Does Whole Foods pay these people? Honestly, where do they all come from, individuals dressed in that oddly attractive hybrid of urban sophisticate and hippie attire, pleasant and really healthy-looking people stuffing $14 organic hothouse tomatoes into hemp multi-use shopping bags?
It's a weird and distinctive clientele at Durham's Whole Foods-one you won't see too often in, say, the Food Lion off of Main Street. And that, I suppose, is the point.
Whole Foods bills itself as something more than just another supermarket. They've got a massive corporate philosophy that goes on and on and on and includes words like "interdependence" and "entwining." They stock scads of organic products and support local farmers and charities. Their website waxes poetic about the "virtuous circle" linking the customer to Mother Earth. The place has elevated grocery shopping to an exercise in social morality.
All successful do-gooders take some kind of backlash, and Whole Foods is no exception. Much of the criticism is fairly accurate: yes, the store caters to the affluent and savvy who have the luxury of affording an all-natural lifestyle. Yes, most stores typically sell only a minuscule amount of local food, while buying the vast majority of organics from the five or six farm conglomerates in California that largely control the industry. Yes, "Whole Foods" the marketing image far outstrips "Whole Foods" the reality.
But so what? Isn't this true of every business, ever? If the worst thing that can be said about the company is that rich people like it and its ads stretch the truth, is that really a problem?
Yes and no. I like Whole Foods the store; there are plenty of things that are unequivocally good about it (the base pay rate for employees, $13.15 an hour, is one of them). At the same time, I think there's some central assumptions lurking behind the company that are profoundly disturbing, ones that should concern you even if you've never set foot in the store.
Whole Foods is one of a myriad of "cause" businesses-socially aware companies that represent a set of ethics beyond the desire for a healthy bottom line. It's been tried before; the difference is that this go-round many companies have been wildly successful at it. The official term for it is "social entrepreneurship," and it's very much in vogue right now.
Being a Public Policy major, I can tell you that many of my peers are quite excited by this concept. Admittedly, it's heady stuff. Charitable ventures that can turn a profit? Businesses that save the whales, or the environment, or the children? How cool is that? These students (as well as plenty of academics and professionals, here and elsewhere) are pretty well sold that this is the wave of the future, that market mechanisms can be tuned to solve all human ills.
And that's precisely what disturbs me. For one thing, the free market has proven very adept at coopting causes or ideals, draining them of content, and re-selling them as empty lifestyle choices. I mean, hell, even Wal-Mart is selling organic produce these days. It's an open question as to whether and how well social entrepreneurial projects will be able to retain their initial ethics in the pressure cooker of the market.
The real issue is much more fundamental than this, however. Most of the problems Whole Foods wants to address-unsustainable agriculture, food as a mere commodity-are a direct result of acquisitiveness, over-consumption and good ol' American consumerism.
Yet the company isn't really asking us to drastically alter our buying habits. It isn't demanding that we produce our own food, and purchase less. In fact, it depends on us not doing any of these things. Whole Foods wants and needs us to keep consuming at the same clip we always have, it just wants us to consume better stuff (provided by Whole Foods, of course).
The same can be said for One World Market, or Ten Thousand Villages, or any of the numerous fair-trade coffee vendors. In a sense, this brand of social entrepreneurship isn't radical at all, it's profoundly conservative: we bought and expended our way into this mess, and damned if we won't buy and expend our way back out.
Don't take this the wrong way; I think most of these businesses are pretty great, and that the products they're selling are actually better than the traditional alternatives. Yes, without question buying free trade is doing less harm. But is it doing good? Is it activism? Is it a full solution?
I don't know. My instinct is that social entrepreneurship is an incomplete response, that it leaves core issues of consumption and waste unaddressed. Either way, it's something we need to consider, and now.
As far as I can tell, social entrepreneurship is an increasingly popular subject in the Public Policy and Political Science departments, and if you don't run into it in a classroom, odds are good you'll find it at a store or business (the Whole Foods is a safe bet for many students). When you do, you'll need to know what to do with it, whether to trust its promise: that we can buy a better world.
Brian Kindle is a Trinity senior. His column runs every Friday.
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