The Past, The Present, The Future of Food

by Jen Maiser

As mentioned yesterday, the UC Berkeley School of Journalism hosted an exciting event last night: Michael Pollan and John Mackey in dialogue about food issues.  If you read blogs by other writers in the San Francisco area, you will notice a plethora of comments about the event last night.

Why the excitement?  It's a rare thing when we see a CEO of a major corporation sit in a room of possible detractors and open himself up to questions and unscripted dialogue.  So rare, in fact, that an auditorium with 2,000 seats sold out in less than a week. 

As the event opened, John Mackey asked how many people in the room had read The Omnivore's Dilemma.  To my eye, at least 2/3 of the audience raised their hands.  This was a room that was engaged, savvy, and ready to hear what Mackey had to say.

And I don't think the evening disappointed.  This event is being written about all over the web, so I will leave you with a few general impressions, and a list of links to people who were in the audience or watching the webcast.  Be sure to peruse comments sections of the linked posts, as well -- there is some interesting conversation occurring.

• John Mackey is passionate about animal welfare.  He is working hard to make Whole Foods a place where you can buy compassionately grown, humanely raised meat.  He doesn't believe that Whole Foods is there yet, but the company is working toward that end.  They are working with the USDA to have a star rating system which will show the consumer exactly how well each piece of meat they purchase was raised and slaughtered.

• The Omnivore's Dilemma had a direct impact on policies and marketing within Whole Foods.  In the book, Pollan brought up many points about Whole Foods.  Some Mackey didn't find to be fair, and some he did.  Nonetheless, the highlighting of local foods in stores, and the promotion of local suppliers is a direct effect of Pollan's book.

• Mackey believes that Pollan and others exaggerate the existence of "industrial organic" or "big organic".  Mackey believes that most organic farms really are small to middle size, and that the emphasis on industrial organic is not valid.

• Mackey believes that The Omnivore's Dilemma began an "open season" for criticism on Whole Foods.  A funny exchange occurred when Mackey told Pollan "I figure you cost us about $2 billion."  He was kind of kidding, but kind of not.  In this same exchange, Mackey said that some people are now comparing Whole Foods to Wal-Mart.  This is a comparison that I think is pretty unfair.

• Mackey is concerned about price, and is doing some things to address it in his stores.  Whole Foods' biggest competition is Trader Joe's, he said.  And they have made a recent decision to match the price on all exact products that are sold at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods.

• An interesting discussion occurred toward the end of the evening where Pollan asked Mackey if Whole Foods plays the leader to policies, or whether they follow what the customer wants.   Mackey said that it was a bit of both - like a dance.  I get the feeling, just from some small remarks that Mackey made, that the emphasis on local food in the stores is because he is following a trend and not because he has a huge passion for local food.  In the end, though, I don't really care what the reasoning is -- the result is that Whole Foods, in the past six months, has had a much larger emphasis on local foods, local producers, and local farmers than in the past.

After the evening was over, I came away with an appreciation for John Mackey as a businessman.  While the evening did not persuade me to buy at Whole Foods over my local farmers' markets or my local coop, it cemented in my mind the fact that, when a large corporate supermarket is necessary, Whole Foods is a pretty safe bet and that they are doing their best to make good purchasing decisions.

Other bloggers discussing last night's event:

Bay Area Bites
Becks & Posh
Cooking with Amy
Culinate
Chews Wise
Daily Kos
Deglazed
Chubby Panda
East Bay Express Blog
The Ethicurean
Ghost Word
Growers & Grocers
I'm Mad and I Eat
Obsession with Food
Peter Merholz
Poet with a Day Job
The Jew and the Carrot

Also interesting: John Mackey on Whole Foods' Growth (APM Marketplace), Is Whole Foods Straying from its roots? (NY Times, Burros)

Jennifer Maiser is the editor of the Eat Local Challenge blog and the author of Life Begins at 30.

Comments

[swag]

God, that was such a dismal event. A television commercial and propoganda event disguised as journalistic theater.

And all the self-congratulating applause every five minutes... I thought I was at a Mao Communinist Party speech in 1952 China.

(It made me question if I really did enjoy living Berkeley in and attending UC there in years past...)

[James Berry]

Hey Jen,
Nice summary. I wrote about this on culinate this morning. Reading your account I find that you also have a lot to say about what Mackey said, and not too much about Pollan, which I attribute mostly to the fact that Pollan was mostly asking questiions.

[Bonnie/Dairy Queen]

Nice job, Jen. I felt much the same way, if you can manage to wade through my long account. Given that the fish question at the end was the hardest he got all night -- and it was either you or Marc who posed it, wasn't it? -- it does seem in retrospect that Pollan was being unusually gentle.

[Amy Sherman]

I also posted about it on my blog, Cooking with Amy.

Thanks for posting all the links. It's interesting to see so many different points of view about the same event. It seems that everyone walked away with at least slightly different conclusions. Some had a higher opinion of Mackey/Whole Foods, some a lesser opinion.

[jen maiser]

Thanks everyone - I've added your links to the list.

Bonnie, it wasn't me who asked the fish question but it was a good one. In retrospect, I have a ton of questions for him.

Amy, you're totally right about the differing opinions. It's actually a little entertaining to see how many viewpoints there were - and they all seem to contradict each other in some ways.

[Marc]

I wrote some notes about the Pollan-Mackey event at Growers and Grocers.

It wasn't me who asked about fish either. I asked about how Mackey interpreted "shareholder value" (i.e., Wall Street demands) in relation to Whole Foods sustainability and animal welfare goals. It was addressed indirectly during the conversation, but not as much as I would have liked.

[Anna Haight]

I also wrote about the event on my blog, Anna's Cool Finds, on February 27th, under "Newsflash". (I can't figure out how to make the hyperlink.