Conscious crap - my response to a post on John Mackey in the Yale Sustainable Food Blog

The original post can be found here. In it, the author describes Makey, CEO of Whole Foods, vision of conscious capitalism as a way to " promote a healthy relationship to food in this country". I, as you can imagine, am a bit critical of this position.

My comment to the post:

I recently saw Gus Speth (Yale Dean of Forestry and Environmental Studies) speak at our college about environmental challenges that are ahead of us and the ways that various sectors have tried to address it thus far. Though he stopped short of providing any concrete solutions, his discussion of having to face a post-capitalist society was the most interesting to me. He identified, as the founder of such organizations as the NRDC, how working in the system to try to change has not worked. I think the type of capitalism Mackey suggests, is a continued attempt to gloss over the real structural problems that face the environment in general and the food system in particular. In short, it is just more "green-washing"; attempts to buy our way out of a problem that is fundamentally rooted in consumerism, while trying to make us feel better at the same time. So while Mackey runs a business, which means his first responsibility is to make profit for his shareholders, Whole Foods of course has found something people wanted to buy - a passive ethic and a pretense to real food consciousness - that at the same time does a great job of maintaining the status quo.

NYT article: Urban Food Systems and Better Nutrition

There is an interesting article describing policy initiatives that aim to promote better nutrition by increasing access to local foods. Proposed policies would provide incentives for supermarkets and farmers' markets to locate in areas of need while restricting fast food restaurants. This policy would also require some public agencies to purchase a quantity of food from local sources.
This type of initiative is exactly the kind of systemic change I have been interested in for shaping a healthy, just and sustainable food system. While studying for my "first exam" this winter, I have gotten really into thinking about Kurt Lewin's notions of life-space and channels and gate-keepers (I wish I could say I had picked up on the relevance of this during my course last year...) and the consequences of how these issues shape the way people eat. It really all came together for me when one of my study-mates (thanks T!) said that Lewin was saying that if you want to change the way people eat you have to change the ways food gets to them. That just crystallized all my interests in food-system change in a single -forward sentence. Given this idea, I think that these policy initiatives are a great step and its about time that officials start thinking about shaping the food environment instead of the continual focus on individual lifestyle change.