Sorry, yuppies. Shopping at Whole Foods doesn’t help world hunger.

April 28, 2010

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.