuine concern for the community, the environment, and the ‘whole planet,’ in the words of its motto. In reality, Whole Foods has gone on a corporate feeding frenzy in recent years, swallowing rival retailers across the country…. The expansion is driven by a simple and lucrative business strategy: high prices and low wages." (1)

We’re not suggesting that anyone stop shopping at Whole Foods and we’re not calling for any kind of boycott (see sidebar at left) — we just want consumers to realize that even a company that puts on a socially-responsible face doesn’t always live up to its own hype.

Here are fourteen questionable aspects of Whole Foods Market:

(1) Aggressive monopolization. Tons of independent co-ops throughout the country don’t exist any more because Whole Foods bought them out. Whole Foods also absorbed all its significant competitors (Wild Oats, Bread & Circus, Fresh Fields, Bread of Life, Merchant of Vino, Nature’s Heartland, Food for Thought, Harry’s Farmers Market, Mrs. Gooch’s Natural Foods Markets, and U.K.-based Fresh & Wild). (2)  They’ve thus created a near-monopoly in the natural foods grocery business. Consumers are better served by a diversity of stores, but Whole Foods has been trying to wipe out the competition — and has been quite successful at doing so.

(2) Failure to support farmworkers. When United Farm Worker activists passed out literature at an Austin Whole Foods Market, Whole Foods called the cops and had them arrested. Embarrassed by the public outcry, Whole Foods then promised to support the UFW’s grape boycott, but then broke that promise when it moved the store a couple of blocks away, saying the agreement applied only to the old location. They also produced deceptive literature for their customers blasting the farmworkers group and describing farmworker conditions as being no problem at all. About this, the UFW says, "Several major cases have been tried in states such as North Carolina and Florida during recent years where it was found that workers were being kept by their employers in a state of virtual slavery. This is worlds away from the ideal and naïve (and disingenuous) information put out by Whole Foods." (3,4)

(3) Fierceless devotion to profit. It’s not unusual for a business to try to maximize profit. But when the business puts on a socially-responsible face, consumers have the hope that the business will put "Doing the Right Thing" above "Making More Money". That’s not always the case at Whole Foods. It’s precisely why Whole Foods swallows its competitors, sells certain questionable products, and keeps wages as low as possible. Common Dreams says, "A closer look at the company’s business practices and Mackey’s ideas about business and society reveals a vision not that different from a McDonald’s or a Wal-Mart. In fact, the Whole Foods business model is more or less the standard stuff of Fortune 500 ambition. This is a vision of mega-chain retailing that involves strategic swallowing up (or driving out of business) of smaller retail competitors. It is a business model that objectively complements the long-term industrialization of organics (that is, large-scale corporate farms) over small family farms. It is also a vision in which concerns about social responsibility do not necessarily apply where less publicly visible company suppliers are concerned. Subsidiaries of cigarette manufacturers (for example, Altria, owner of Kraft’s organic products) or low-wage exploiters of minority workers (such as California Bottling Co., Inc., makers of Whole Foods’ s private-label water) are apparently welcome partners in this particular eco-corporate version of ‘the sustainable future.’" (2,5)

(4) Refusal to carry only turtle-safe shrimp. When Earth Island Institute asked Whole Foods to carry only shrimp caught in nets certified to protect endangered sea turtles, Whole Foods flatly refused. (1)

(5) CEO posing as someone else on the Internet. For seven years, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey posted on the Yahoo Finance board about his company and its competitors while pretending to be someone else. By trashing rival Wild Oats, their stock price could drop and he could buy them out for less money. Mackey also had the gall to anonymously praise himself. ("I like Mackey’s haircut. I think he looks cute!") (6)  He didn’t stop there: He also criticized specific employees, under the cover of anonymity. Daily Kos said of this, "The very idea of the founder and CEO of a major national corporation hiding behind a pseudonym to lambaste one of his own hourly wage earners on an online message board says something about the personal moral integrity of union-busting executives." (7)  After being discovered, he was unrepentant, trying to justify his behavior in a long blog post, and making a point to say specifically that his actions weren’t unethical. (8, 9)

(6) Poor working conditions. Workers organizing for a union in Madison said, "The ridiculously high turnover rate, wages that are lower than the industry standard, pervasive lack of respect, constant understaffing, absence of a legally-binding grievance procedure, and other poor and unfair labor practices-all of which have led to widespread low morale-highlight the simple fact that workers ultimately have no say in the terms and conditions of their employment at any Whole Foods Market-not just Madison. Workers are not recognized or appreciated for their contributions. Instead, Whole Foods relies on worker apathy and lack of investment in their jobs to keep turnover high, and for the most part, wages, benefits, and other working conditions poor. This environment should be unacceptable for any workplace." (1)

(7) Anti-Union. Whole Foods is so fiercely anti-union it has actually fired employees who were trying to organize one. As Common Dreams says, "Whole Foods matches Wal-Mart in its reputation for corporate anti-unionism. It’s a hostility rooted in a management whose ‘core values’ are intrinsically patrician and antidemocratic. The latter qualities were revealed in all their dismal hypocrisy most forcefully in 2002 when employees of the chain’s Madison, Wisconsin, store voted to unionize and join the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). In a story that caught the attention of the New York Times and other media, Mackey had what might be described as a New Age temper tantrum, treating the specter of collective bargaining at one of his stores as a disaster of almost unspeakable proportions….The yearlong effort to defeat Madison’s first organizing drive revealed Mackey as a "socially enlightened" poseur, a New Age business type who talks about love and ecological footprints and other enlightened things, but who turns to the hard boot of corporate scare tactics and disinformation when confronted with a group of employees who dare to assert their democratic right to self-representation." (1,10)
And "In 2006, after truck drivers working at its San Francisco-based distribution center voted to unionize with the Teamsters. The company fired two of the drivers, altered its sick-leave policy, froze wage increases, refused to provide information to the union that was necessary to negotiate a contract, and ‘harassed and disciplined employees,’ found NLRB investigators, who concluded that ‘Whole Foods engaged in a variety of [illegal] retaliatory measures to discourage union activity.’ An out-of-court settlement required Whole Foods to reinstate the employees and reverse some of its policies." (20)

(8) Low Wages. Whole Foods has been widely criticized for keeping wages low. "Companies such as Whole Foods or other non-union chain competitors are paying many of their hourly employees what in late 1960s dollars would be equivalent to the minimum wage or below." (1) And they can certainly afford to pay more. Whole Foods stores bring in $800 per square foot in a year, double the industry average. (11)

(9) Refusal to come clean on the use of GMO’s and toxic chemicals in its products. "Whole Foods is still not fully transparent about the use of GMOs in store-brand products, and has ignored shareholder requests for information on the use of toxic chemicals in products like baby bottles that are sold in stores." (12)  Whole Foods also asked shareholders to vote against a resolution asking Whole Foods to report about endocrine disruptors and other toxic chemicals in its products. (13)

(10) Selling dangerous food. You might think that with a company that champions healthy eating, anything in their store would be safe to eat. You’d be wrong. Whole Foods sold fish so toxic in mercury that one customer’s blood levels had to be reported to the Center for Disease Control. (17) Whole Foods didn’t start identifying potentially mercury-laden fish in its California stores until the government forced them to do so. Even then, a quarter of Whole Foods stores failed to display proper signage as required by law. (18)

(11) Misleading shoppers about its support of small farmers. Signs at Whole Foods Market say, "Help the Small Farmer — Buying organic supports the small, family farmers that make up a large percentage of organic food producers." What they’re not telling you is that while the number of family farmers is a large percentage of the total, overwhelming majority of organic output comes from corporate farms. As Slate put it: "There are a lot of small, family-run organic farmers, but their share of the organic crop in this country, and of the produce sold at Whole Foods, is minuscule." Slate also pointed out that Whole Foods has pictures and profiles of small organic farmers in their stores, but doesn’t actually carry products from those farmers. (14)

(12) Gagging shareholders. Whole Foods refused to let shareholders speak about shareholder resolutions at its annual meeting. " ‘Given that the annual shareholder meeting is the one time each year that top executives and directors have to show up and be accountable to shareholders, it is unconscionable for companies not to allow proponents to make a short statement in support of their proposals,’ said Beth Young, senior research associate for The Corporate Library (TCL), which assesses corporate governance….’It also seems to flatly contradict the company’s pledge to ‘recognize everyone’s right to be listened to and heard regardless of their point of view,” Mr. Herbert told SocialFunds.com. ‘Whole Foods should recognize that any company that presents itself as socially responsible, as it does, is an easy target for a cynical press and public when it fails to uphold reasonable standards of corporate practice.’" (15)

(13) Obfuscating executive compensation. Forbes magazine says, "Media reports frequently tout Whole Foods’ pay policy, which caps the chief executive’s salary and bonus at 14 times the average worker’s pay. The Wall Street Journal, Slate.com, Harvard Business Review and BusinessWeek have all mentioned the pay cap, generally in favorable terms. But they all omitted one thing: stock options." When you count stock options, Mackey really made close to $3 million, or eighty-two times the average workers’ salary. Forbes continues, "Whole Foods manages to obscure Mackey’s total pay package by ballyhooing the salary cap." A company is certainly entitled to pay its execs whatever it wants, but the issue here is that WF is deceptive about how much its execs actually receive, relative to the lower-paid workers. (16)

(14) Forcing smaller competitors to hand over private financial data. Whole Foods has been trying to force many of its smaller competitors to hand over private sales and financial data about those smaller stores. Whole Foods already holds a massive advantage due to its size, but that’s apparently not enough for them. As one of the harassed smaller groceries put it, "Allowing Whole Foods to look through all of our private information about how we operate and what our plans are for the future unfairly adds to their already large size and financial advantage. We’ve been able to build a successful local business being David against their Goliath, and we’re happy to keep doing that, but we do object to having one hand tied behind our back." (19)