Wal-Mart Puts Foodies on the Warpath

And Wal-Mart thought South Park was rough on them? With the news that the megalomaniac superstore monolith is going to be stocking its shelves with organic foodstuffs, some foodies are coming out in full force to protest.

Perhaps that's a bit of hyperbole. But at the very least, Wal-Mart did end up taking a verbal beating at Sunday's Slow Food New York convivium annual meeting. According to the article in last week's New York Times Magazine which sparked the debate:

Wal-Mart will buy its organic food from whichever producers can produce it most cheaply, and these will not be the sort of farmers you picture when you hear the word "organic." Big supermarkets want to do business only with big farmers growing lots of the same thing, not because big monoculture farms are any more efficient (they aren't) but because it's easier to buy all your carrots from a single megafarm than to contract with hundreds of smaller growers. The "transaction costs" are lower, even when the price and the quality are the same. This is just one of the many ways in which the logic of industrial capitalism and the logic of biology on a farm come into conflict. At least in the short run, the logic of capitalism usually prevails.

Wal-Mart's push into the organic market won't do much for small organic farmers, that seems plain enough. But it may also spell trouble for the big growers it will favor. Wal-Mart has a reputation for driving down prices by squeezing its suppliers, especially after those suppliers have invested heavily to boost production to feed the Wal-Mart maw. Having done that, the supplier will find itself at Wal-Mart's mercy when the company decides it no longer wants to pay a price that enables the farmer to make a living. When that happens, the notion of responsibly priced food will be sacrificed to the imperatives of survival, and the pressure to cut corners will become irresistible.

Up to now, the federal organic standards have provided a bulwark against that pressure. Yet with the industrialization of organic, these rules are themselves coming under mounting pressure, and forgive my skepticism, but it's hard to believe that the lobbyists from Wal-Mart are going to play a constructive role in defending those standards from efforts to weaken them. Just this past year the Organic Trade Association used lobbyists who do work for Kraft Foods to move a bill through Congress that will make it easier to include synthetic ingredients in products labeled organic.

In addition, it might appear that local farmers who provide high-quality organic products are going to be devastated by Wal-Mart's move into the space. But, do those small, local farmers reach the tables of middle America to begin with?

I think not.

They are reaching the yuppies and hardcore foodies that gravitate towards local farmer markets. They are reaching the chefs and restaurants that have customers who like seeing that their snap peas came from "such and such farm" and that their peaches harvested from "such and such grove," where they were lovingly tended to and picked at the peak of ripeness.

I like to think there is room for everyone at the table. And, if Wal-Mart helps improve offerings for folks that would be eating processed, genetically-modified gunk without it, who am I to argue? I'm simply one of those yuppie, hardcore foodies that gravitates towards local farmer markets and likes to dine a restaurants where menus offer me snap peas from "such an such farm" and peaches harvested from "such and such grove."