Whole Foods, whole health and a whole big mess

Does everything, including food, where we shop and how we live have to be divided along partisan lines?

There is a coffee shop in Ottawa, a short walk from Parliament, which I like to frequent for one simple reason; they have great coffee. Now Ottawa being a national capital and a political town, everything can take on political overtones; coffee shops are no exception. Bridgehead, the cafe in question, has the appearance of a university town coffeehouse; the pierced and tattooed staff serve up their wares while world music plays and protest posters litter the bulletin board by the door. In short, Bridgehead feels like a leftist coffee paradise.

Walking back to my office at Parliament with a Bridgehead take-away cup in hand can elicit knowing glances from left-wing politicians or staffers while those on the right are a bit more suspicious about a reporter who buys his daily java from Che Guevara loving radicals. It might allay some fears on the right if they knew I also shopped at the warehouse store Costco, a store regularly denounced by many on the left for putting local stores out of business. The simple fact is though, where I shop has little to do with my own political viewpoints.

I bring this all up in relation to a bizarre sideshow in the American debate over health care reform, Whole Foods Markets. For those unfamiliar with Whole Foods, it is the world’s largest chain of natural and organic foods, started 29 years ago in Austin, Texas. The company provides full benefits including health insurance to all employees who work more than 30 hours per week (that’s 89% of all staff), they partner with local farmers and food producers in every market they operate in, they run food drives and healthy school lunch programs, they have won international awards for being humane in their supply chain and for their micro-finance program which lends money to farmers to improve their operations.

How on earth could a company like this be controversial? It is all for the simple reason that when co-founder and CEO of the company John Mackey voiced his opinion on American health care reform it was deemed to be the wrong one. It is another sad example of the politicisation of food and every day life.

Citing out of control deficits and an unwillingness of the U.S. federal government to deal with expected shortfalls in the existing Medicare and Social Security systems when Baby Boomers fully retire over the next few years, Mackey wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “…the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system.”

The libertarian-minded CEO then went on to detail his own eight proposals for fixing the health care system in America in a way that he says would lower the costs for everyone. You can read Mackey’s proposals for yourself and agree or disagree but no one can doubt that the man offered up real proposals to fix a health system that all sides agree is broken. While President Obama is in favour of a government run system that is fairer to all, the leader of a successful organic food company wants a system that is privately run and fairer to all. Should this be such a big shock or surprise?

Thousands of Whole Foods customers say they are shocked, appalled and angry that the leader of what they see as an obviously liberal food store disagrees with them. Many customers are promising to take their anger out on the company by no longer shopping there. A blogger at the liberal website DailyKos posted this:

Mr. Mackey, I'm not sure if you understand who it is that shops at your organic grocery chain: a lot of progressives, vegetarians, professional and amateur athletes, and others who care so much about the environment and what they eat that they're still willing to shell out three bucks for an organic orange, even in the midst of the worst recession in sixty years.

But shop there no more is the new rallying cry. Several Facebook groups have been set up (what protest is complete these days without a Facebook group?), to denounce Mackey’s “evil ideas”; the largest of the groups now has more than 20,000 members. I’m not sure I can worry this much about what I eat, making sure it is healthy and affordable takes up enough time.

Editorials have been written across America and in Britain, The Economist online chimed in with this, “The clear moral of this tale is that shareholders should require those they hire to run their firms to be Trappists—certainly when it comes to controversial topics unrelated to the company’s activities, and which customers may feel strongly about, but perhaps in general.”

Now as The Economist states, it would be foolish for Mackey or Whole Foods to protest the boycott while also embracing the market as the solution on health care and many other issues. Yet the boycott doesn’t ring true to me. Beyond the obvious involvement of groups like Single Payer Action, an advocacy group that is pushing for a nationalisation of health care period, well beyond President Obama’s call for a government option, there is the insincere morality of those Whole Food shoppers who say they won’t frequent the store in the future.

The reasoning for the boycott is that John Mackey has political opinions that are right-wing, anti-union and obviously against true health care reform. Yet if shopping were all about lining up your own politics with the politics of a company CEO, then I would see many more men with ponytails and goatees cycling their way to Costco to pick up milk and organic, shade-grown, fair trade coffee beans (yes, they do sell them). A number of Costco stores in California and the American northwest are unionised and employees at non-union stores get the same wages and benefits as the unionised shops, including salaries of $40,000 or more, a large sum in retailing. It sounds like the type of employer those boycotting Whole Foods would want.

Costco co-founders Jeffrey Brotman and Jim Sinegal are not only donors to the Democratic Party, but have been linked to left-wing advocacy groups like MoveOn.org and America Coming Together. Yet I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that Costco’s customer base includes a large number of Republicans and very few of the die-hard liberals calling for an end to Whole Foods over the politics of their CEO.

This incident is not only another example of the politicisation of food but of the growing partisan divide in America (and other countries); the divide Barack Obama was supposed to heal. How much longer can democracy survive if we cannot even have civil disagreements over how a political question should be solved?

Brian Lilley is a political journalist and the Ottawa Bureau Chief for radio stations 1010 CFRB Toronto and CJAD 800 Montreal. He is also the Associate Editor of Mercatornet. Follow Brian on Twitter.

Costo photo used under Creative Commons Licence - BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons