Eat Your Green(s)
The high price of Whole Foods is not a matter of elitism, it's a matter of government food policy
Tell most people Whole Foods is buying up Wild Oats and they'll just shrug their shoulders and dismiss the whole thing as one overpriced elitist food outlet snapping up another. So a bunch of Westsiders may have to cough up a few more bucks for their organic Mendocino seaweed or their unpasteurized stinky French cheeses or their cranberry extract and evening primrose oil. No big deal, right?
Certainly, the Los Angeles Times wasted no time inserting the old "whole paycheck" crack in its takeover story last week. Surf the blogosphere, and you'll find a whole wave of anger against Whole Foods, against the very idea of specialty food stores and, especially, against the people who shop there.
"The cereal aisle is a phreakshow of Nutty Date Clods & Jet Puffed Millet Meal & Fruity Leather Gobs," reads one pretty funny, Martin Amis-ish rant against Whole Foods at a Bay Area-based blog called Beautiful Atrocities. "They don't carry Soap Digest or Weekly World News, you're expected to stand in line & browse Algae or Afterbirth or Yoga Triathlon, or just watch the slovenly workers, who sport more metal than an Iron Maiden CD ... . One twit was actually asking for vegetarian flax oil. I'm like, 'Would that be different from the free-range flax oil??'"
The truth, naturally, is a little more complicated than that. Southern California is probably the worst place in the country to appreciate the positive effects that stores like Whole Foods achieve, precisely because of all those affected, over-made-up, over-Botoxed shoppers who pack into the Santa Monica store, or the West L.A. store, or the Brentwood store, like it's fashion week in Milan and they have a houseful of supermodels to feed on a carefully calibrated diet of vitamin tablets and half-bites of tofu.
The broader picture, though, suggests something more nuanced. People want to buy decent, unprocessed, tasty food, and they sure can't get it - or not much of it - at Vons or Ralphs or Albertsons. In many heartland cities, the arrival of a Whole Foods has had a similar effect to the arrival, a decade or two ago, of Borders or Barnes & Noble: It provides a kind of nourishment - whether cultural or gastronomic - that the community simply didn't have before. Given the difference in real estate prices between Pacific Palisades and, say, Baton Rouge (where the Whole Foods has fabulous gumbo and crawfish), the food isn't necessarily that expensive, either.
Sure, there is a huge class issue here. I can write until I'm blue in the face that there is a technique to shopping at Whole Foods while keeping the proverbial arm and leg intact - the fruit and vegetables are pretty cheap, and so are the bulk items, and the delicious bread and Greek olives are easily worth the little bit extra - but the fact is that for many Americans this kind of store is considered the exclusive domain of the rich and pampered and they would never consider setting foot inside.
It's also true, though, that the appetite for good food has grown immeasurably over the past generation or so. It started with the farmers' market movement in the 1970s and then spread along with the country's booming restaurant culture. Whole Foods and Wild Oats have done well precisely because they have responded to a readily identifiable demand. If they are struggling a little now and feel the need to merge into one company, it is largely because the big chain supermarkets are muscling in on the organic, unprocessed end of the food market. Everyone from Safeway to Wal-Mart wants a piece of the pie.
And that has to be bad news for anyone who loves good food, regardless of their income or pretentiousness level. Whenever fresh food or drink gets subjected to the whims of vertically integrated mega-corporations, it's the consumers' taste buds that suffer. Just look what happened to Starbucks coffee when the company took off - the beans got burned and stale. Or what happened to the Coffee Bean, which isn't half the chain it used to be.
The core issue here is not one of consumer taste, but rather the structure of American agriculture. There is nothing inevitable about good food being expensive. Rather, it is the result of deliberate government policies and priorities. Huge agribusiness concerns are rewarded with lavish subsidies for growing cash crops - principally corn, wheat, soy, and rice - leaving almost no room for more diverse produce that could give rise to a proper, deep-rooted, universal food culture in this country.
It's not like that in southern Europe, where good food is an integral part of peasant and working-class culture - with prices to match. France, Italy, and, to a large extent, the European Union, encourage diversity in agriculture and target their subsidies to achieve results where they really matter: on the plate. As the chef Dan Barber wrote in a brilliant piece in The New York Times last month bemoaning the passage of the latest Farm Bill: "If we're spending $20 billion or so a year on farm subsidies, we ought to invest in the foods we eat. And I mean eat, not process into something that resembles food."
That, though, is an idea whose time has yet to come. America has essentially held on to its pioneer culture, in which food is regarded as a means to an end rather than a point of fundamental connection between people and the land. It is also a politically corrupt country where farming has been turned into an industry and green refers strictly to the color of money, not the quality of fresh arugula.
Small farmers who champion the cause of good, affordable food are penalized at every turn - whether it is through their insurance rates, or through the disproportionate (and entirely unmerited) hit they take when E. coli is found in a single batch of industrially produced spinach and they have to throw their entire crop away.
That, in a nutshell, is why Whole Foods is so painfully expensive. But it's not as though the big supermarkets, with their processed cheeses and deeply dubious sausages and their cookies and jams laden with artery-clogging high fructose corn syrup, are particularly cheap either.
When I arrived in this country eight years ago, I couldn't believe how much it cost to do the weekly grocery run. (Admittedly, I had come from Italy, so I may have had my standards set a little high.) After a few weeks, I went on assignment in Baja California and more or less danced with joy as I ran round a local supermarket stocking up on everything from canned beans and water to tortillas and fresh jalapeno peppers.
On the drive back to L.A., it dawned on me, given the (then) absurdly cheap price of gas in the United States, that it might be cheaper to go shopping in Mexico every week. It further dawned on me, as I pondered the kind of time the trips would take, that it might even make financial sense to hire a day laborer, even a Mexican one, to go shopping in Mexico for me.
And then it hit me: That is exactly how the Californian economy is structured in the first place! If it weren't for the agricultural import restrictions (of which I was blissfully unaware while I made that first cross-border drive), we could be eating good, cheap Mexican food all the time.
Instead, we have to put up with the high prices and elitist air of Whole Foods. Let's not blame the store, though. We need more specialty outlets, not fewer. We need to champion the cause of good food more widely. And once we have achieved that, we need to club together to demand a sane regime of government regulation so we can actually afford to eat it.
Published: 03/01/2007
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