Okay, we’re cheating a little this week and perhaps this post would be better named “What We’re Watching…” ’cause that’s been the preferred method of media consumption this week. A friend of mine reminded me of some excellent TED | Talks that I’d encouraged him to listen to a few months back.
But of course, as inspiring as these talks were, I was hungry for more and just yesterday, stumbled upon TED’s new lists, which allow users to order talks based on user ratings on criteria such as “most beautiful”, “most jaw-dropping”, “most ingenious” and “funniest.”
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.
Hear more about issues surrounding our food supply in this podcast interview from last August with Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini centered around his book, Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should be Good, Clean, and Fair.
About the only things sprouting up on lawns this summer in central Texas are “Alarm Stage Drought” signs. The grass is crispy, some trees feature the yellow hues of autumn, and county officials and parents will be closely monitoring the few fireworks used by neighborhood kids this year. Our typical blast-furnace-August weather started in mid-May this year, and we’ve not had more than a flirty little spatter of rain since. Our June was the hottest recorded in Austin since 1854, with an average high of 99.4 degrees. Even our scrappiest cur-dogs won’t go out in this year’s noon-day sun.
In a wide ranging interview posted to his blog Chews Wise, Samuel Fromartz, author of Organic, Inc: Natural Foods and How They Grew, talked to Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey about “the Wild Oats deal, rising food prices, the company’s soon-to-be-launched humane meat ratings system, and the prospects for sustainable seafood.” This is a great read for anyone interested in the natural foods industry and Whole Foods Market in particular. Make sure to read both parts of the interview.
Check out this 20 minute video of Mark Bittman’s talk at the EG (Entertainment Gathering) Conference from TED. (TED – Technology, Entertainment, Design – has a lot of great stuff from a wide variety of thought leaders.) TED describes this piece as “a fiery and funny talk” where “New York Times food writer Mark Bittman weighs in on what’s wrong with the way we eat now (too much meat, too few plants; too much fast food, too little home cooking), and why it’s putting the entire planet at risk.” Do you agree with Mark’s suggestions for necessary changes?
I spend more than half my work time thinking about, researching and talking about organic food. As part of my job as Quality Standards and Organic Programs Coordinator, I work with our stores and suppliers to help them understand and follow the National Organic Standards, to ensure that what they’re selling as organic truly is. I also work with non-profit organizations, certifiers and others to support organic agriculture, and I carefully follow the USDA’s National Organic Program and their ongoing work on the standard. Given all my work with organics, the Whole Story Blog powers-that-be asked me to answer one of the more perplexing questions that’s been floating around lately: Can organic food from China truly be organic?
The short answer is “yes, it can,” but the long answer is far more complex and interesting. Let me take a few minutes to lay out some of the basic issues around organic agriculture in China, go over just what “organic” means in the US (or any country), talk to some leading organic experts and certifiers, and then let you decide whether organics from China are truly legit.
News stories about products from China have been largely negative over the past year: Dog food tainted with toxic melamine, fake pharmaceuticals, toys with lead paint, contaminated crops… All of these very serious safety issues have raised serious red flags about the quality of everything coming out of China. Shoppers, retailers, food makers and the media have all wondered: “If pollution is this rampant, and oversight is this lax, how can we trust anything grown or made in China?”
With organic food, the answer is complicated, but there are number of reasons we at Whole Foods Market feel good about our organic private label products from China. You can read more about some of the specific ways we make sure our organic private label products from China meet our standards here. Read on past the fold for more information about how U.S. law applies to organics grown outside the U.S., and what some experts see as opportunities to strengthen the system.
I’ve been hearing some questions about whether it’s possible to get organic products from China, so I went to Margaret Wittenberg to find out the inside scoop. Margaret has been with Whole Foods Market for about 27 years and she served on the National Organic Standards Board and helped write the USDA Organic Rule, so I figured she would be in the know. (Transparency alert: Margaret was my Team Leader for many years and I love this woman. Her integrity is unbelievable!)
Anyway, here’s a quick blurb from Margaret on the whole organics in China deal:
Whole Foods Market is a transparent company. We take pride in informing our customers about where our products come from so they can make conscious buying choices. The reality nowadays is that sourcing high quality organic products has gone global. Many companies play the game of sourcing ingredients from one country and packaging them elsewhere so they can be labeled from the country they were packaged in. Not at Whole Foods Market. For example, our Private Label team sources a few high quality organic products from China and we let our shoppers know that up front. We go to great lengths to ensure that the quality and organic integrity is there every step of the way, whether we are sourcing our products from around the corner or around the globe. We are proud of the processes, safeguards and protocols we have in place and we want our customers to know exactly what we do when it comes to sourcing.
If you want to know more about our organic sourcing, check out “Sources You Can Trust” – new info just posted to our website. We plan to have more on this topic this Friday. Got a specific question about organic sourcing? Let me know and I’ll try to make sure it is answered with the info posting Friday.
From supporting a biologically diverse, healthy environment to limiting the toxic and long-lasting chemicals in our surroundings, there’s no shortage of reasons to buy organic. Take a look at our top reasons for choosing organic.
Welcome to Whole Story, the official blog of Whole Foods Market.
Don’t know us? In a nutshell, we are the world's leading natural and organic grocer and we’re passionate about healthy food and a healthy planet. Learn more about us.
We’re lucky to have a whole bunch of smart, passionate people doing incredible things in areas like organics, supporting local growers, green practices, fair trade, micro-lending and all kinds of food related stuff. We’ll use this blog to share some of the cool things going on around here.
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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.
