The U.S. Department of Agriculture is currently considering whether or not to approve the use of genetically engineered (GE) Roundup-Ready alfalfa. Their report says you don’t care about GMOs in organics. Comments are due to them by February 16th, so read on to hear how you can help. (Or go directly to the True Food Project’s Take Action website.)

As part of the approval process, they are required to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), a detailed analysis of how the crop will affect the environment, organic and conventional farmers, farm animals, and the public. They’ve released their EIS on GE alfalfa, and here’s how the True Food Network at The Center for Food Safety summarized the issue in a recent Action Alert:

In 2006, the Center for Food Safety (CFS) sued the Department of Agriculture (USDA) for its illegal approval of Monsanto’s genetically engineered (GE) Roundup Ready alfalfa. The federal courts sided with CFS and banned GE alfalfa until the USDA fully analyzed the impacts of the plant on the environment, farmers, and the public in a rigorous analysis known as an environmental impact statement (or EIS). USDA released its draft EIS on December 14, 2009. A 60-day comment period is now open until February 16, 2010. This is the first time the USDA has done this type of analysis for any GE crop. Therefore, the final decision will have broad implications for all GE crops.

That Environmental Impact Statement, unfortunately, contains a number of questionable statements and conclusions. The part of the EIS that worries us the most is the claim that buyers of organic foods don’t care if those products are contaminated with GMOs (genetically modified, or genetically engineered, organisms). We know that nothing could be further from the truth, and that a huge number of our shoppers care deeply about avoiding GMOs in the foods they buy. We’ve gone to great lengths to keep GMOs out of organic foods and, through our work with The Non-GMO Project, have helped advance North America’s first standards and verification program for Non-GMO foods. We are intent on preserving our ability to provide non-GMO options for our shoppers. Every newly-approved GMO crop erodes our ability to provide non-GMO food, and leads to contamination of organic and non-GMO crops, due to pollen drift and other forms of contamination.

What can YOU do?

The True Food Project has set up a Take Action website to help you easily submit your comments to the USDA. These are due by February 16th so take the time to do it now. Please use the CFS’s form letter as a guide and personalize it as you see fit – let the USDA know exactly why you’re concerned about this issue, what you think about GMOs in your food, and what you think they should do with the approval of GE alfalfa.

In our own comments to the USDA, we emphasized a few key facts:

• Organic and natural foods consumers do care about the presence of GMOs in their food. In fact, avoiding genetically engineered ingredients is one of the key reasons that shoppers seek out organic foods.
• The contamination of organic and non-GE crops by GE material has presented a huge burden for our company and our industry.
• The unchecked proliferation of GE crops will directly harm organic producers and the integrity of the organic label.
• The approval of GE alfalfa would do more harm than previously approved GE crops, since alfalfa is a wind-pollinated perennial crop.

Everyone has their own opinion about GMOs; please tell your story to the USDA via the True Food Project action campaign by February 16th. We’d love to read what you think in the comment section below, but make sure you send your comments to the USDA first!

Bisphenol-A (BPA) is a chemical used to make plastics and other materials used in many food packaging applications, from can linings to baby bottles (see my last post on BPA for some background). Many of us who have been working on the BPA issue for years were quite surprised, on Friday, to learn that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had changed its position on the chemical, admitting for the first time that they, too, have questions about its safety. For as long as they’ve had a position on BPA, the FDA’s position has been that it’s safe and suitable for food contact. With this announcement, the FDA admits that “on the basis of results from recent studies using novel approaches to test for subtle effects, both the National Toxicology Program at the National Institutes of Health and FDA have some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and young children.”

To translate: There still isn’t conclusive evidence that BPA is harmful, but there are a number of question marks that need to be resolved through research – and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) was just awarded about 30 million dollars to pursue that research. In the meantime, the FDA has announced its interim position and the steps it is taking regarding BPA: Read the rest of this entry »

Big news: We just announced that our 273 U.S. stores have been certified organic by CCOF (California Certified Organic Farmers). Those of you who’ve been paying attention know that we’ve been a certified organic retailer since 2003 – a voluntary certification that’s not required by the USDA. So what’s the big deal now? Well, last November, the USDA told us that it was about to get much harder to be a certified retailer. Rather than walk away from certification altogether, we opted to go down the much more difficult road of getting each of our stores individually certified. The USDA was right: it was much harder. But we did what it took and made it happen. That’s the news.

Here’s a bit of context. When USDA’s National Organic Standards went into effect in 2002, they defined organic in great detail, down to the specific substances that could be used, and required that everyone who handles organic food – growers, ranchers, processors, etc. – be certified by a USDA-approved third party organic certifier. Everyone, that is, except retailers. Huh? Yes, the whole supply chain for organic products must be certified, with the tiny exceptions of retailers and restaurants. These exceptions were made because they thought it would have been prohibitively difficult and expensive for all the retailers that carried unprotected organic food to get certified (by “unprotected” I mean unpackaged, like produce, meat, bulk grocery, etc.). So the USDA told retailers that they still had to follow the rules, but they wouldn’t have to be certified. And we told the USDA something to the effect of “So you think it’s too hard for retailers to get certified? We’d like to respectfully prove you wrong.” Read the rest of this entry »

Why am I grinning ear-to-ear on this steamy hundred-degree day in the middle of Texas? The reason is this press release, which announces our commitment to the Non-GMO Project and represents the culmination of a very long and complicated undertaking. I’ve been working on this project – helping the company come up with a way to truly verify our efforts to avoid Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in our private label products – for just over five years, and it would be an understatement to say that I’m ecstatic about this announcement. I’d even go so far as to say that this moment makes me extremely optimistic about the future of our food supply and the persistence, energy and integrity of the natural and organic food visionaries who propel our industry forward.

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I was pretty disappointed late last week to learn that there was a smear campaign afoot, by a group claiming that Whole Foods Market is working to “undermine” the integrity of the organic food label. What?! It seems like this happens every couple of years, usually based on some sort of claim that large food corporations are inherently evil and out to dilute the organic standards to make organic food cheaper to produce so they can make millions off of unsuspecting, gullible shoppers. Insert your best evil laugh here: Mwah-ha-ha!

Ludicrous yes. True no. We’d have to be insane to push for weaker organic standards. A strong standard gives food shoppers something to trust. The “organic” label represents a strong regulation that ensures the food is grown without toxic and persistent chemicals on environmentally friendly farms. We fought hard for decades to get that regulation established and the last thing we’d want to do is jeopardize its value by chipping it away.

A small and passionate group of people who wanted to create a natural and organic alternative to the mainstream conventional grocery stores of the era opened the doors of our first tiny store 30 years ago, about four blocks from where I’m sitting now. Since day one, we’ve supported organic agriculture, and we now offer more organic products than our founders could have imagined back in 1980. And we add more and more year after year. Here are some basic facts about our commitment to organic: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most important things Whole Foods Market does is expressed in our first Core Value: Selling the highest quality natural and organic products available. You’ll find that statement on our walls, our website, our brochures, etc. But what do “natural” and “organic” mean, and who sets the definition? I’ll start to get into the nitty gritty details of these questions in this post. For background, you may want to check out my introduction to the topic of quality standards from last week. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been avoiding this post. Not because I don’t love talking about what I do, but because I couldn’t figure out how to shrink this topic – an overview of our Quality Standards – into an easily digestible post. But then our lovely blogmistress (Paige Brady) told me I could write a series rather than a single post. Yeah!

Just as I was breathing a sigh of relief, she hit me with this bombshell: Could you use the first post in the series to explain our Quality Standards in a way that an 11-year-old can understand? What!?

Seems that she was in our downtown Austin store over the weekend with her daughter’s 11-year-old friend, who had never been to our store before. She was thoroughly enthralled and amazed – remember your first step inside our store? Anyway, the friend asked, “Is everything here organic?” and Paige said “no” but that everything was natural. And then fumbled through various attempts at explaining what natural means – realizing as she rambled that a typical 11-year-old doesn’t have the background to understand how much junk is in our conventional food supply. Paige eventually came up with this: “You won’t find blue ketchup here because ketchup comes from tomatoes and tomatoes aren’t blue in nature.” And the friend got it: “So, ketchup is red here?” Yes. Read the rest of this entry »

We encourage you to join in the forum discussion instead of posting a comment on this blog entry.

Studies about Bisphenol-A (BPA), the plastic monomer used to make polycarbonate plastic, have been getting a ton of media attention lately, and our customers have had quite a few questions about it. While we certainly don’t have all the answers, we wanted to share with you what the research currently shows and what we, as a company, are doing to address the issue.

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My colleague Jody Villecco and I recently spent a few days on the backroads of New England, meeting the technical folks from two of our oldest supplier partners: Tom’s of Maine and Seventh Generation. Jody, I, and our team are the official “geeks” of Whole Foods Market; we spend most of our work lives researching products and their ingredients, buried in technical food science and nutrition reports, and generally geeking out about our products as we establish standards for what we sell in our stores. Fortunately for us, there are similar technical teams working at many of the companies whose products we sell, and the time we spend talking shop with them is educational, valuable to our work, and fun.

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Every week I see dozens of myths and misunderstandings about food and our company come across my desk, confused thoughts ranging from “Everything Whole Foods sells is organic” to “Canola oil is a secret poison” to “Whole Foods Market is owned by Paul Newman.” This is the first in a series of posts aimed at sharing – and clearing up – some of the more popular misunderstandings floating around out there. Through these examples, I’d like to illustrate the lengths we go to “do the homework” about natural foods and to make sure that there’s nothing in our products that you’d be surprised to find there. If you have any particular questions or topics you want to see covered, post a comment down below and let me know what you want to hear about.

Who we are and what we do

Look around near the doors of any one of our stores and you’ll likely find our commitment to “Selling the Highest Quality Natural and Organic Products Available” painted directly on the wall. This promise, the first of our company’s core values, seems simple at first glance, but becomes complicated once you start to consider the words “natural” and “organic” and what they really mean. I’ll save “organic” for another post, but what does “natural” mean, and who decides? Well, we do, and we take the job very seriously.

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