Michael Pollan: Farmer's markets trump healthcare reform

Frankly, I'm agnostic on this boycott. I don't know enough about it and haven't really cared much about it until a Whole Foods opened in my neighborhood. My gut instinct is that if companies were held accountable for what their CEOs believed, we wouldn't be buying anything but ice cream from VT. On the other hand, Lindsay Beyerstein makes an excellent point about the effect the high cost of health care has on everything, including whole foods, with small initials. If Whole Foods, with capital initials, cost the same as "gastro-industrial complex" foods (as Beyerstein calls them), it might make more sense to ignore the ill of supporting a corporation with a short-sighted libertarian at the helm to support local farmers through WF. But supporting WF right now only reinforces Mackey's mistaken impression that we don't need or care about health care reform.


http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2009/08/michael-pollan-farmers-markets-trump-health-care-reform.html


Foodie guru Michael Pollan says he won't join the boycott of Whole Foods markets, even though he disapproves of CEO John Mackey's attempts to kill healthcare reform. Because the self-proclaimed "ethicurean" can't bear to forgo golden raspberries?

Not exactly. In a post on the conservative New Majority blog, Pollan argues that Whole Foods' support for farmer's markets trumps the CEO's views on health care. On a personal level, Pollan hopes that health care reform will be a force for reform in the food system because when health insurers have to cover everyone, they will be motivated to push for prevention: If insurers had to cover everyone with type 2 diabetes, they'll want to make sure the food supply isn't creating more type 2 diabetics.

Yet, he's not bothered by the fact that Mackey is crusading to let insurers pick and choose which conditions to cover:

Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.

If you're an insurer, it's way cheaper, and more reliable, to refuse to cover type 2 diabetes than it is to lobby for fresh, local, sustainable food.

Pollan accepts the premise that consumers should use their buying power to push for social change, he just assigns a lower priority to healthcare reform than he does to farmers' markets. This is dismaying because justice for workers is supposed to be a core component of his vision for a new food policy.

...

:dunce:

The Greed and Paranoia of Financiers ,giving them a hell of a head start on the Concept of health care ,Medicare ,or any social security.

that important.

Some ethics.

This is classism, but the affluent "progressives" can't and won't see it.

Fuck it.

they're no replacement for universal healthcare. I've had several breast cancer patients
who were vegetarian and ate only organic foods. They still got cancer. Pollan needs to get a grip.

Pollan says:



Don't think Pollan is opposed to health care reform, because he certainly isn't. He's just saying that the views of the CEO alone are not sufficient for him to boycott Whole Foods in light of the fact that they support local ag.