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Petition urges Whole Foods Market to ditch meat counters
Hundreds of consumers are asking Whole Foods Market to make a "revolutionary" change. An online petition calling on the Texas-based supermarket chain—which has stores in Vancouver and West Vancouver—to shut down its meat counters has been signed 1,400 times.
Posted by James McWilliams, the Texas-based author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, the petition states:
Forget (for the moment) dairy and eggs and all the animal-based products dependent on systematic suffering that you believe are integral to a robust stock price. We can deal with these items later. For now, as a step toward a better future, just shut down the meat markets. Forever.
Do this because you can afford to do it. Do this because it is consistent with your articulated values. Do this because it is the right thing to do. Do this because you would be doing the gutsiest thing ever done in corporate and culinary history. Do this because, if you don’t, nobody else ever will. As a loyal patron, vegan advocate, and historian of agriculture, I’m asking you to do what you have done so well since the 1980s: lead.
McWilliams says he's received a response from Whole Foods co-CEO John Mackey. That letter, which McWilliams has posted on his blog, says the chain has "no plans to stop selling meat and poultry…or seafood, eggs and dairy items for that matter". Mackey's letter continues:
Our work in the world of animal welfare makes a difference in the way hundreds of millions of farm animals are raised every year. It supports a network of several thousand hardworking farmers and ranchers who are improving the welfare of livestock animals. Giving up on our initiative at this point won’t slow the rate of animals being processed and it won’t encourage Whole Foods Market’s carnivore customers to stop eating meat. It will simply shift purchases of meat to other retailers, to those that have not invested millions of dollars and many years of hard work to ensure that animals are raised with care and respect, and slaughtered with a minimum amount of stress. Whole Foods Market isn’t selling humanely raised animals simply because they are eventually killed for food. That is not true. Also, for you to suggest that selling meat is only about the bottom line at our company simply is not true either. Our first stakeholder is our customer and the most of them purchase and eat meat.
In a follow-up post, McWilliams says his fight with Whole Foods "isn’t over".
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of course whole foods aren't going to stop selling meat. and they shouldnt. people need a source of organic meats. organic usually also means free range. if they stopped selling meat, people would have to go buy lower quality meat from animals that are abused.
Did you know that, or were you just being funny ?
But, humans definitely take it for granted that they themselves are rarely consumed. They also tend to consider themselves to be intellectually superior to animals, and yet they can't keep from eating them compulsively?
Now as a LEFTIST I can think of a dozen reasons not to shop at WF -- the least of which is whether they sell MEAT or not -- but not that any of THOSE reasons would be of interest to amoral wealthy 'vegans' living in a bubble world of constant self-righteousness who don't seem to do anything ELSE but 'play with their food' like a 6 year old.
It *is* the Lululemon of groceries: well made products with a nice logo at a premium price that sufficient numbers of people seem quite willing to pay. But I think you mean that in a negative way.
Whole Foods haters, should there not be a Whole Foods? Perhaps, if only you had the spare time to deign to remake Whole Foods in the correct way, you might let them know what they ought to be doing instead of what they are doing right now.
Uh, what mom and pop shop did Whole Foods kill off? I think you mean Walmart.
IMO Whole Foods raises the demand level for good produce -- which I myself happen to buy local at farmers markets, that which I don't grow myself fuvm. But for those who don't happen to get it together enough to do what I do, then WF is a convenient if extremely pricy alternative.
This may be a total sidebar, but when exactly (and where exactly) were you in Europe last? Because unless you're talking about the pre-1980s or about some rural villages in Tuscany or the south of France, that's a pretty sizeable load of ... obsolete stereotypes. I'm from Europe and have just moved back here after several years living in Vancouver. And while I'm pretty ecstatic to be back in a real city (yep, no quotation marks) for almost every other reason, what I definitely miss about Vancouver - apart from the scenery - is the superior food culture. Independent artisan food producers are virtually extinct here and as far as urban centres go, North America, with culinary hotspots like New York, LA, San Francisco and, yes, Vancouver, have long surpassed Europe in both quality and variety of available foods - in both retail and gatronomy. *sidebar over*
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