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Add an EventTalking with Jenny: Who is the farmer at the Farmers' Market?
"Perhaps we are getting sick of our 33 new packaged foods a day and the disinfected, anonymous aisles of a supermarket. Going to a farmers' market is worlds away from ordering your groceries online, and people seem hungry for an authentic experience. A farmers' market is a way to get back to basics without romanticizing the past. Sustainable farmers today are translating elements of pre-World War II America into modern times, recognizing the advances of technology while still creating a healthy environment." (page 33)
What inspired you to write Fields That Dream?
I'm a total foodie and I have been my whole life. So I've always had a very intense passion for cooking and for feeding people, but I never really thought about where my food was coming from. Growing up around here, everything comes from around here, whether it's conventionally or organically grown.
When I started cooking elsewhere and saw that food was traveling great distances, it was a real shocker. It started making me feel very powerless. I didn't understand the mechanism or larger reason behind it. I felt like I had no control.
I don't think I'd been to a farmers' market before Seattle. It was such an incredible feeling, it felt like I was coming home that first time. The produce is so different than at a grocery store, the interactions are so different.
Opening the book, I knew it was a collection of profiles of small-scale farmers. But I was surprised how you were able to use their stories as jumping off points for a discussion of contemporary life in the United States. Their stories seemed to connect to every facet of recent history, even the creation of the mobile home after World War II. Did you expect those connections to be so vivid?
It IS part of it, because (the mobile home) was part of that mindset of efficiency and expediency and convenience. And that is exactly what was happening with the food at that time, too. To answer your question directly, no, I didn't expect things to jump out like that. But when you start unraveling our history, you start to see how everything is connected.
I wrote that part before Fast Food Nation came out, and Eric Schlosser went into it, which was very validating to me. It was very hard to find information about freeways, but it was very relevant because they formed this massive transportation system. Without that, we couldn't deliver food across the country.
Throughout the book I kept seeing what you're saying, that food is instrumental in the development of everything. World War II changed everything, not just our food but so many things. The farming technology transformed our culture. I would have never thought there was a connection, but one of the facts that was just so striking to me was that DDT was used to delouse troops. And then we said, "Oh, let's put it on our food." But it was war technology. The technology they used for tanks was then applied to tractors.
Now that we've become displaced from the land, how do we reconnect?
That's a really complicated question. You have to have some sort of personal connection. Today I was at the midwife's and there were all these magazines stacked up in a line. Every single woman on the cover was blonde and skinny with blue eyes and in this case, she was also pregnant. On the magazine cover, the headline tells us how to lose weight without exercise and then there's a recipe for a double fudge brownie, all on the same cover. That's why I say it's emotionally complex to get people connected with where their food comes from.
People are making inroads in different ways, it just depends on what gets someone's attention. For some people, it's finally realizing they can lose weight by eating fresh, healthy food. For other people, it's being scared of cancer and wanting to stay away from chemicals, so they buy organic food. Other people have a deep environmental belief system. For others, it has to do with animal rights, which leads them to vegetarianism, and when you're eating vegetarian you really notice. So there are all those ways, and this book is meant to hopefully tap into those different ways, like trying to educate people on all those different aspects, hoping one would touch home.
But it's also about trying to dispel the mythology that organic or locally grown food is more expensive.
Now, onto the subject of class and race. It may be myth, but the perception is that organic food can only be afforded by the upper classes. And walking into the Staff of Life or New Leaf in Santa Cruz, I rarely see people who aren't white.
As our family grows, Andrea and I have definitely been watching how much we spend on food. And we spend a lot on food. But we got rid of other things, so ...there are things that I'm willing to sacrifice because eating organic is so important to me. But this is also coming from a white, educated, mostly middle-class person, I suppose.
A lot of farmers take food stamps or WIC stamps, and there are a lot of farmers' markets open on the weekends and evenings to accommodate working people ... There are also important projects in the inner cities, like the Peoples' Grocery of East Oakland. We're not talking about getting working class and poor people organic food, necessarily. We're talking about getting them fresh food. There are horrible statistics showing that in some poor neighborhoods that are predominantly black, there are no grocery stores. The only food you can get is sold at liquor stores.
The community gardens play a role, as people can grow their own food. Farmers also go into the inner city to sell their produce, and sometimes they charge lower prices. The People's Grocery mobile grocery store sells organic for reasonable prices. It has to be done on a grassroots level. Like anything, we've benefited from organics becoming trendy, but these kinds of trends are always set by the white, middle-class people. So it's a next step.
For me, the food crisis is about providing fresh food first to the working class and poverty striken communities, and then it would be great if it could be organic on top of that.
I agree with you, but here we are, two white women talking about this. What I often see are well-intentioned, white, college-educated people talking about educating poor, non-white people and, really, by the time the message gets to the communities of color, it sounds condescending. Like we pity them.
The projects I mentioned were initiated by people of color. The Peoples' Grocery of Oakland is run by young people of color in the community. Also I've read about farmers' markets started by people of color in those communities. In the Southwest, native scientists and growers are starting to look at diabetes.
So yes, I agree with you. But there's a lot happening in communities from within the community, and while there are also white people working, it's a partnership. I think that's an important point. I don't know a lot of projects that are lasting and successful in the model you mentioned (projects initiated by people from outside the community). The ones I read about were started by the communities themselves and that's a very important distinction. It's a good point.
Albertson's isn't always cheaper than a natural foods store, but walking through Albertson's, I see more Latino families, more families with children, more people who appear working class.
Food is a common denominator among all communities, and I think that depends on how it's perceived within each community. Going back to the model of farmers' markets, I don't think in every community the markets are necessarily for wealthy or white people. It depends on the community you're serving. Santa Cruz is a mixed community, but there isn't a lot of outreach (by the farmers' markets) to the Latino community here.
But if you go to the flea market, there's a lot of produce being sold open air, and that's where many Latinos go. I would not hesitate to say that a lot of Latino families living in Santa Cruz, if they want to buy fresh or locally grown food, would either go to the flea market or to Watsonville, because Santa Cruz is very segregated.
What assumptions did you make about the farmers you interviewed?
I assumed they wouldn't be interested in talking to me, that they wouldn't know how to respond. All these assumptions came out of my own boundaries I had created. That's a really intense thing I had to come to a realization about, confronting my own fears of crossing the borders of culture and race. It was a growing experience for me, and now my work is predominantly writing about, almost exclusively, Native American and Latino people. I don't have those fears anymore. It was something I learned in general, not so much about farming, but about interviewing people. Just as when a writer who goes in with an agenda, it's just gonna get blown out of the water every time. I had an agenda, and that got blown.
One of the farmers, Joanie McIntyre, makes some strong comments about gender roles within her family. She said that although their farming style is considered progressive, at the end of the day she's in a traditional gender role, cooking, cleaning and being the primary caregiver of the family's four children.
Throughout most of the book, you make comments and observations, but in this case it seemed like you quoted her, and then stepped back. Was that intentional?
It was deliberate. In areas where I thought it would be most provoking, I didn't want to insert my opinion. I thought readers could think for themselves and I didn't want to insert any kind of judgment. I also wanted to represent people fairly, and let people make their own judgment, give them room to process their own thoughts. And of course, the fact that I included her quote shows my agenda.
Every single person interviewed read their chapter before it was published. I really thought Joanie and Michael wouldn't like their chapter, but they were fine with it. That was very important for me, for the people to see themselves represented accurately and fairly.
Were you surprised the farms weren't all organic?
No. What I learned about it all, is that it's not about the label. It's about how the food is grown, and knowing how it's grown is a wonderful thing about not buying vegetables anonymously. A couple of my favorite stands at the local farmers' market aren't certified organic. But I know they grow without pesticides or if they use some, they use them responsibly. But there is no way I'd know that if I (bought the produce) from the store.
One of the great things about farmers' markets is they lessen the dichotomy between conventional and organic. That's why I use the term sustainable, a lot of the time, instead of organic. I had a lot of assumptions about organic. I learned there was a lot more to sustainability than the term "organic."
I found a parking spot between an Outback and a Prius. In moments, we had left the land of steel and asphalt behind and stepped into a world of biological wonders. The robust-looking bread, in all the right shades of toasty brown, was clearly far more than an inert sandwich-support medium; even the few lonely white-bread specimens looked good. The fruits and vegetables actually looked and smelled like fruits and vegetables. The bulk bins formed a solid base for the best of food pyramids. In the deli and packaged-food sections, it was an invigorating experience simply to read the labels.
The work day was just starting, and the employees, most of them anyway, were genuinely friendly and seemingly delighted with their lot in life -- to be young, healthy and working at Whole Foods. These "team members," as they're known in company lingo, have signed on with a major-league powerhouse. With 180 stores in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, annual sales of $4.6 billion and profits of $160 million, Whole Foods recently moved into the Fortune 500.
But then we started looking around for something to buy. As we stared bug-eyed at the lofty price tags, I wondered aloud what sort of income it would take to become a regular Whole Foods shopper. Priti had an idea: Why not give Whole Foods the Wal-Mart test?
Return of the cashier-shopper
Priti was referring to a June 2003 AlterNet article in which I asked this seemingly simple question: In view of Wal-Mart's vast range of merchandise and "Always Low Prices," could a family whose breadwinner worked at the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Salina, Kan., afford to supply its minimum needs by shopping there?
I'd relied on published studies that computed the cost of an "adequate but austere" life for a family with one adult and two children in Salina. The budget included only the basics: shelter, transportation, food, routine toiletries and medicines, and not much more. Housing and transportation can't be bought at Wal-Mart (yet), but almost all other necessities can be.
The bottom line: Our Wal-Mart cashier could not satisfy such a bare-survival budget even if she worked 40 hours per week, more hours than a typical Wal-Mart workweek. And as you might expect, in trying to keep the family within such a budget, I condemned them to an array of foods that were boring, unappealing, and not very nutritious -- and produced in ways that most customers would prefer not to know about.
But is that inevitable? Or is the nation's corporate food system capable of supplying people at all income levels with products of the quality we saw at Whole Foods?
Salina to San Antonio
I took Priti up on her suggestion, moving the hypothetical family from Salina to San Antonio, and having my cashier work and buy groceries at Whole Foods. I used the same list of foods -- a minimal, USDA-recommended "low-cost food plan" -- that I'd used at the Salina Wal-Mart.
Back at Whole Foods, we followed the same simulated-shopping rules, selecting the cheapest food in each food category and the cheapest brand of that type. Using those prices, I computed the monthly cost of feeding an adult female, a 12-year-old boy and a 4-year-old child.
At Salina's Wal-Mart, the bill had been $232, plus sales tax. At Whole Foods, the same basket of food cost $564. Texas has no sales tax on food, and Whole Foods employees get a 20 percent discount, bringing the cost for the San Antonio cashier all the way down to $451. That monthly price tag includes only the cheapest foods in each category, and none of the store's popular luxury items.
The starting wage for a cashier at Salina's Wal-Mart in 2003 was $6.25, which fell $146 per month short of meeting her family's survival budget. Whole Foods employees in three states told me that a starting cashier's wages tend to be between $7 and $8, but according to Whole Foods spokesperson Ashley Hawkins, a poll of all company regions showed a starting wage of $8 to $10.
Let's assume that the cost of nonfood necessities in present-day San Antonio is similar to Salina circa 2003 (although it's undoubtedly higher, and the San Antonio cashier might not have access to the full day-care subsidy that low-income Kansas workers get). A $10-per-hour employee determined to shop at Whole Foods could manage to do so. An $8-per-hour employee could meet the bare-survival food budget, but with nothing left over. At $7, she would miss the mark by more than the Wal-Mart cashier-shopper. The situation would be worse in a state like Kansas that taxes food sales.
Hawkins says Whole Foods' full-time turnover rate is 24.7 percent, so the above wages would apply to approximately one-fourth of employees. She says the companywide average wage is $15, and that health care, 401(k), stock option and stock purchase plans (after about 10-12 months' employment) have helped earn Whole Foods a place on Fortune magazine's list of the "100 best companies to work for" for the past nine years.
Blinded by uniqueness
But not all employees agree with Fortune's assessment. Jeremy Plague was among the Madison, Wis., Whole Foods employees who managed to form a union (the only one in the company's history) for a period between 2002 and 2004, eventually succumbing to Whole Foods' fierce anti-union policies.
Says Plague, "In my experience, most people really liked working at Whole Foods for the first few months, blinded by the uniqueness of the store and by their hippie rhetoric of how we all mattered. But then people hit the six-month wall where they realize that it's all a bunch of BS, and Whole Foods is just like every other money-hungry corporation … It's all a great, worker- and environment-friendly system until you get to the actual people working in the stores, stocking the shelves and ringing you up at the register."
A website created by the Madison organizing effort, wholeworkersunite.org, remains active as a gathering place for current and former Whole Foods employees critical of company policies.
Critics of my cashier-shopper analysis argue that jobs with retailers like Whole Foods or Wal-Mart aren't meant to support families. But to the extent that that's true, neither employer can be viewed as a model for the economy at large. And given the wage and price policies of the two companies, one thing is clear: Customers who frequent Whole Foods are unlikely to be Wal-Mart cashiers or other low-income earners.
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey is frank about that. He recently told The Independent (UK), "You can't have it both ways. If you want the highest quality, it costs more. It's like complaining that a BMW is more expensive than a Hyundai. Yes, but you're getting a better car."
And few Whole Foods Markets are situated in economy-car country. Of the 170 stores in the U.S., none are located in zip codes with average 2003 household incomes at or below $31,000 -- the approximate income earned by a full-time employee earning the average Whole Foods wage.
Only nine of the 170 stores are in zip codes with incomes of $43,300 or lower. That was the median income in the United States that year (that is, half of U.S. households had incomes lower, and half of them higher, than $43,300).
Half of the zip codes with Whole Foods stores lie above $72,000 in average income. A fourth of them exceed $100,000.
Mackey's defense of high prices is mirrored in Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott's defense of his company's low wages, which he summed up in an address to employees last October: "I ask anyone to do the math. Even slight overall adjustments to wages eliminate our thin profit margin." And, said Scott, price increases are out of the question because even as it is, "our customers simply don't have the money to buy necessities between paychecks."
Is it possible for a corporation that sells everyday, necessary products like food to do three things at once: (1) pay a living wage, (2) charge prices that most people can afford and (3) provide an acceptable return to its shareholders?
Clearly, Wal-Mart gives top priority to shareholders. Then come customers and, bringing up the rear, workers. As expected, its degrees of success follow in that same order, with workers sacrificed to satisfy the first two priorities. But what would happen to its wages and prices if Wal-Mart, notorious for putting the price squeeze on its suppliers, were to commit itself to marketing only sustainably produced, high-quality goods?
And, returning to Whole Foods, the same question can be put another way: Does it manage to make the list of "best companies to work for" only because of the premium prices paid by its customers? How would Whole Foods' merchandise quality, pay and benefits look if it tried to match Wal-Mart's customer base, maybe not in size but in socioeconomic diversity?
Whole-food, nonmarket solutions
Many academics and grassroots activists in the sustainable-agriculture movement are asking those kinds of questions, doing some hard thinking about how society can pay farmers (preferably noncorporate farmers) adequately to raise nutritious food in less ecologically destructive ways while keeping the end products affordable for all.
Clearly, our hypothetical cashiers, wherever they work, would benefit from having their own vegetable garden. But unless, against all odds, they also managed to raise a lot of staple foods on their own -- wheat, dry beans, maybe some chickens or dairy animals -- or had plenty of time for fishing, they would still be largely reliant on purchased food of some kind.
Like many in her profession, Rhonda Janke, associate professor of horticulture and a sustainable cropping systems specialist at Kansas State University, is a big advocate of locally produced food, farmers' markets and community supported agriculture, or CSA. (In a typical CSA arrangement, consumers contract with a farmer in their area to deliver a certain quantity of food on an agreed schedule during the growing season. The kinds of foods delivered depends on what's in season.)
As for making good, locally produced food affordable, Janke notes that "many CSAs have provisions for 'work shares' and reduced cost shares for low-income families, and that can be part of a 'local safety net'. But that doesn't eliminate the need for the grower to get full price from a minimum number of full-paying customers."
Janke asks, "What do you consider a living wage for a farmer, and does that make the price of food go up? If all farmers got $10 per hour, not counting [federal subsidies], what would food cost? Would the price at Wal-Mart go up? Whole Foods?"
She believes that leaving it up to the big retailers would put food out of reach for a lot of people: "I think the only conclusion one can logically come to is that market forces alone are not going to provide enough healthy food to everyone in our society."
In that spirit, a growing number of pioneering nonprofit organizations are working to put good food within economic reach of their local communities. One of them is People's Grocery in Oakland, Calif. The nonprofit, community-based organization sells fresh produce and staples through its store and Mobile Market -- a "grocery store on wheels" that travels through West Oakland making regular stops. The organization also has extensive educational programs and has helped establish a growing network of community gardens that currently provide 25 percent of the produce it sells.
I asked co-founder Brahm Ahmadi what makes it possible for People's Grocery to sell good, natural food that low-income families can afford, while Whole Foods can't. He said the fundamental difference is that "they're pursuing profit and we aren't."
Ahmadi says good food doesn't have to be expensive. "Because of its huge size, Whole Foods receives a deeper discount from its suppliers than any other natural-food retailer. Yet the prices in its stores are among the most expensive. They are purely profit-driven, so they do not allow that cost benefit to go to the customer."
Once, says Ahmadi, a Whole Foods executive told him, "We could not market food the way you do, because our shareholders simply wouldn't allow it."
People's Grocery subsidizes its efforts through charitable funding, with the understanding that the donated money will go to hold prices down. But as the low-income market strengthens, says Ahmadi, People's Grocery will try to reduce its dependency on contributions by marketing food that it obtains directly from producers, cutting out as many steps of the expensive supply chain as possible.
The growth of the natural-food industry may have been phenomenal in recent years, but Ahmadi predicts that its relatively affluent target market cannot avoid saturation: "Companies will have to project what new markets they can turn to. And there's substantial growth potential among low-income shoppers. They account for almost half of food retail in the U.S. -- that's $85 billion."
Indirectly echoing Rhonda Janke's conclusion that "market forces alone are not enough," Ahmadi says, "We need to build demand that can thrive and grow on its own," but in low-income areas "it has to be done differently. It requires a grassroots approach with community organizations that have track records."
And community organizations working in not-so-posh urban zip codes from coast to coast are establishing just such track records. They include, among others, Garden-Raised Bounty in Olympia, Wash., Growing Power in Milwaukee and Added Value in Brooklyn, N.Y.
But a more thoroughgoing overhaul of the nation's food systems may be needed to reach the majority of city dwellers, as well as vast, less densely populated rural regions between the coasts. Of the 500 poorest counties in the United States, more than 450 are rural. Ironically, it is in highly productive, ecologically threatened agricultural regions that sustainably produced, nutritious food is least widely available.
To organizations like People's Grocery, it's unacceptable that such food is accessible to some families and not to others simply on the basis of where they live or how much they earn. As Brahm Ahmadi puts it, "We're not talking about a luxury item here. Good food is a basic need."
I used to work for Whole Foods on the east coast, and I personally know how shitty of a company they are. I recently saw in the newspaper that they are the most profitable food-related-business to invest in or some shit.
When I worked there, they physically searched ALL of the employees as we left every night, including the purses of longtime employees.
'Ecologically sound' my ass! For 3 months, the sink in the flower department ran, not dripped, but ran ALL DAY LONG. I repeatedly urged the management to fix it, but they gave little care to the fact that gallons a minute were being wasted, they could of cared less - as long as it didn't stain their nice clothes. The Whole Foods i worked at didn't even recycle the pounds of carboard boxes that were thrown away everyday.
I've never seen more food wasted in my whole life, than when I worked at Whole Foods. It was disgusting. I would often ask if I could bring home some of the boxes of food being thrown away because of aesthetic error, but they would always deny my requests, and make bourgeois comments about it.
Whole Foods is a bourgeios corporation that is meant to make tons of money off of other rich people (30 dollar blocks of chocolate?).
They have almost 200 stores. Their scum - no ifs, ands, or butts.
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