So much for Whole Foods supporting locally grown and certified organic products.
To view the list “Country of Origin – Whole Food Market Internal Document – Do Not Distribute”, go here:
http://www.acc-tv.com/images/wjla/news/iteamwholefoodslist052108.pdf
You’ll see items like basil from Egypt, chives from China and parsley from the Czech Republic! I grow those – and more – in the herb garden in my backyard for crying out loud!
It’s sickening. And yet, people will continue to shop there. Maybe everyone’s so jaded to hypocrisy it fails to make an impact anymore.

i believe that people shop at the local Whole Foods because there is some type of mind control being practiced there in the lighting and the music that makes people feel happy and included. I am not kidding and I stay out of that store and stick to the quiet old fashioned “health food” store very close to where I live in other words within walking distance. No spinning lights, no spinning music just old fashioned produce and bread and bulk items. No fancy $5 breads or $12 brownies just the “health foods” we have grown to trust.
Years ago I rented a room to a young man who worked there and he said “well, Whole Foods is all military/industrial money no different really than Safeway or Macy’s.
Anyway I really do think there is something hincky with that concern/.

The more I read about the food industry, the more convinced I am that the second I move out of my parents’ home, I need to start an organic vegetable garden. Not just for me, but for the sake of my future kids.

Hi, Libba Letton from Whole Foods Market here. I’m not sure why, but this WJLA story, which aired almost two years ago in May 2008, is making the rounds on the internet again. The piece is full of errors and incorrect assumptions, which we address point by point here, on our blog: http://blog.wholefoodsmarket.com/whole-foods-market-responds-to-wjla/.

Libba, unless the “made in China” information on the back of the products is in error, Whole Foods can hardly claim to be supporting locally grown products.
Whole Foods’ damage control doesn’t negate common sense.

There is so much wrong with this argument.
1. The US barely produces a fraction of the organic food that US consumers demand, and therefore organic food simply has to be imported.
2. You can analyse food in a lab to determine if it is organic.
3. Typically Wholefoods’ organic certifier will audit the facility that the “organic” food is being produced/grown.

The chief issue that bothers me is contained in DH’s argument above, although he or she will not like what I do with it. Most organic food we eat is not produced here at home. It is raised abroad, in areas with very cheap labor, Why? It’s cheaper. For the consumer? Not so much.
For the middleman. The profit is bigger.
By bringing in this food from abroad we make it difficult if not impossible for more organic farmers to thrive because they are competing with extremely low labor costs abroad. Thus we make the change-over to better farming here more difficult. Not only is local agriculture actively injured when purchases are from elsewhere, it lowers demand for local products which depresses their prices and slows the increase in their supply. It’s called Economics 101.
This outcome is 100% undesirable. I expect Safeway not to care much (and by the way they also offer some local products) but Whole Foods with all its noise about ecology and health? Come on.
There is no getting around this. For the company to simultaneously tout local growing is, shall we say, misleading…?
I need say little about carbon footprint issues as they are pretty obvious. The carbon footprint of organic food from China is bigger than the carbon footprint of organic food from California or Texas or Florida. The food is frozen, so it really is not important in that respect where it comes from. It should be produced here. There is only an argument for imported food that can be grown here being imported if it is sold fresh unseasonally. This argument does not apply to frozen food.
MAYBE the labeling of organic is accurate. Maybe not. I have learned over the years that government agencies, ESPECIALLY when dominated by “conservative” administrations as ours have been for the past almost 10 years, often fail to do their job. Now the very interests that often decry regulation are now the ones praising evaluations coming from one of the more repressive regimes on earth with a record of unhealthy agricultural production. (Are you listening Steve Mackey?)
Again, in making this argument I am subordinating economics a little bit to ethical relations with our land and with our farmers. As, this is something corporations are institutionally biased against. This is WHY the corporate world initially tried to get national standards set for organic agriculture, standards that overrode state standards. It created national standardization backed by law – the enemy of local vitality – and it made it easier for agribusiness to twist those standards because they were controlled in one place, a place where money speaks louder than anything else; Washington, DC.

This is WHY the corporate world initially tried to get national standards set for organic agriculture, standards that overrode state standards. It created national standardization backed by law – the enemy of local vitality – and it made it easier for agribusiness to twist those standards because they were controlled in one place, a place where money speaks louder than anything else; Washington, DC.
This.
Back in the ’70s, Hormel sued the State of Michigan in Federal court over Michigan’s standards for processed meats, such as hot dogs. Michigan standards were much higher than Federal standards and Hormel argued, successfully, that this was a restraint on interstate commerce. The court ruled that hot dogs made in Michigan had to conform to state standards, but hot dogs sold in Michigan but made in other states only had to follow federal standards.
Local coney island restaurants made a point of saying they used “Only Michigan Made Hot Dogs”.

“Health is wealth” is known to all and everyone wants good health. So, Let us build a food habit discipline, keep pace with work, rest and or exercise to Achieve good health, The ultimate wealth.

Old news, why post it if you don’t even bother to follow-up on what has or hasn’t changed in the past year and a half since the report aired.

Well it wasn’t old news to ME. Some of us have busy lives and can’t be regularly trawling the Internet for every piece of news out there.
If you can, then by all means link us to an update on this.

Will- You sound like a shill for Whole Foods. You’ve ignored the arguments I gave and offer nothing new. If you have something new to say, say it. If you don’t, submit your troll bill to Whole Foods. I hope they pay you well.

This is old news and I found their response to this adequate.

You are responding to an older post as well…
Assuming that Whole Foods has responded adequately to whether Chinese vegetables are genuinely organic, there is another dimension to the problem. When American organic growers are forced to compete with Chinese growers, they are often at an enormous disadvantage, as anyone with a brain can see. That is WHY Whole Foods buys Chinese organics.
By outsourcing organic agriculture to China we are retarding its growth in the US.
This makes good sense for a corporate bottom line, but it makes no sense at all for someone worried about promoting organic agriculture here at home.
That’s why I shop at the local farmer’s market and at purely local supermarkets. When Whole Foods comes under pure corporate logic after its founder departs this world or retires, we can be 100% sure it’s institutional commitment to organic will evaporate completely and the company will only be worried about share values and CEO perks and bonuses. It’s profits will be used in part to manipulate organic standards whenever it sees an advantage in doing so, and their centralization in Washington will help this enormously.
It is vital that we keep local agriculture and stores viable when we have the choice – and shop at Whole Foods only when we don’t.

I start doubting if vegetables and fruits in Whole Food are true organic or not.
Needless to say, I don’t want to shop at Whole Food.
Once I got supposedly organic cabbage from this market and when I cooked it, it tasted like plastic and I put in trash.

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seks randki

Organic foods? hmm, let me see how these affects my health.