John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods (or as we call it here in Boston, Whole Paycheck), wrote a hide-bound and ideological op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last month (find it here). The first tip-off that it's going to be silly is that it calls health-care reform "Obamacare" (nothing like a little derision right in the title of an op-ed to command the interest of the readers of the WSJ opinion pages). What follows are all the usual canards of the Right's views on health care, and all their usual free-market, individualistic, deregulatory policy solutions.
A movement has developed to boycott Whole Foods because of Mackey's opposition to meaningful (i.e., single-payer) health-care reform. The group Single Payer Action is also part of this boycott. Now would be a good time to shift over to farmers' markets and food co-ops to send Mackey and Whole Foods a message.
Here's an interesting tidbit from the Boycott Whole Foods website: Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and other books about food and food production, has weighed in against the boycott, because although Mackey is wrong about health care, "Whole Foods is often right about food," Pollan tells us. According to the Boycott Whole Foods website, Pollan has spoken at a conference put on by America's Health Insurance Plans (the main lobbying organization for the health insurance industry), on a panel entitled "Leaving the 'Fast Food Nation' Behind: Challenging American's Attitudes Towards Personal Responsibility and Health." (The other speaker on that panel was Richard Thaler, co-author of the pop-behavioral economics book Nudge.) And he posted against the Whole Foods boycott on the website of archconservative David Frum (newmajority.com).
Now, I don't begrudge Michael Pollan an appearance at an AHIP conference (Howard Dean also spoke on a panel at the conference), or a comment on a website "dedicated to the modernization and renewal of the Republican party and the conservative movement," as its "About" page says. The man is pretty much omnipresent, so why not in these venues? But it doesn't surprise me that he doesn't seem to get the importance of collective action. I heard a radio version of a talk he gave a couple of years ago--it was about the prevalence of corn in the American diet (via corn syrup, mostly, but also as feed for the animals that become our meat), and the history of overproduction of corn post WWII. A terrific talk--the whole time I was craving broccoli (which I don't usually care for too much), because I figured there's no way they'd figured out how to make broccoli with corn. But in the question period, someone asked him early on what we could do about this, and all he had to say was something about making good choices about what we eat, choosing to shop at places (like Whole Foods) that offer fresher food, etc. There doesn't appear to be a truly political bone in his body--for him it's all about individual consumer choice. (It reminded me of Al Gore's otherwise terrific movie, ending with rousing call for us to change our lightbulbs.) So I'm not surprised that Pollan blandly opposes this boycott.
Joel Harrison, who wrote this terrific article for us last year, has written a point-by-point rebuttal of John Mackey's WSJ op-ed. Here are the basics; click on the links to get the details on each point.
YES, TO HEALTHCARE FOR ALL, NO, TO MACKEY'S WHOLE FOOD CARE
Wall Street Journal
Details and references
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Details and references
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Joel A. Harrison, PhD, MPH, lives in San Diego, where he does consulting in epidemiology and research design. He has worked in the areas of preventive medicine, infectious diseases, medical outcomes research, and evidence-based clinical practice guidelines. He has lived and studied in both Canada and Sweden.