Thingy Bits

Thingy Bits

1. Attended the Michael Pollan v John Mackey smackdown last night. It was very cool I must say. If you want to learn some stuff about it, go over here or here. Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods felt compelled, after reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, to begin a dialogue with Pollan about the good stuff Whole Foods is doing to push toward support of, and better consumer access to, real and whole foods. As a note: Whole Foods took a bit of a beating in Pollan’s book, who condemned Whole Foods for its “supermarket pastoral” (how when you walk in you feel the words and pictures stimulate you into thinking just being in the store is somehow heathier) and its support of Big Organic, which to Pollan, isn’t that much better than regular old industrialized agriculture.

Everyone knows Whole Foods’ most famous nickname: Whole Paycheck. And it came up in the talk too. Everyone also knows when you buy $14 Chilean asparagus in the middle of a California winter it’s going to be gross. Also came up during the talk. But formulating your entire opinion about Whole Foods Markets based on these two word-of-mouth and perhaps personally experienced things is unfair. I am guilty of this myself, for sure – with the added benefit of peer pressure from hard core local/sustainable/community farming angry lesbian foodies.

But sometimes I think we jump to condemn things that are trying to be better because they are imperfect: Whole Foods is, after all, a capitalist venture and everyone knows you simply cannot dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools (change from an industrialized, corn-producing mass meat eating nation – most of what we grow (upwards of 70%) in the US goes to feed animals we eat from feedlots in our mcfood – to a sustainable agricultural nation). Or we condemn it because when external forces like a market ups the ante of what’s considered quality and healthy, it forces us to look at ourselves, and up our own ante for what we are putting into our bodies. Sometimes, it’s simply too hard to change. We’re addicted to cookies, really cheap cookies, and the organic version is like, a lot more costly than Oreos. So we criticize the attempt, that way, we can still have our cheap 7-11 cookies in the middle of the night.

The point is prices in the Unites States in stores everywhere have been set my Wal-Mart. What does that have to do with eating organic and shopping at Whole Foods? In a nutshell: when Wal-Mart makes something $.05 a pound and you buy it there, you think it is feasible that you’ve been swindled everywhere else things are not $.05 a pound. The phrase I can get it cheaper somewhere else and grabbing a store by the balls is the friggen American Way. It’s capitalism, competition, and we pride ourselves on that crap. The truth is, Wal-Mart, by creating that price point, places the producers into a kind of serfdom (and us, too, by altering our belief that we spend too much money on food as it is and forcing our choice from us by creating a sense of cheaper is better. It’s not. Cheaper is never tastier, fresher or better. It’s just doable. The truth? Peeps in the US spend only 8% of our disposable income on food. Other nations spend 10 and 15% percent).

But back to our poor producer in serfdom to Wal-Mart: if the producer can no longer sustain his business on the Wal-Mart price, or even go lower as, over time, seemingly smacking inflation in the face Wal-Mart will say I need a “better” price on this – Wal-Mart will simply take its business elsewhere. The problem is, Wal-Mart demands and moves so much product, the producers of said product can only handle the one account – Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart were to leave them…therein lies the rub.

What that does to a human being, a consumer, like, my brother for example: not a lot of money so he shops at Wal-Mart for his family. They have so much product, he thinks the norm is that everything is always available to everyone all the time at little or no cost. He buys salmon for three cents a pound. He hears on the news that Wal-Mart has a bad rap (for whatever reason, sound bytes and word-of-mouth carry little fact but, like economics, have long-lasting effects on the market because they carry a lot of emotion), maybe he should try to shop at Whole Foods. He goes in looking for his two-cent salmon and what he finds is, sometimes, there is no salmon at all and when it is there, it’s many dollars a pound. Well, he’s heard it’s better to eat salmon than red meat. So he should go back to Wal-Mart for that salmon, it’s cheap, and they have it.

No one thinks about where the salmon comes from and why it is so cheap. We just credit Wal-Mart with being a savvy capitalist who must really not be making much money off consumers by finding our food for us and offering us such low prices. Whole Foods, on the other hand, is clearly robbing you blind. But actually, Wal-Mart makes a crap load MORE money than Whole Foods, and does a lot less in the community with it. How do they make more money? They sell more product. Their philosophy is quantity not quality. This is the reverse philosophy of Whole Foods, who is trying to create a sustainble food environment so that, my god, it doesn’t run out. Because at the Wal-Mart price point and consumption pace, it will. I would go so far as to say Wal-Mart is single handedly to blame for the near-extinct state of our ocean fish. (For more reading on Wal-Mart buy The Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman. It is totally awesome and Fishman is a great writer, like Pollan. In fact, it is a nice companion piece.)

So, I really enjoyed the talk. Of course I despise Bay Area audiences and their damn hissing when they don’t like something. So childish. Basically, any CEO who knows he is not as intelligent and articulate as a journalist/professor trying to rip him a new one but risks everything to go on stage and defend his passions and goals in a face-to-face in front of 2,000 people and even more on the webcast is pretty okay in my book. You would never see G-dub or Enron never mind that filthy rich Walton family in a smackdown. Never. Unless of course Ali-G somehow convinced them to come on his show. How does he manage to do it?

2. Ms. Indecisive. This should be my nickname nowadays. Thank you to everyone who read and responded to my personal problems. That’s true dedication to PWADJ, and I appreciate it. I am working on a T-shirt right now, so hopefully, you can buy one and advertise me on your body too! THAT would be dedication! But seriously, thanks.

I can’t seem to figure anything out right now, and as I get older, I seem to be approaching an endless black hole of indecision about everything. I never used to have trouble picking a flavor of something, or knowing what I wanted for dinner, or figuring out what to do on a Saturday night. But now, everything seems like a major production. Which riding lesson should I take: Saturday at 9 am or Sunday at 1 pm? Which job should I take: the one with lots of duties and low pay, or the one with lots of duties and high pay? Which wordpress template should I pick? Where should I host my blog? What do I read next? Do I really like Cool Ranch Doritos? Shower or bath? I’ve even been wearing mostly the same clothes all the time because I just don’t know what to wear anymore. Is this an age thing? Or is it…

3. Menstruation. Do we really need another blog entry on it? Probably not, but I suppose you could stand to hear how PWADJ deals at least once monthly. Or doesn’t deal. First off, I take five walprofen to curb my first day cramps. FIVE! My doctor is equally as stunned as you. However, her solution is for me to take two a day every day, regardless of cramps, that way the ibu will be in my system so the cramps will never have the chance to get bad enough that I’ll feel the need to take five at once.

Ostensibly, this is to protect the coating of my stomach and help me not get addicted or poisoned. Okay. Let’s do a little math on that then shall we?

One bad cramp day monthly = 3 doses of 5 pills = 15 ibuprofen ingested monthly.

vs.

2 pills every day for 31 days = 62 ibuprofen ingested monthly.

Now, which one is gonna rip a hole in my stomach and get me addicted? PS: if she just gave me the damned prescription motrin I asked for, then we wouldn’t be having this blog entry because that shit removes every semblance of cramps from my person. But no, she wants to give me anaprox. WTF? That’s about as useful to me as eating salt. No, not even that useful cause the salt’s tasty.

4. What up with the blogger comment word verification lately? I’ve been getting a string of like forty thousand letters to enter, which of course, increases my rate of error when trying to enter them and now blogger thinks I am some kind of criminal. Dude, but for reals. I recently had this: sovdznmlmbqgg. WTF?

5. It’s not normal to bring the alarm under the covers with you so that when it goes off again you can snooze it without getting cold. Is it?