I was told recently that the CEO of Whole Foods is vegan. I found it difficult to believe since it seemed contrary to their sales of many
non-vegan products. A recent article/interview helped me better understand.
Below is just a small excerpt from the January 4, 2010 New Yorker article by Nick Paumgarten
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/04/100104fa_fact_paumgarten?currentPage=all#ixzz0cjSYgcmv
“Mackey has on several occasions acted on criticisms. At a shareholder
meeting in 2003, animal-rights activists staged a protest over duck,
which led him to examine the meat business more closely. This inspired
his vegan conversion, and persuaded him to overhaul the
meat-procurement process. Some criticize Whole Foods for selling meat
at all. A few years ago, Mackey told Grist, a Seattle environmental
magazine, “Sure, I wish Whole Foods didn’t sell animal products, but
the fact of the matter is that the population of vegetarians in
America is like 5 percent, and vegans are like 25 or 30 percent of the
vegetarians. So if we were to become a vegan store, we’d go out of
business, we’d cease to exist. And that wouldn’t be good for the
animals, for our customers, our employees, our stockholders, or
anybody else. If I were to take Whole Foods in this direction I would
be removed as CEO.”
A grocer, typically, wants to hide what goes on in back. A grocery
store is a theatrical production, designed to dazzle the customer, and
to disguise the artifice and hard work behind the scenes. Over the
years, grocers have helped keep their customers happily ignorant of
the food’s origins—of the horrors of the slaughterhouse, the miseries
of the onion fields, and the absurdities contained in a can of soda or
a bag of chips. Our interface with the food chain ended with the stock
boy and his sticker gun in Aisle 6.
Whole Foods sought to change that. It began to sell information and
narrative, along with the food. It told stories about where the food
came from, putting up displays by the seafood counter with photographs
and descriptions of the real fishermen who had caught it all—a genre
that Michael Pollan, in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” called “supermarket
pastoral.”"
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