Whole
Foods, which touts its support for locally grown food and organic agriculture, imports a great deal of its frozen food from China. So says a report from ABC’s
I-Team.    We are all aware of current Chinese
honesty and quality regarding food.  Poisoned milk
 and dead pets come to mind.  Knowing this, Whole
Foods has put China as the country of origin in very small type on its packages and, according to the I-Team report, kept the knowledge of how dependent they were on Chinese food hidden.  ‘California Blend’ vegetables are not exactly from California.  

Worse,
there is no reasonable way for anyone to tell if food that comes from China is
in fact organic.  We are dealing
with a despotic government that controls the news and has a history of
suppressing information it does not want anyone to know.  Further, there is no sane way to argue
it supports local agriculture.  The
only less local agriculture will finally become available when we have Lunar or
Martian colonies.

I
have continually argued in this blog and elsewhere that publicly held
corporations cannot be trusted with food 
production because they are interested only in profit.  While the founder of a corporation
might be a principled person, as when Amadeo Giannini  founded Bank of America, the internal logic of control being determined by who
has invested the most virtually guarantees that there will be no lasting
ethical commitment that interferes with making money.  Eventually the organization will be interested only in money and will do whatever it takes to get it.  

Because
I believe interacting with any living system has an ethical dimension, and that agriculture in particular is or should be a highly ethical enterprise, I have
come to the conclusion that while corporations are good at making cars, they
should not be trusted with producing food.  Ever.

Now Whole Foods has become an unexpected ‘exhibit A” to my argument.  They tell us of their commitment to organic agriculture and local produce, while making it difficult to discover how little they walk their talk.

Whole
Foods has been a subject of much debate on this blog, and as evidence of John
Mackey’s personal commitment to healthy eating piled up, I softened my view
that the chain should only be patronized when there are no reasonable organic
food outlets or local food outlets near by.  But that was with the assumption that the company was likely
to be honorable until John Mackey retired. 

I
may have been won over to my qualified acceptance much too quickly.  Listen to the video from ABC and decide for yourself.  As for me, I am doubly committed to NEVER buying their store brand.  It has shown itself to be deliberately misleading, or worse, and competes against the very same local agriculture the company tries to take credit for supporting.