My mother recently gave me a rather undeserved and random surprise: a gift card to Whole Foods! Being one of my favorite stores in town, I was like a little kid with candy. I rushed over to the store and began searching for "Kentucky Proud" products, items with a sticker on them that ensures the consumer they are purchasing local goods. To my horror, the great big organic/fair-trade store in Lexington has almost ZERO local products! I am all for sustainable farming and stopping the exploitation of farmers from around the world, but in light of what we have been discussing this semester I am curious of just how much Whole Foods is " helping save the world on step at a time" as they claim on banners all over the store. Sure, those
acai berries are grown in a way that an agricultural family gets paid and the rain forest remains relatively safe, but what about the fossil fuels it takes to ship fair-trade products around the globe??? It is almost like taking two steps forward and one step back, in my opinion.
I do have some good things to say however: the groceries I got from Whole Foods had significantly less packaging than the local products from the Good Foods Co-Op I purchased last month!!! The mushrooms I bought actually had a container that is compostable, and several of the other items had almost 100% recycled packages.
So I sacrificed local eating for better packaging this time around. It is unfortunate that such an awesome store doesn't support more Kentucky farmers. I understand that this is a chain store, but I'd like to think that doing some regional research for local products couldn't be that timely or expensive...
I wonder what local produce would be available at this time of year. I imagine that the Whole Foods produce section would look pretty brown (root vegetables, mostly). Part of eating local, of course, means changing our habits of using any kind of produce at any time of year. What would all of you think about that?
ReplyDeleteI had a very brown (and orange and yellow) winter. It was tough and I wasn't able to make it all the way to the other side (have recently bought lettuce and spinach from who knows where since I was feeling very low on nutrients). My insistence on local produce may have even steered me towards more processed products, though I feel like I did spend less money on food this winter.
ReplyDeleteThere is currently a lot of push back against Whole Foods and their claims of being geared toward organic and local. I shop there because it's the only place on this side of the river that carries bulk goods and other health food items.
The Organic Consumer's Association has a new action alert out for Whole Foods: http://www.organicconsumers.org/whole_foods_unfi.cfm
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