Sunday, February 19, 2006

From: melcher@nets.com Subject: [Arclist] Groceries Date: February 19, 2006 10:03:06 PM MST Groceries When we think about oil and politics do we think about food? From my bedroom window I can hear the sounds of traffic streaming by on Interstate 25, carrying folk around the last corner down from the pass through the Sangre de Christo foothills at Glorieta and the Pecos river, toward Santa Fe. They descend the mountain toward their jobs or they come down to vacation from points north, crossing a gateway where populations and commerce of the great midwestern plains passes into a strange and almost alien country of the southwest, where civilization appears to change in some subtle manner, just like the landscape. Between the soft hiss of passenger cars there's the deep restrained thrum of big rigs; truckers coming down from Colorado across the vast 'staked plains', from Raton past highway towns called Springer and Wagon Mound and Las Vegas. They cross in the night, to deliver the groceries in the early mornings to Santa Fe and Albuquerque and points south. America's food travels an average of 1,500 miles from farm to table. The interstate passes within a few hundred yards of our house. At the bottom of a long curve the road curves past two small hills and branches onto an exit that carries Route 285 south in the direction of small highway towns like Lamy and Clines Corners, eventually to connect with Interstate 70, the major artery going east and west through Albuquerque and Santa Rosa. Just off the exit and to the immediate right is the bedroom community of Eldorado, where a vast spread of former ranchland has become prime real estate, with houses and lots still within reach of an upper middle class income. At the second intersection is a small shopping plaza with a midsize supermarket. Once it served mainly the small towns and ranches up and down 285, but recently it made a move to capture the more upscale and educated population of the Eldorado subdivision, who commute the ten miles or so into the city to find alternatives to the overprocessed commodities that fill most commercial rural markets. My mind drifts to memories of a group of us meeting in a late night office in 1979 to talk about another impending crisis of food and fuel. We'd just opened a new warehouse in the growing wholesale natural foods business that we'd pioneered, and it then dawned upon us how much we remained hostage to our nation's energy policies. In those days America's lifestyle had led to bad karma in the middle east, as the Iranian people rose up to throw out a colonial dictator and threaten the nation that had kept him in power. This was our first major oil crises, and long lines at the gas pumps and the rising price of commodities brought down a presidency. Fuel shortages were barely being absorbed by the trucking businesses which carry the lifeblood of our whole economy. Then, as now, the source of our food was far from the consumer. Those of us who pursued and supported more sustainable agriculture knew that not only shipping, but the growing of most of our commercial crops required uninterrupted flows of cheap petroleum. The postwar boom in corporate farming had forced small local and family farms to give way en masse to enormous energy intensive industrial spreads that depended on large machinery, wasteful irrigation methods and artificial petroleum based fertilizers to replace the soil that was wasted and ruined or allowed to wash away. The idealistic movement for sustainable farming that we supported was still in infancy, and still as dependent on long distance trucking and warehousing as the mainstream. Although we had the inspiration and energy of youth to drive us and had no doubt that necessity would in the long term play in our favor, those days were scary, as we watched the scarcity of oil bring our dreams perilously close to collapse. Nothing much has changed in twenty-five years. In a slightly delayed response to the pressures at the gas pump, the cost of our breakfast cereal, our milk, our water, our frozen entrees and cookies, our baby cereal, crawls up by multiple percentage points with alarming frequency. The movement for more sustainable farming practices has gained ground along with an increasing demand for less industrialized and processed foods. Once an insignificant part of the grocery business, the natural foods industry is growing at more than 20% a year while growth in the rest of the food industry is relatively flat. Once made up of small neighborhood speciality stores that sold mostly supplements and bulk commodities, the natural foods business has entered the world of Wall Street with the growth of large corporate entities like Whole Foods and Wild Oats, which have fashioned themselves according to the one-stop shopping model of traditional supermarket chains. Distribution giants like United Natural Foods have gobbled up their competitors and now control prices and availability in most of the industry. More and more mainstream supermarkets are featuring 'organically grown' products as well, usually at gourmet prices, while companies like General Mills, Beatrice Foods and even Pepsi buy up regionally based natural foods companies to include 'natural' product lines in their marketing mix. The idealism of the past has been tempered by economic necessity as well as the promise of lucrative profits. There's a contradiction here. The original idea of the natural foods business was a return to a smaller, more localized and regionally sensitive model which fosters a healthier environment and a stronger sense of community and connection, as an alternative to the big, bigger and biggest mindset that governs the corporate climate. Sooner or later a clash of cultures is inevitable. Since the primary duty of a corporation is to shareholders rather than cunsumers the result is an inevitable echo, in many ways, of the questionable practices that have resulted in our precarious situation. While our neighborhoods and communities are replaced by shopping malls and sprawl, the land that produces our food recedes in our minds to something of a distant abstraction, and food becomes something that apparently 'grows' on grocery shelves. Like a lot of entities in the natural foods business we started a small buying coop in the mid seventies. A group of people seeking alternatives, many of us had opted out of our parent's lifestyles and gathered in communities motivated by spiritual and political concerns, founding our own institutions to provide us with the necessities for living. One primary objective was to return to a sense of community based upon a stronger connection to living close to nature and the land. What started as a loosely connected network of like-minded individuals and communities became the fuel for an explosion of technology and communication that would revolutionize the economic landscape of the post industrial world. What was a revolution in values led to an explosion of prosperity that became the engine driving the middle class boom of the eighties and nineties. For the most part we were more educated than our parents, and having grown up in a rapidly changing world we were able to take full advantage of the new wave of innovation that fueled that boom. Having participated in the early growth of the natural foods business and grown disillusioned with it's increased corporatization, I came to New Mexico almost 17 years ago to help start another small neighborhood sized natural food store. Our venture didn't work out as planned, and circumstance landed me for the next decade and a half working in various aspects of the publishing business, marketing, advertising, writing, editing, even printing. During all of that time something in me longed for the essential earthiness of the food business, partly as relief from the abstraction and hype that goes along with marketing and publishing. I missed the fundamentals of relating to people and society at the basic level of what we eat and how it gets to us. Recently, I answered an ad in the local paper for a supermarket needing a 'natural foods head.' I applied, made a proposal, and was hired to help in the expansion of a small rural grocery store, wishing to attract local customers who traveled into town from this expanding 'bedroom' community of middle class professionals to shop in one or more of Santa Fe's ever expanding proliferation of natural food outlets. The store I agreed to work in could be called a 'hybrid', as it carries both the commercial brands found in most rural chains and a growing number of items familiar to customers of Whole Foods and Wild Oats. The store is a hybrid in other ways, as the employees are mostly people who live in low income apartments and communities like Pecos, while the customer base is increasingly middle and upper-middle class professionals inhabiting the semi-rural subdivision and working in prosperous Santa Fe. Attitudes and practices of management are a long way from giving the rather progressive lip-service to community and healthy practices that one encounters in most of the natural foods business. The employer-employee relationship appears to harkens back to the ancient 'patron' system more indigenous to New Mexico. By and large the awareness of food is governed solely by the bottom line, and my role is seen by management and many of my fellow employees as the 'weird foods guy.' With the attraction of new customers the bottom line works in my favor, but the task is a relatively lonely one, and I feel that I run an almost independent entity encased within the shell of a traditional supermarket. For anyone who thinks that food isn't the stuff of politics, let me tell you that the grocery business is as political as it gets. Every inch of shelf space in your local store has been fought for or negotiated. The feeling of being the 'weird foods guy' in a 'hybrid' store is akin to that of the wild west; of being at the edge of a frontier (or a wasteland), battling for a few acres of land, or a few feet of space, in order to prove myself and the viability of the products that I stock. As I listen to the swoosh of traffic, a sound that's like an intermittent river, breaking the otherwise peaceful atmosphere of these old hills, I think about how this road connects us, and how my life has once again brought me to serve at the concrete and asphalt edges of our world, on the boundaries between rich and poor, Anglo, Spanish and Indian, urban and rural. Early in the morning, three mornings of every week, I meet the long truck out of Denver, full of products I've ordered from our wholesaler, a natural foods conglomerate that scooped up the company I once worked for and helped to build, along with most of it's former coast to coast competition. I often think about those times, when we were creating the business, making up rules as we went along, expanding from small food cooperatives and buying clubs and vitamin stores into the next generation of mainstream upscale grocery stores and suppliers. In those days we mostly thought of ourselves as revolutionaries, our enterprises having grown out of cooperatives and communities that wanted to change everything in the world we found to be wrong and out of balance. We reputed the avarice and hypocrisy that led us into wars and resulted in human waste and destruction. We were then only beginning to see the magnitude of the potential destruction. Deep down we all felt that something in our humanity was being threatened by untamed profits, although we were unclear of either the scope of the danger or of the alternatives. Many of us traveled west, because the fast growing urban centers of the west were relatively unformed and less constrained by the inherent limitations of established eastern and midwestern cities in decline. The industrial axis shifted first to the south and then overseas, transforming the Norman Rockwell vision of American prosperity and security into little more than a billboard illusion. The war in Vietnam brought down the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, replacing him with Nixon and the ascendency of another set of political assumptions. Nixon went out with a disgraceful whimper and the short term social reaction that followed the interim rule of the innocuous Ford administration led to the rise of the first rock and roll presidency, that of Jimmy Carter. Carter was elected largely by the rising 'youth vote.' The baby boom generation had finally arrived at voting age, weaned on an 'alternative' press embodied then by Rolling Stone magazine and the irreverent social and political commentary of writers like Hunter S. Thompson and history as told in Gary Trudeau's 'Doonesbury.' For the newly spawned enterprises of the alternative food business the Carter years were a boon, as a bank of solar panels went up at the White House, the Department of Agriculture published and issued studies supportive of organic farming and a newly formed Department of Energy began to seriously look into strategies for conservation and alternative power generation. Jimmy Carter, being a former farmer and engineer, appeared willing to contemplate new ways of thinking about things, both practical and spiritual. Unfortunately, a national crises ensued, brought about by international policies going back to the Eisenhower years. We'd supported the reigns of tyrants in several of our major oil suppliers and when the tyrants were overthrown America, for the first time, found itself hostage to a dependency it had inherited as the price of it's own power. For a nation addicted to oil, that had enjoyed unprecedented economic growth since the end of the Great War, to curb our rising economic expectations was unacceptable. The Carter presidency was held responsible for dampening our expectations of endless upward mobility and with the so-called Reagan revolution came a new national commitment to the values of individual acquisitiveness, even at the expense of the collective good. Unrealistic expectations fostered by social upheavals during two decades were overturned, the solar panels and the alternative energy effort stalled, and in many ways America began to turn in on itself, seeing it's role as the main defender of a narrow set of assumptions upon which the so-called progress of a corporate world order is based. At this stage of the struggle it all looks like a game, a battle for 'market share.' The natural foods business, once founded on the basics, less on processed foods and commodities, increasingly imitates the traditional market. More and more of the business has shifted toward the marketing of 'fast foods' and convenience foods in order to keep up with the often hectic lifestyle of its mostly middle class parishioners. We now buy most of our water off the shelf, We consume inordinate amounts and varieties of snack foods and chips. Do we need twelve different varieties of corn puffs? Indeed, water, sodas and chips are my fastest moving items. Next comes frozen entrees and prepared meals of countless variety. We pay the highest prices for bath salts and body lotions in stunning array. Every month I'm approached by industry reps with a dozen new products straining for differentiation from those that have gone before. The corporatization of the industry has moved us once again from a sense of community and connection toward the desire for convenience and speed, and the eternal availability of that which will satisfy our every appetite. The natural foods business has continued to depend on cheap transport, and grown as dependent on processing and exotic packaging as any other part of the food business. Still, we tell ourselves there is a growing awareness that it makes a difference how our foods were grown and prepared. Until the government manages to dilute the meaning of the term 'organic' to one as meaningless as we've made 'natural' there is a growing demand for foods that are not produced in a way that harms the earth. The 'revolution' is presently confined largely to the well-healed and highly educated, and the pricing structure of an industry in hoc to Wall Street will keep it so for the foreseeable future. By and large, the poor are forced to be satisfied with the cheap products of subsidized and wasteful industrial production. They aren't exposed to new ideas, even when it means their health is the ultimate price. To look at the way foods are presented in the media we appear to be still addicted to fast foods while obsessed with being overweight. Diseases like obesity and diabetes disproportionally effect the poor, while incidents of cancer and heart disease continue to rise across all population groups. As our economy continues to grow our health declines, including the health of our communities. While we play the game, the population suffers. Someday perhaps all of this will become real to a majority, and we will shift our habits of living toward a life that respects the connections between us and our collective connection to the earth. That time has not arrived. There are encouraging signs in the industry of a return to the desire for the 'neighborhood' store. This is accompanied by a revitalization of the inner cities and the peaking of the trend toward uncontrolled suburban sprawl. Stores like Trader Joe's and local cooperatives like The Marketplace in Santa Fe have not only succeeded, but thrive in the presence of large national chain stores by offering people a familiar and intimate environment and being responsive to the needs and desires of particular neighborhoods and communities. The growth and popularity of local farmers markets all over the country are another indication of this trend. My own store's appeal is essentially that of a neighborhood business, a one of a kind establishment that responds to the desire to feel that the place they buy their food is uniquely tailored for them. in a sense the customer in these places are stakeholders in the business, and the place provides them a place where they not only shop, but meet other people who share their sense of place. At this point, the distributors from which they purchase most of their products have been consolidated under only a very few suppliers, and they are subject largely to the policies and prices of large national distributors, who often make up for the deep discounts they provide their large chain customers by overcharging their smaller accounts. Their ultimate advantage over both the short and long term lays in their ability to change and be responsive to their particular customer base. People are beginning to turn toward businesses that can offer an experience of something more intimate than the traditional anonymous supermarket environment. Over time, as the increasing cost of fuel puts pressure on the industry to turn more to commodities that require less processing and transport it's businesses with the ability to respond and change quickly to changing local market conditions that are most likely to succeed. All of this will require changes in the way we view our lives and the importance of the connections we have with one another. For me, this job provides a unique opportunity to know a community, a neighborhood, by what it eats. I don't know yet whether the experiment will succeed, but I know it's success will be in direct proportion to our ability to respond to that community's perceptions of itself. The task of drawing connections across all of the frontiers of class and consciousness and economic reality, from management to employees to customers is a daunting one. It may be that this particular business isn't ready to make the best use of the opportunity, and I'll find myself looking toward a different frontier, not as tied to conventional standards. One thing I've noticed in almost all of the people I've met in the food industry, is that they are uniquely devoted to serving other human beings. This is one thing that makes any struggle for the future worth the effort. Ultimately, we are all what we eat, and the politics of food are close to the root of whatever kind of society we wish to be. # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # You can't stop the signal. http://internet.cybermesa.com/~melcher/ 10:15:29 PM    comment []