Whole Truth

If anybody still needs more reasons to actually shake the hand that feeds them, which is to say food shop at a local farmers' market, here are a scary trio that came this week. The first is that dogs are dying across this country because their owners loved them enough to feed them packaged chicken treats. Turns out the chicken used to make them came from China seriously embedded with poisonous chemicals.

The second is that our food supply has become increasingly international because we like to eat summer produce all winter and because we think food has to be dirt cheap like what comes from China. And with this increase in imported food, our death and poisoning from it has skyrocketed. Supplies are just too big to trail. The FDA/USDA can't even guarantee all the homegrown commercial stuff. They rely on the suppliers to police themselves.

As it happens, some watchdog groups can guarantee and have for years that pesticides banned in this country are sold to the ones below us and come back in on the fruits and vegetables. That alone should be reason enough to not eat in winter seasonal fruits coming from the summer time of South America. Stick to made in the USA: apples, pears, oranges, grapefruits, even Hawaiian papayas.

But here's the real clincher, reason 3: local Los Angeles ABC news exposed the big lie called Whole Foods. Frankly it isn't hard to see in its smaller stores like the one I visit in San Francisco that it's really just a gussied up sugar shack, putting very slick organic gloss on all the sweets it sells to drink, nosh and gobble. The sweets at least in that store so frustratingly outnumber the fruits and veggies and assortment of beans, I think of it as Unwholesome Foods.

But that's not the worst. ABC news found the biggest whopper in the company's relentless marketing spin is how Whole Foods tosses the word "organic" onto its own in-house label: 365, without actually knowing--or evidently caring-- whether or not the food inside really is. Almost all the bags of frozen "organic" 365 vegetables their investigator found at a local store said in small print on the back: Product of China. Even the special "California Vegetable Medley"! A Whole Foods spokesperson admitted no one in the organization had any way to know whether China monitored or even imposed American standards for organic on produce labeled as such. It just trusted its suppliers. The way shoppers blindly trust Whole Foods.

So those organic frozen vegetables might be just like that killer dog treat chicken. How's that for 21st Century style trust-busting?