There are lots of things to love about spring but it can be a period of dread in the produce business as we transition from the winter to the summer fruit harvest season. A lot can happen all at once: citrus starts to fade, we start losing variety in hard fruit (apples and pears), and the weather can play havoc on new crop domestic fruit (like berries).
The springtime high tension in our trade was exacerbated this year by the massive earthquake in Chile, where much of our winter soft fruit (grapes and blueberries) and summer hard fruit (apples) come from. These challenges for all fruit is doubly so for organically grown. Lower overall acreage and storage volumes can mean a sharp reduction in available organic supply in the spring. The questions every year are these: do we have enough life left in winter to carry us into summer? And what, if anything, can we do about a springtime gap in fruit?
We’re taking a poll and we want to know what you think. What is your favorite natural alternative for sweetness in baked goods? Take our poll and see how your thoughts stack up with others.
We say: Let’s forget the fake sweet stuff. Artificial sweeteners are purely synthetic compounds that do not exist in nature, and that work by fooling our bodies into believing we are eating sugar. Whole Foods Market doesn’t allow artificial sweeteners in our food, because why mess with a good thing?
What concerns you most about the seafood you eat?Take our poll on seafood and see how your thoughts stack up with others.
Let’s fish for the future
From 75 to 80% of the world’s marine fishery resources are fully fished, over-exploited, depleted or recovering. With the growing demand for seafood, our choices are important. Every time we put wild-caught seafood on our plates, we can help ensure a long-term supply for ourselves and for future generations by choosing seafood that comes from healthy fish populations that are well-managed and caught using sustainable fishing methods.
What’s your top reason for choosing organic products? Take our poll on organics and see how your thoughts stack up with others.
We say: Let’s take toxic pesticides out of the recipe — we make it easy to choose organic food that’s good for you and for our planet.
Since the commercialization of synthetic nitrogen sources, pesticides and herbicides in the middle of the twentieth century, farmers have been using these chemicals to boost nutrients in the soil, control insects and weeds. However, almost as soon as synthetic chemical-based farming took off, a passionate group of resistors shunned this approach and formed the roots of the organic movement in the U.S. Since then, a growing group of shoppers and food producers have been asking questions. As more consumers demand more organic products, more farmers have returned to naturally sustainable methods that avoid unnecessarily harming the soil, air, water and creatures of this planet.
Reading the label on a food package can be pretty scary these days. In the early 20th century, food scientists began to “improve upon” foods and, usingartificial additives,created fake food products more cheaply than the authentic originals. We’ve been walking science experiments ever since! Whether we are concerned about known or unknown effects, artificial additives may serve other interests, but not our bodies. Simply put, they are not natural.
To keep what we put on our plates as natural as possible, Whole Foods Market is committed to selling food that is free of artificial preservatives, colors, flavors and sweeteners as well as hydrogenated fats. All of the food that we sell meets that standard. No label reading required.
Let’s think backwards — to take the food movement forward. No, this isn’t an April Fool’s joke! Every bite has a story. If you don’t know the story behind your food, are you sure you want to eat it? Whether it’s a steak or a banana, your conscious food choices make a world of difference. Watch the video and check out Let’s Retake Our Plates.
Our produce team has been learning a lot about pineapple lately. We had heard from various sources about environmental problems associated with pineapple production in Costa Rica and we wanted to know more. Over the past six months, we’ve toured farms, tasted lots of pineapple and met with a diverse group of knowledgeable people, including growers (large and small), farm workers, importers, certifiers, academics and others – a peace corps volunteer even took a long bus ride to tell us about her life and work in a community on the edge of a big pineapple farm.
As a result of what we’ve learned, this April (Earth Month) we’re introducing Whole Trade Pineapple. As always, the Whole Trade Guarantee™ is our commitment to ethical trade, the environment and the highest quality. In this case, the quality speaks for itself. This fruit is excellent – fresh, ripe and sweet. I’ll explain in the rest of this post why it’s also important that it meet the other requirements of the Whole Trade Guarantee.
Every single bite of food we take has deep agricultural, environmental and nutritional significance. The bowl of cereal I’m eating right now contains corn (which might be organically grown or not, genetically modified or not) and is bathed in milk (which might be organic or not, from cows given synthetic growth hormones or not, or it could be soy milk — GMO or not, organic or not, and let’s not even get into almond, hemp or rice milks). That yellow color could be natural or not, and the whole box could be preserved with synthetic preservatives to make its shelf life virtually infinite. This is a very simple meal (eight ingredients), and a relatively minor one in the grand scheme of my day, but the choices I’ve made with this little meal have touched at least half a dozen different crops, some cows, growers and my own health.
The relationship between a meal and the rest of the universe is complicated and gets more so when we start talking about meat, seafood and products imported from other countries. My point here is that what seems to be a tiny choice (what to eat for breakfast) can actually have deep significance when we consider the collective impact of the 1100 or so meals we each eat every year.
The incredible growth of the natural and organic food industry over the past 30 years has been driven by individual food choices made about specific meals. Yet considering that organic currently makes up just 4% of US agriculture; GMO crops make up almost all corn, soy, canola, sugar and cotton production in the US; our kids are getting fatter; and unhealthy food is getting cheaper, it sometimes seems like our movement – natural and organic foods – has barely made a scratch in the mainstream of conventional food.
“Let’s Retake Our Plates” is a Whole Foods Market initiative designed to highlight the things we all can do to continue this movement towards better food. In choosing between various types of food, we really are voting with our dollars and have the power to accept or reject so many ways of growing crops, raising animals, impacting the environment and feeding our bodies. The plate (or take-out container or smoothie cup or whatever) is the point where we, as eaters, intersect with the systems and practices through which that food is grown, raised, processed and marketed. Read the rest of this entry »
Due to the recent earthquake in Chile’s central regions, we’re anticipating a significant shortage of Chilean grapes within the next 10 days.
We expect the shortage to extend through early April and perhaps all the way to the first of May.
Here’s an update based on information we’ve been able to collect over the past couple of days:
Most important, our vendor partners in Chile report that they’re unharmed.
Unfortunately, their infrastructure didn’t fare as well and there will be an impact on fresh produce supplies, especially table grapes.
Packing houses have been especially hard hit, and we’ve received reports that many cold storage facilities and packing plants have been destroyed. Thousands of pallets of fruit that was packed and ready for shipment has been lost. Chile’s Sixth Region, where grape production is peaking, is reported to be a disaster, without electricity since the earthquake struck this past Saturday. The capacity to cool and hold new fruit is extremely limited. Read the rest of this entry »
UPDATE 02/18/10: The comment period has been extended until March 3, 2010 You still have time to have your voice and opinions heard! The easiest way to send your comments to the USDA is on the True Food Project’s Take Action website.
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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. Read the rest of this entry »
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Unfortunately, their infrastructure didn’t fare as well and there will be an impact on fresh produce supplies, especially table grapes.
