1A McMahon Commentary: Some Shoppers Who Buy “Organic” Are Engaging in a Fantasy So They Can Feel Good About Themselves

Reading Michael Pollan’s best-selling The Omnivore’s Dilemma may tempt us to divide grocery shoppers into two camps, those who shop for food solely based on the cheapest price available, and those who go out of their way to shop for the more expensive “organic” foods are not only supposed to be healthier but make them feel they are returning to Eden. 

Pollan observes that Whole Foods has branded itself as one of our country’s major entranceways into Eden, a “Supermarket Pastoral.” He writes that “Taken as a whole, the story on offer in Whole Foods is a pastoral narrative in which farm animals live much as they did in the books we read as children, and our fruits and vegetables grow in well-composted soils on small farms . . .”

Alas, the bucolic narrative, Pollan points out, is a myth and the very idea of buying our produce from some pastoral utopia and even the idea of “organic” must be reconsidered when we recognize that the industrialization of the $11-billion organic food movement has, by necessity, modeled itself after the very un-Edenic food industry it was railed against.

Pollan writes: “Of course the trickiest contradiction Whole Foods attempts to reconcile is the one between the industrialization of the organic food industry of which it is a part and the pastoral ideals on which that industry has been built. The organic movement, as it was once called, has come a remarkably long way in the last thirty years, to the point where it now looks considerably less like a movement than a big business.”

As Pollan scrutinizes this contradiction with keen analysis throughout his book, showing that the “organic” industry cuts corners and makes compromises just like any industry, he makes it clear that Supermarket Pastoral is a hollow image, and we can infer that shoppers who subscribe to this Pastoral Myth are putting their critical thinking skills on hold so that they can congratulate themselves for “boycotting” the “evil food industry” when in fact they are giving their business to the very industry they claim to disdain.