The Compassionate Instinct

What makes many of these choices so hard is that they’re personal, everyday decisions fraught with vast ethical implications. As Pollan makes clear in his book, every food purchase we make, whether it’s at a McDonald’s or a Whole Foods supermarket, supports a certain set of environmental and economic values. But we can’t be sure of which values we’re supporting when the labels on our food make it hard to understand where this food actually came from—and that’s where Pollan comes in.

GREATER GOOD: In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you investigate the stories we’re not being told about where our food comes from. But it’s also hard to understand the stories we are being told, as they often rely on words like “sustainable farming,” “free range,” and, especially, “organic”—words that we may have encountered in the supermarket, but we may not know exactly what they mean.

MICHAEL POLLAN: I think that’s true. In doing this research, I tried to look behind some of those stories to the reality, and sometimes the reality was not at all what the story suggested.

For instance, I think consumers assume that when they spend the extra money to support an organic dairy, they’re supporting a small farmer, they’re supporting dairies where cows get to eat grass, as cows evolved to do. But in fact, while that is true of many dairies, there are also now huge organic feedlot dairies, where cows live in groups of several thousand, where they do not get to graze in a pasture, and they eat corn all the time, which isn’t very good for the cows to eat.

That’s not deceptive, exactly. There’s nowhere on the package that says, “We graze our cattle on pastures on small family farms.” But there’s a lot of suggestiveness going on—there are pictures of cows that are on grass, and that kind of thing.

G G: But what’s interesting is that ethics is even part of the marketing strategy in the first place. It’s not just about what tastes the best or is best for your health.

M P: Yeah, exactly. That’s what Whole Foods is doing. Whole Foods, very cleverly, figured out how to combine two things that are very hard to combine in American culture: pleasure and virtue. Right? They’ve made shopping a pleasurable experience and eating their food a very pleasurable experience, and they combine it with this implication, and it’s often very true, that you’re making an ethical choice when you buy their food. You may spend a little bit more—or in the case of Whole Foods, a lot more—but by buying this apple and not that one, or this steak and not that one, you’re contributing to a better environment, and you’re voting with your dollars for a better world. They hold themselves up as the supermarket of ethical choices.

But there are some real questions about that. There are a lot of foods at Whole Foods that aren’t whole, that are highly processed. It’s a mixed bag—it’s not all organic, either. And I think that their marketing strategy, which is very clever, is that by having a few things that are organic and humane, they create an aura over all of it. So you feel that you enter that store and you’re in the realm of virtuous shopping, and any decision you make within that store is not going to compromise your ethical sensibility.

I’m afraid it’s not true. I’ll give you one example. I was just in a Whole Foods in Berkeley, and they have farmed Atlantic salmon. Now I’ve never been to a salmon farm, but by and large, from everything I’ve read, farmed salmon is ethically dubious at best. There’s an enormous environmental footprint made by those farms. And the fish they produce is not as healthy as wild salmon. So I’m surprised that’s there.

You can’t go into Whole Foods and assume that all the work has been taken care of and that everything has been vetted to your satisfaction. And that’s a key issue: your satisfaction. There are so many different ethical decisions you can make, and sometimes they collide. It’s not the case that there’s virtuous food and nonvirtuous food.

G G: So what’s an example of one of those collisions of virtues?

M P: Well, some people are really concerned about their health, or their children’s health. And for them, perhaps organic is a good choice because it has no pesticides. Some people really care about the welfare of the animals. Well, organic is a better choice, but it doesn’t really solve that problem. Organic animals can live on feedlots. They can be fed diets they shouldn’t be eating. I did visit farms that sell free-range organic chicken. Those are not chickens running around in little farmyards. They’re in a huge confinement operation. They don’t go outside, in fact. They have the option of going outside, but they don’t take it.