Posts from December 2005


thinking with our stomachs (or, why john mackey sucks and no one will say so)
01 December 2005

If there’s one thing that North American vegans love, it sure is Whole Foods Markets. This health chain stocks all kinds of vegan goodies, and many vegans that I know often commune with the Whole Foods Mother Ship a few times a week. Hushed, reverent tones are used to describe the goodies that one can find there, and if you ask most vegans, Whole Foods is, indeed, A Very Good Thing.

Well, I’m not most vegans.

Though I understand the convenience of a mega-chain stocking vegan foods of all kinds, I have some real issues with the public statements of the CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey. In an interview with Animal Voices radio, John Mackey describes company initiatives in fundraising for animal welfare causes. Seems big-hearted, right? Well, maybe only if you’re willing to cut Whole Foods the benefit of the doubt. I’m not. And I’m not willing to because Whole Foods has every interest in selling meat, eggs, and dairy. If they can spend some money on making consumers feel better about the way that their meat and dairy is treated, they can sell more of it. What’s insidious about this to me is that the average consumer at a Whole Foods is probably even more attuned to food than the average supermarket consumer. The average Whole Foods customer is probably an easier person to talk to about the exploitation and problems of the meat industry. But if they think that their meat is coming from some really nice, sunny farm where the animals are treated well, then they’re going to be less likely to consider going vegan because they think that the animal “died happy” (as if that’s even possible). These welfarist measures don’t attack the root of the problem, and if anything, they continue the horrid and rampant exploitation of animals that is the norm. The only difference is that they make people with a conscience feel better about eating animals. To me, even if the slaves are treated well, it is still slavery. What I don’t get is why we’d even buy any of this for anything more than simple marketing designed to help Whole Foods sell more meat.

I’ve heard Mackey respond that Whole Foods needs to sell meat, dairy, and eggs to stay in business, as if this justifies the sale of these items (and to many vegans, it apparently does, satiated as they are by an abundance of Tofutti Cuties, fake cheese, and dark chocolate). To me, this sounds like the argument of a Southern plantation owner prior to the end of slavery arguing that cotton production is just plain too expensive without slaves. What is this except profiting from exploitation? If your business depends upon the exploitation of animals for continued profitability, how is this even remotely ‘vegan?’ And if your business makes people feel better about animal exploitation, I think you’re in the wrong business.

If a passable argument for any business is that it depends on animal exploitation to remain profitable, then we might as well give up right now on fighting animal agriculture of any kind, because they can marshall the same argument to their cause (perhaps even more convincingly). Animal agriculture is a huge industry, and one that couldn’t remain profitable without the exploitation of animals. Most of us see this as our #1 enemy. Yet, are we willing to cut Mackey some slack because he’s a vegan and because he keeps us flush in bourgeois organic pasta, SoyDream, and Follow Your Heart “cheese?”

  Posted by Bob Torres    Permalink    Filed under: categories

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