If a ‘natural and organic’ supermarket such as Whole Foods sells the same junk as everyone else, then what’s the point?

Not long ago I made one of my periodic forays to Whole Foods, the all-natural-groceries conglomerate. My assignment was to buy a Christmas ham from a pig that had not suffered unduly, and that was relatively free of chemicals and antibiotics.

I was somewhere between the Amy’s organic soups and the own-label cans of vegetables when I came upon an unexpected sight: bottles of Heinz regular ketchup that, like much of the industrial food that comprises the American diet, is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

As you may know, HFCS is among the laboratory-created synthetic foods targeted for elimination by activists, most notably the journalist Michael Pollan in his influential book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Though scientific opinion differs on whether HFCS is any worse for you than regular sugar, there’s little doubt that its cheap ubiquity – a consequence of misguided government farming subsidies – has contributed significantly to our epidemics of obesity and type-two diabetes.

Thus I considered it a breach of faith that Whole Foods would carry such a product. Shopping there means you’re going to pay more and drive farther than if you simply stocked up at the nearest supermarket. In return, it doesn’t seem too much to ask that you be spared from having to worry about ingredients such as HFCS. So it was with a perverse sense of anticipation that I started reading Nick Paumgarten’s 9,100-word profile of Whole Foods founder and chief executive John Mackey in the current issue of the New Yorker.

As Paumgarten observes, Mackey has stepped in it several times in recent years, engaging in embarrassing (and legally dubious) internet sock puppetry with regard to his acquisition of Wild Oats, a rival chain, and writing a commentary for the Wall Street Journal in opposition to government healthcare reform. The latter enraged his largely liberal customer base, engendering brief calls for a boycott.

What makes the New Yorker article valuable, though, is the way Paumgarten captures Mackey’s “crazy uncle” and “right-wing hippie” personae and places them in the context of his radical libertarianism. In the course of talking (and talking, and talking), Mackey reveals an important contradiction that illustrates why Whole Foods simply isn’t as good as it should be. On the one hand, Mackey, now a vegan, is absolutely committed to healthy food. On the other, his naive belief in individual responsibility informs not just his contempt for government but, in a sense, for his own company as well.

Consider, for instance, Mackey’s much-criticized statement that “We sell a bunch of junk.” In fact, Whole Foods sells meat, which Mackey eschews, as well as nutritionally empty snacks. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Meat, candy and potato chips have been with us for a long time, and, in their unadulterated, pre-industrial incarnations, were considerably less toxic than they are today.

But Mackey’s libertarianism means that the consumer must always beware, even at Whole Foods. As Paumgarten writes of Mackey:

His belief in the power of the individual is such that blame falls on individuals, too. In his view, it tends to be the fault of the unhealthy or fat person that he or she is unhealthy or fat. People just need to eat better….

It matters less to him that our food system, for a dozen reasons, … has been rigged to deliver unhealthy food at artificially low cost to a misguided public. People have the power and the means to choose rice and beans over Big Macs, and when they fail to do so they bring ruin on themselves, and on everyone else.

The trouble with this type of thinking is that, at its end point, it’s our own fault if we buy ketchup loaded with high-fructose corn syrup – even if we got it at Whole Foods. After all, there was a shelf full of Heinz organic ketchup next to the regular variety. If you choose the cheap stuff, what concern is it of Mackey’s? Whole Foods is a store that sells “a bunch of junk”, not a shrine.

Except that Mackey misconceives an important part of his business. At a time when even Walmart is carrying organic foods, the niche Whole Foods ought to fill is that of the trusted guide. If I have to walk the aisles of Whole Foods with the same label-reading skepticism that I bring to supermarket shopping, well, I might as well go to the local supermarket. It carries more natural and organic foods than it used to, it’s closer to our house and it’s a lot cheaper.

Besides, as Paumgarten writes, Mackey’s libertarianism ignores larger social and cultural forces. My wife and I would love to do better than Whole Foods – to buy most of our food from local farmers, and to leave the industrial-food system altogether. We’ve tried. But unless we are willing and able to devote a lot more time and money to the enterprise, the best we can manage is to buy produce from farmers markets during the growing season and milk from a nearby dairy.

For us, a place like Whole Foods should be an important way station between industrial food and something better. Mackey seems to understand that, but his blind exaltation of the individual misses some pretty important caveats.

Individuals live in a social setting, turning over some tasks so that they can specialise in others. I don’t want to perform my own surgery or maintain my own roads. And I don’t want to come home from the grocery store with unhealthy food only to be told it’s my own damn fault.

Especially if I bought it at Whole Foods.

via The Guardian by Dan Kennedy on 12/29/09

Illustration: Lyza

In an unusual yet stimulating proposition, The L.A Times recently covered an interesting tale of Hantz Farms buying abandoned properties in the city of Detroit with the plans of turning these plots into large scale commercial agriculture use.

Officials at Hantz Farms imagine the current trend of local food consumption must continue to grow in order to make this venture a successful investment. The idea has also gathered some support due to the hope that it might help in revitalizing the city which was hit terribly hard by the economic crisis with an almost 50% of the population either unemployed or underemployed.

In addition, aesthetically this would also allow for the redevelopment of the over one-third of the city’s 376,000 either vacant or abandoned parcels while supplying an alternative to the idea of Vertical Farms, which has yet to date neither supportive nor contradictory data for the theory.

However, no endeavour is lack of hurdles – the city must rethink its zoning laws, make plans in case of soil contamination, propertax mundanes and answer the question of who would bare the cost of parcel preperation.

Illustration: cuellar

Oxymoronic as it may sound, I can imagine plans are seriously being drawn by a major cigarette company to introduce a new line of ‘organic’ cigarettes brand in order to partake in the rapidly growing ‘green’ market and capture some ‘green’ conscious smokers.

The Organic Foods Production Act which was passed in 1992, permitted the creation of the current program in the U.S. had been classified by the USDA as a marketing initiative, not a food-safety, nutrition or an agriculture program. As with any marketing effort, the program boosted the organic industry to be $23 billion in 2007 ( €16.2 billion). Currently, the big players in the industry are starting to take notice. With that in mind, they are bringing along with them all their gimmicks and schemes in order to capture one old deity as they maintain their sacrosanct missions: market share.

The effects are already being noticed. In 2008 alone, 98 percent of green-labeled goods were found guilty of greenwashing – a term coined by Jay Westerveld in an 1986 essay attacking the hotel industry’s double standard of towel re-use in promoting green while the practice also saves them heaps of money. As more and more loopholes are discovered in the laughable American organic label and more powerful actors follow the cash; lobbying to attain their desired lax standards and watching the USDA’s list of allowable non-organic ingredients grow to cover new products, consumers find themselves buying and eating the same products found in the conventional aisles.

Under the original organics law, 5 percent of a USDA-certified organic product can consist of non-organic substances, provided they are approved by the National Organic Standards Board. That list has grown from 77 to 245 substances since it was created in 2002. Companies must appeal to the board every five years to keep a substance on the list, explaining why an organic alternative has not been found.

The goal was to shrink the list over time, but only one item has been removed so far. The original law’s mandate for annual pesticide testing was also never implemented — the agency left that optional.

It is even true that pesticides were once allowed to be used by farmers on food that are to be sold as organic when the pesticides in questioned, after a ‘reasonable review’, did not contain any chemicals found in the ban list of the National Organic Program. Now it is just common knowledge for anyone in the industry that pesticide testing is hardly ever carried out.

Deputies of the NOP know and have clearly communicated that their mission is to ‘grow the industry’ as quickly as possible. Easiest, quickest and best possible way one can imagine is to incrementally relax the standard and ‘wash’ the meaning out of what organic is meant to be. Organic cigarettes may just be the beginning.

Illustration: Bukutgirl

This question must definitely be rephrased. It is not a matter of whether or not sustainable farms can feed the world, it is rather more of a question of how soon and how can we implement this goal. The notion of choice is a long gone experiment.

Arguments against this issue point to a list of factors that indicates industrial farming as the only way the world can be fed with a substantial growing population – including the listing of massive-scale farming methods as key elements in curbing climate change.

I am very much a proponent of biodiversity and any idea that undermines the Earth’s variation of life forms under a given regional ecosystem is to me unequivocally irrational and just plain uttermost self detrimental. Massive-scale farming as it is done today has proven time and time again to be of dire consequences for the surrounding wild life in any locale.

Thousands of reports and experiments can attest to one how crucial the biodiversity of our planet is to us and to everyone of it’s inhabitants. Today, how industrial farming treats the planet must undergone a complete repair as it is very much so broken. The 2008 World Bank and UN International Assessment on Knowledge, Science and Technology concluded that a fundamental overhaul of the current food and farming system is needed to get us out of both the food and fuel crises. Findings of the report acknowledges that ecological methods should be the aptly choice for the future.

Let us take an anecdotal evidence of industry scale transformation: Mosanto, the leading producer of genetically modified seeds, which sells 90% of the world’s GE seeds, recorded a loss of $ 213 million last quarter. Foreseen results like these in essence has led Mosanto to years ago strategically posed itself desperately as the key to hinder starvation in developing nations with its claim of godlike high yield seeds.

I think we’re cathing on.

Illustration: Chaval Brasil

The idea is simple. Create a platform where one can track where all the materials and parts in a good come from. A product of a research project at MIT labs, it is in essence trying to achieve a paradigm shift in product design, manufacturing and traceability. Sourcemap introduces a new dimension in product procurement and in the supply chain of the materials that a product may compose of.

No more it is nearly simply asking what the overall costs may be in acquiring the materials of a good, it has now become a joint effort in assessing a good’s life-cycle’s sustainability, exposing the external costs and our apparent prolongation of the tragedy of the commons. Transparency and social conscious are here the ultimate aim of Sourcemap, linked with an apparent immeasurable breadth of underlying calculations and open databases; It hopes to “impart environmental literacy, foster collective simulation and build solution paths where no path currently exists.”

Supply chains (as with many other social issues) have numerous metrics for success, especially determined by when and where they are established. Some of the metrics useful to determine whether a supply chain is appropriate are local interest, environmental factors, human rights – none of which can be quantified in absolute terms. When there is no single solution, it is fundamental for designers to provide the tools to initiate discussions about the variables that matter.

We also would like to note that its marketing aspect for all types of endeavours and consumer products are also none but few.

We’re nearing an inflection point in our discussions about sustainability and building a bright green future.

Mainly, this is because we’re realizing that our task is larger and more pressing than we thought even a few years ago. It’s not enough to be less destructive, to be more sustainable. We need to actually start being non-destructive, being as close to sustainable as we understand how to get. And we need to do it quickly. As Dana Meadows said, in an era where we seem to be running hard up against the limits of so many natural systems, the ultimate limit turns out to be time. If we don’t make truly massive shifts in the next decade or so, we’re committing ourselves to huge troubles; if we here in the developed world don’t transform ourselves in the next two decades, we’re committing ourselves and our descendants to catastrophe.

Given how far we need to go, how quickly (I think we need — for reasons I’ll explain in another piece — about a 95% reduction in our impacts in the next two decades), we can’t waste time on what doesn’t work. We’re being forced, I think, to look at our solutions with a colder eye and clearer judgment. What works? What scales? What has the best political chances of happening? What can make money or creative infectious behavioral change or in some other way self-replicate? What solutions, in short, could work?

Everything else — all the solutions that don’t make that cut — are at best distractions, and in our current situation, where we’re fighting in the public debate for mindshare for real change (and change-stalling propaganda surrounds us), even distractions are not incidental. The idea that every small step is a good thing is simply wrong.

We have inherited a whole set of solutions by conventional wisdom, many of them surrounding lifestyle choices. Almost all of us believe that someone who buys local food, who drives a hybrid, who lives in a well-insulated house, who wears organic clothing and who religiously recycles and composts and avoids unnecessary purchases is living sustainably.

They are not. As we’ve explored a bunch of times in different ways here on Worldchanging, the parts of our lives that actually fall within our direct control are the tips of systemic icebergs, and often changing them does nothing to alter those systems: not individually, not in small groups, not even in larger lifestyle movements. If we’re going to avoid catastrophe, we need to change those larger systems, and change them for everyone, and change them quickly.

It’s quite clear that some of the “solutions” we embrace don’t actually motivate people to change at all. There’s hard evidence suggesting that most of the time, small steps do not actually motivate people to later take larger steps (most people adopt a small change or two and then feel they’ve done their part and stop).

Other times, we ask people to pay attention to the wrong things. Though the efforts some contrarians’ make to discredit local food verge on the absurd, the fact remains that food miles are not the most important measurement of food system sustainability. Perhaps more importantly, some observers’ suggest that local food often serves as a substitute for systemic engagement in movements to change agricultural systems at the largest levels, and I think there;s truth there. Certainly, many of us have a tendency to engage in iconic consumption, without really examining the entirety of our impact and whether our time and money might best be spent trying to effect change in some other way.

That’s not to say that its wrong to garden or recycle or buy CFLs. It’s not. It’s never wrong to try to live a life that’s internally consonant with the change we want to see in the world. Most of those life choices also make us healthier, happier and better off in the long run. So no harm in doing them (disclosure: I garden, recycle and use CFLs). Some personal choices, like forgoing beef and living without a car, not only create some measurable impact, they’re also public enough to signal your beliefs. But we still shouldn’t mistake these things for creating sustainable systems. Until we have systems that reduce the numbers of cows and cars we all use, we’re not making any real progress at all.

We can no longer afford to mistake the symbolic for the effective, or put our hopes in the mystical idea that if enough of us embrace small steps, our values will ripple mysteriously out through the culture and utterly transform it. We’ve been saying that for more than 40 years, it hasn’t happened and we need to stop lying to ourselves that it will. Live the life that fits your values, but don’t mistake that for changing the world.

Far too much of the debate about sustainability still orbits around ideas of smallness, slowness, simplicity, relocalization that often obscure the reality of our lives from us. Their main virtue is that they make incredibly complex systems that we cannot change alone seem susceptible to easy understanding and quick transformation through personal choice. In other words, they let us deceive ourselves in ways that are extremely comforting.

We need to be better than that. We need to be bigger than that. We need to understand that a bright green future will look like nothing that has ever come before, and will involve us changing the fabric of our lives, not just the ornament. It will involve needing to be more connected to global networks of people working towards change, more committed to seeking understanding and transparency in complexity, more engaged with systems that make us feel small — because we are small, and the world is complex, and we can’t do this alone.

We’re redesigning our civilization. We need to be people who are tackling the most important systems around us, employing tools that can change them quickly at scale. We need to get comfortable talking policy, working in parallel collaborations, thinking in systems, understanding infrastructures and markets and flows, and using money to power comprehensive transformations.

The opposite of democracy is depoliticization. The idea that “regular” people can’t do this is insultingly elitist, psychologically isolating and inherently depoliticizing. Of course we can. Even those of us who lack formal education in these fields are entirely capable of contributing in important ways to big efforts — if we learn to think of ourselves as connected and collaborating, and start to pay more attention.

Ah, attention. Some will stop there and say, “people are lazy! they won’t pay attention to anything!” There’s some truth to that. We are primates are lazy, inclined to sit around, much sweets and groom each other. But we’re also curious, and passionate.

Many of us want to know how things work around us. Many of us feel passionate about the need for change. The simple hard reality is that the powers that be are incredibly effective at working to disillusion us, to make us too cynical to act in our own best interests, so overwhelmed by jargon and bureaucratic process that we get bored and go home. We are apathetic and disengaged in some very large part because that’s the way some people want us to be. That’s a hard truth, but still truth.

The answer to that apathy and disengagement is not to demand less from people. That hasn’t worked. Instead, I think, we need to regard not being boring as one of our cardinal design principles. We need to make change interesting, and fun, and provocative, and full of good times and relationships with others and meaningful work. We need to approach complex, vast systems in terms of art, and game design, and public festivals every bit as much as in terms of reports and committees and NGOs. We need a cultural movement, for sure — it just has to be a cultural movement aimed at making systems geekery a passionate part of the lives of regular people.

That, ultimately, is the biggest problem with the hand-made approach to sustainability: even when it works, it makes us passionate about small things in our lives, not engagement with the world. Visiting a neighbor’s great backyard garden may well encourage me to want to grow my own; it doesn’t encourage me to understand global agrobusiness, connect with food policy activists and do something to change the $2,000 in destructive agricultural subsidies the U.S. government pays with part of my taxes every year. The hand-made can be beautiful. It can be deeply personally meaningful. I’d like a world where the hand-made abounds. But the hand-made is not The Revolution.

via World Changing by Alex Steffen on 11/1/09

Illustration: zachstern

In recent years, due to the advent of Linux, Wikipedia and alike, the term ‘open‘, as it relates to royalty-free, has gained more popularity and is rapidly becoming an household term. Everyday new projects and applications are created within this young concept. As it relates to standards however, there exists a number of interpretations for the institutions that partake in their creation.

Numerous definitions of the term preserve the right that standard or patent holders may and permit the charge of licensing and/or royalty fees per use and/or standard’s implementation. For example, major internationally recognized standard institutions such as the IETF and ITU-T hold the right to require payment upon implementation of either the parts or whole of their specifications, though these institutions create ‘open standards‘.

Part of our overall vision at Diplomatic Goods is to differentiate and to disallow direct licensing fees. The collaborative works that we intend to create are to remain under a licensing scheme that would uphold this vision and facilitate the expansion, adaptation and ease of new members within the organic industry, including improved consumer awareness, education and protection.

Consequently, we have chosen to base our vision on Ken Krechmer’s ten principles of Open Standards:

1. Open Meeting
2. Consensus
3. Due Process
4. Open Intellectual Property
5. One World
6. Open Change
7. Open Documents
8. Open Interface
9. Open Use &
10. On-going Support

What does this means for you? The ideas we put forward will cause undoubtedly significant disruptions within current standards’ bureaucracy processes. They will lower costs, improve ease of adaptation, significantly increase stakeholder participations, improve the ease of new participants, and promote true global consensus.

Illustration: Kubina

I’m sure at least you have once purchased something that had the label organic on it. Did you remember why? What did you think of it when you brought it home and either used or ate it? I bet your experience was similar to mine. I actually felt good and a bit better about myself that I actually had bought a product that was to help conserve the environment, uphold standards for the betterment of animal welfare and, at the same time, I was taking care of my body while eating something healthier.

Although brief that feeling may have been, it was pleasurable and I certainly wanted to experience it again. The placebo effects wore off however as I had the yearning to know how exactly I was helping the environment and what additional nutritional benefit my body was gaining. The information that I gathered was, well, strange. As I dug deeper and investigated this whole industry, it came apparent that trust was the greatest gift I could bestow upon the current regulators of this industry.

It just irks me to read the contents of current organic standards and then wonder about the results of studies that conclude that organic food is neither healthier, adds nutritional value, is environmentally friendly, nor trustworthy. This I believe is inevitably due to the regulators haphazard and unavailing approach at enforcement and collusion with the agribusinesses and lobbyists.

With Diplomatic Goods, we would like to create a self-governing community that harnesses the most of its diverse knowledge to take what is perceived to be scarce commodities ( the certifier and regulatory bodies) and make it abundant, the abundant commodity being you. We are removing the prisoner”s dilemma through non incentive driven intention of you the consumer whose simple goal merely consist of the desirability to just eat and live healthy.

Illustration: Fr Antunes

Say you are a small farmer with a descent sized plot of about 11 football fields, just under 20 acres. With that, you and your family are trying to achieve self sufficiency. When you have a little surplus left over, you may sell that at the local farmers market. You mainly have land for some livestock here and there and a couple thousand bushels of crop yield. When you head to the farmers market you can’t however call your vegetables or produce organic. To do so, you would definitely be breaking the law or at least deceiving your customers. One has to get certified by regulatory body and that process is a long tortured bureaucratic one.

As I write this, I have next to me the IOAS fee catalogue, which stands for the International Organic Accreditation Service, for 2009. These are the guys who certify the certifiers and are under the IFOAM, which is the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements. Yes I know, there are 20 levels to this. So the IOAS, the certifiers of the certifiers charges about $ 5,000 just for the application fee. Once they have returned your application, you have to add another $500 for the screening fee, though, mind you, they haven’t even come to your plot yet for evaluation.

So after waiting a while, minimum just about three months or so, they send you an appointment and an estimation of the evaluation fee. I guess they can determine this from the size of your planned accrediting programmes. So lets say it takes about 5 days, that’s another $3,000 you have to hand in to the IOAS. They charge $600 a day. I know, all these sums are a bit of a bore, but so far we’re closing in on $10,000, excluding the preparation work the accreditee had to do for the evaluation.

Of course there’s an additional annual fee of $3,000 and they want close to 1% of your sales of your first 1.4 million. No small endeavor will ever surpass that sum. We have not even mentioned the surveillance travel fee that you have to pay to these guys. Remember, the IOAS are charging the certifiers who in turn must charge the farmers in order to make their own profit. As with anything that is centrally regulated, its bound to be bureaucratic, slow and, in regards to the fees, just plain theft.

Illustration: Trevor Manternach