Sorry, yuppies. Shopping at Whole Foods doesn’t help world hunger.
Anyone who knows me very well knows I have next to no tolerance for yuppie bullshit, especially yuppie bullshit regarding food. Including smug, self-satisfied yuppies shopping at Whole Foods and thinking that buying organic is somehow saving the world. In fact, our own goofy preoccupations with eating fresh, eating local, etc have nothing to do with feeding the world’s poor and actually distract us from that task. Glad to see this article in Foreign Policy address the delusion:
…though it’s certainly a good thing to be thinking about global welfare while chopping our certified organic onions, the hope that we can help others by changing our shopping and eating habits is being wildly oversold to Western consumers. Food has become an elite preoccupation in the West, ironically, just as the most effective ways to address hunger in poor countries have fallen out of fashion.
Helping the world’s poor feed themselves is no longer the rallying cry it once was. Food may be today’s cause célèbre, but in the pampered West, that means trendy causes like making food “sustainable” — in other words, organic, local, and slow. Appealing as that might sound, it is the wrong recipe for helping those who need it the most.
Read the whole thing here.
UPDATE: A friend dropped me a line to let me know the person who wrote this is on the board of Monsanto–not exactly a happy friendly company. So take it with a grain of salt, and know that there are probably ulterior motives behind it. Still, I think the spirit of the article, if not the exact prescriptions, is pretty good.
Comments are closed.
I’m sure there are some ulterior motives like you state in your update, but overall, the economics of the article are sound. As noble as local, sustainable food sources are in theory and even practice, they are in direct competition with the agricultural exports a lot of developing countries survive on.
In the end, it all depends on which cause you wish to champion. Both have their benefits and detriments–it’s just where you place your priorities.
Totally agree. And what I really hate is not so much yuppies that shop at Whole Foods (which is fine if you’re honest about why you do it) but yuppies that shop at Whole Foods and have this general sense that they’re saving the world by doing so. Like, oh, I’ve already done my bit to feed the hungry in Africa. I bought locally grown artichokes, see?
Ha. Indeed.
To take it one step further, what I really hate is anyone who makes it a point to let everyone know what they are doing to save the world.
Yes! Nail on head.
And, for what it’s worth, organic food comprised only 2.6% of the total food/grocery sales in the U.S. in 2005. I’m sure that’s gone up in the past 5 years, but even still, it’s probably not much more than 5% of the total market share. That also doesn’t take into account that some organic food is still imported, which makes that percentage even less competitive on a global scale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food#North_America
Economics…sheesh…