Walmart...Organic?

According to a study done by Scarborough Research in 2007, Wal-Mart is the leading seller of organic food in the United States.  The study says, "Twenty-nine percent of organics consumers shopped Wal-Mart Supercenter during the past week."  Wal-Mart, known for its immense store sizes and unbeatable prices, has now not only entered the realm of the often perceived elitist foodie, it has now mastered the market.  How is this possible you might ask?  "The company sells 18 percent of all the groceries bought in the United States--more than anyone else by a wide margin," says an article in the Mother Jones publication.  If a company of that magnitude enters any new market, it seems that that company is headed for success.

Wal-Mart first began its "green initiatives" in 2005, according to an article in the encyclopedia Green Food.  The company has pushed to be more energy efficient; S. Robson Walton is on the board of Conservation International and his grandson, Sam R. Walton, currently serves on the board of Environmental Defense.  One of the largest green advances that Wal-Mart has made is to have all of their fish certified by the Marine Stewardship Council.  In order to attract more suppliers, the megalith company encouraged non-sustainable fisheries to become sustainable instead of simply skipping them over.        

But there has been a substantial amount of controversy surrounding Wal-Mart's switch to go green.  Take the fisheries for example.  Critics say that perhaps Wal-Mart is doing what is called "greenwashing" or over-promoting green PR to the point that it is not sincere, but merely based in marketing stratagem.  Some think that  the over-fishing many suppliers do to meet high consumer demand is strategically overshadowed by the retailer's commitment to stay sustainable.  Also, according to the Mother Jones article, produce industry analyst Jim Prevor said that a company as big as Wal-Mart can't waste its time "chasing down small organic apple wholesalers and buying 60 cases of apples because that's all they have...I'd be surprised if it's [organic food] more than 2 percent of their total produce."

From the critical point of view, Wal-Mart is not the most environmental or local-minded company around either, and its sheer size doesn't help.  According to an Economic Policy Institute article, Wal-Mart fuels unemployment in the U.S. by using vast amounts of Chinese imports.  The company sells cheap products to many, many people in the U.S. that are easy to make in China, but only through certain, often labor-rights-abusive methods.  This process is profit-minded, which is not in keeping with the organic mindset promoting local businesses and a low carbon footprint.  Yet, Wal-Mart must be doing something right if it has gained so much more notoriety for going green.  The company has built environmentally friendly stores and has packaged items with less material than before.  So what is one to think about all of this controversy?  Is what Wal-Mart doing laudable or immoral?  Should companies like Wal-Mart's still try to be more sustainable or is it just too difficult because of their size?  

Organic Food Juxtaposed with Industrial Food

I've found through some research that one of the leading causes for organic food consumption is to avoid the misgivings associated with the other food option: industrialized factory farms.  There are stigmas attached to these places, some true some untrue, yet nevertheless it is still important to note the major differences between both types of farming and why these disparities exist.  An interesting quote in Mark Winne's Closing the Food Gap gives insight into perhaps why America is currently known for its addiction to all foods processed.  "'We made sacrifices during the Great Depression and World War II,’ I heard many adults say, ‘but when it comes to food, were are now free from physical work and scarcity’” (5).  The adults quoted are average Americans during what Winne describes are the U.S.'s food "Middle" or "Dark" ages: the 50s and 60s.  The rise in families and the shift in technology after WWII could have unarguably led to the quintessential 50s "TV Dinner".  The Americans of yore yearned for comfort, for ease after hard times, and the 1950s were considered "Happy Days" for many (espeicially the Fonz).  


All of this is very interesting to me because despite the seemingly consensual agreement that there was no problem with food in America during the 50s and 60s, the U.S. still managed to change during the late 60s and 70s.  Of course this was the hippie counter-cultural movement catalyzed by the Vietnam War, promoting all things un-American, which at the time included organic food.  And thus, the organic food movement began, albeit in humble, scattered grassroots fashion.  


Vietnam War aside, however, there were, and still are today, major issues with the American industrial food sector that spurred, and continue to spur, part of society to rebel.  There are health, animal rights, and environmental hazards abound in and around confined animal feeding operation (CAFOs).  According to David Kirby's Animal Factory, agricultural feedlot miasma have near 170 different chemicals, many of which cause debilitating human health problems and rearing cattle is a worse greenhouse gas producer than driving cars.  Kirby describes a dairy farm as having "manure-smeared animals...jammed onto strictly confined tracts of land" (7).  He writes how all the grass in the feedlots was gone, replaced by dirt, urine, and excrement of many cows.  A commonly used phrase nowadays seems to be that cows were designed to eat grass, and when they don't have access to it barely at all, it's hard to imagine that's good for their health.  


There are obviously various issues with factory farming, and they are directly juxtaposed by Kirby as he describes a more old-fashioned dairy farm:  "...she had always delighted at watching mothers and their calves gamboling about the green pastures of their valley home.  She figured they were doing whatever it is that cows do at peace in their world" (6-7).  Although this image is somewhat contrived and cliched, it nevertheless seems that our old-fashioned, grittier way of life was turned upside down over the years to many peoples' excitement and comfort.  But as the megalith that is agribusiness proliferated after decades of compounding growth, some caution was tossed to the wind in submission to the incessant demand.  According to the CDC, "More than one-third (35.7%) of U.S. adults are obese.  Approximately 17% (or 12.5 million) of children and adolescents aged 2-19 are obese."  And if you look at the website linked before the quote paying attention to the obesity progression over the past 25 years, the growth is staggering.  Besides some of the qualms provided above by Kirby regarding today's most profitable food system, it seems that system, or something else, is fueling our country's rampant unhealthiness.  But that is another topic entirely.

Organic Food's Rise and Dip

For the time being, I will be writing blog posts that pertain to my junior theme research paper.  Although we've been working on the paper for some time now, this is my first post where I feel confident in the direction of my thesis, which is exploring the recent growth of organic products in American society.  Contrary to this, however, is an article that I found while researching on the New York Times home page, one of my go-to sites for reliable sources.  The article's title is "Organic Dairies Watch the Good Times Turn Bad", and at first this didn't really surprise me all that much.  We've been living in an economic recession for the past few years, so undeniably people would start to cut back on things deemed as trivial, things like organic food.  This phenomena goes against my paper's exploratory question thus far: "Why has organic food become so popular recently" because of how even though organic products peaked before 2008 after progressive growth, it suddenly dropped in about 2008/2009 (the New York Times provides the helpful graph to the right to show the linear progression in the case of organic milk.)

The article, published on May 28, 2009, says, "As the trend toward organic food consumption slows after years of explosive growth, no sector is in direr shape than the $1.3 billion organic milk industry."  The article also says that farmers have been told by their "conglomerates" that due to the lack of demand and the excess of supply, milk production must subside by 20 percent.  That, sadly, puts many small-scale farmers out of work.  One Vermont farmer in the article named Ken Preston said, "'I probably wouldn't have gone organic if I knew it would end this way.'"

Preston's remark stirred a thought in me about why people "go organic", and thus why it has become so progressively popular.  There is often a difference, I've seen, between why people in supermarkets buy organic and why farmers farm organically.  It's apparent in Preston's case that, although organic foods are nice, it's really all in the name of profit, and profit depends on the choosy stay-at-home parent sifting through piles of various fruit.  No one can see a recession coming, but if Preston had, he probably would've used conventional farming practices, or whatever would make him a living of course.  Despite this downturn in organic food in 2009 especially, there has still been considerable growth from where it used to be, so there must be something strong that still causes regular people to buy organic even in tough times.  In a report titled "Recent Growth Patterns in the U.S. Organic Foods Market" done by Carolyn Dimitri and Catherine Greene of the USDA, "Growth in retail sales has equaled 20 percent of more annually since 1990.  Organic products are now available in nearly 20,000 natural foods stores, and are sold in 73 percent of all conventional grocery stores."  Why the growth is what I'm looking into right now for the next blog post-update, but it seems major retailers selling organic products are definite signposts in the dense forest that is this complex issue.