Whole truth?

What wasn’t said in the Mackey-Pollan “debate”

By Twilight Greenaway

March 7, 2007

Last week, in the days immediately following the public discussion held February 27 on the UC Berkeley campus between journalist Michael Pollan and Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackey, the blogosphere lit up with glowing reviews.

The discussion, hosted by Berkeley’s journalism school, was an extension of an online dialogue between the two men over the last six months. In his bestselling 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan described his experience of shopping at Whole Foods, where he said he found an abundance of quaint, pastoral storytelling about the origins of the food that didn’t reflect the stores’ increasingly industrial approach to organic food.

Mackey objected to the fact that Pollan had not spoken to him directly while doing research for the book, and the two exchanged a series of online letters that can now be read on both Pollan’s and Mackey’s blogs.

In the post-discussion blogosphere, Mackey was described as “unpolished and passionate.” He showed an impressive “intelligence and passion for ecologically grown food,” and he was lauded for “generally talking in plain English, and never digressing into corporate speak.” Even here on Culinate, the 53-year-old Mackey was described as “coming out ahead.”

Michael Pollan

Then again, maybe all these commentators were expecting someone more like Enron’s notorious former CEO, Ken Lay. And in truth, for a CEO Mackey is strikingly down-to-earth. He has a sense of humor and isn’t afraid of self-deprecation. He’s comfortable in front of an audience, but doesn’t seem unusually slick.

Mackey started the evening with a nearly hour-long PowerPoint presentation about the history of agriculture, the failings of industrialization, and the new “ecological era” in agriculture, which he described as “attempting to correct the failings of the industrial era.”

John Mackey

In more traditional CEO fashion, Mackey also took the opportunity to announce a number of new initiatives at Whole Foods, including new labels for artisanal foods, a $30 million venture-capital fund to sustain artisanal-food producers, and a new in-store fair-trade rating called the Whole Trade Guarantee.

What Mackey did not mention was the fact that his grocery-store chain had just grown by nearly 50 percent. Only a few days before the Mackey-Pollan discussion, Whole Foods had announced that it had bought its largest competitor, the Wild Oats chain, adding 110 new stores across the U.S. and Canada.

The decision not to mention this significant development was no accident — and after taking a closer look at Mackey’s strategy that night, it comes as no surprise. This 1960s radical turned free-market libertarian knows how to work a crowd, and in front of this particular audience, appearing too large or too corporate would have meant sudden death.

Pollan’s bestselling book.

In a room full of dyed-in-the-wool Berkeley liberals, Mackey had the advantage of the underdog, and he made the most of it from the beginning. “How many of you have read Michael’s book?” he asked, watching a predictable sea of arms shoot up. When he followed it with, “How many of you have read my book?” the room grew as still as an old Western flick right before the shootout.

But those who had read the written exchanges between the two men may have been disappointed by Pollan’s in-person tone, which was anything but cowboy-like. The author took a far gentler and more diplomatic approach on stage, a tone that made his two letters to Mackey seem nearly demanding by comparison.

On the other hand, Mackey’s written approach prepared us for a cultivated ability to make Whole Foods look resilient and, more importantly, already way ahead of any criticism that might come its way.

Mackey’s mission, it became clear, was to assure the audience that he (and by proxy, all of Whole Foods) was in complete agreement with Pollan, whose catalyzing book Mackey praised as “genius.”

And although many in the audience appeared fidgety as Mackey made them sit through a hefty dose of choir-preaching, they were also surprised to see him show a disturbing (if somewhat stock) animal-rights activism video.

The Whole Foods logo.

Between the gratuitous shots of paralyzed farm animals and other visual pyrotechnics, however, Mackey inserted a series of subtly antagonistic points that did the double duty of agreeing with the dominant perspective in the room while picking it apart.

For instance, although Mackey and his marketing team are carefully positioning themselves as friendly to the local-and-sustainable food movement — they have announced several new initiatives this year, including the addition of actual farmers’ markets in the parking lots of many Whole Foods stores — Mackey also repeatedly characterized Pollan’s views of corporate organics as “exaggerated.”

He then spent a great deal of time persuading the audience that, in the case of the environmental impact of buying locally, “fossil-fuel savings have been greatly exaggerated by some advocates.”

And for all his talk about increasing the percentage of produce bought locally, only 16 percent of the produce Whole Foods sold last year was sourced locally, while next year that amount is estimated to rise by just four percent.

Because the majority of Mackey’s assertions appeared on slides that he moved quickly through without taking questions from the audience, the information he presented came across as pure, unadulterated fact. Much of it, however, was nothing more than spin.

In one striking example, a slide repeated a number that Mackey had cited in his written response to Pollan’s second letter: “At Whole Foods, 22 percent of our organic produce comes from large corporations, and 78 percent comes from independent family farms.”

In its original online form, that statement read differently (italics are my own): “Of our top 150 suppliers/brokers in the produce category, 22 percent of our purchases are from large corporate farms and 78 percent are from independent and family farms (some of these smaller farms pool together under one brand name to help improve marketing and distribution). Sixty percent of these 150 suppliers grow organically, and/or represent growers who do so.”

After reading Mackey’s description of Earthbound Farm, the biggest organic produce grower and shipper in the United States with $450 million in sales last year, it becomes clear that what some may consider the most obvious example of “corporate organics” might actually fit in Mackey’s “small farm under the same brand name” category.

The Earthbound Farm logo.

“Earthbound is not quite the large monolithic industrialized organic farm that you portray it as being,” Mackey wrote in the same letter. “Earthbound buys its product from 185 organic farms of varying sizes and consolidates this diverse group of farms together under one brand and one distribution system.”

Either way, there’s plenty of gray here. In a May 2006 San Francisco Chronicle article, Earthbound’s Drew Goodman referred to the fact that he sees Earthbound’s size as exactly what allows them to do business with Whole Foods.

“Our food system is industrial,” Goodman told the Chronicle. “The only way to play that game is to reach the scale that you can get into Kroger’s and Whole Foods.”

Another “fact” presented by Mackey’s presentation was this: “If you live in Berkeley, you will use less fossil fuel and produce less carbon dioxide by buying rice from Bangladesh than from California.”