Here’s an excerpt from “Whole Foods CEO Mackey Endorses Cato Book – No More Corporate Crime Prosecutions” by Russell Mokhiber
Most people who shop at Whole Foods are liberal yuppies.They have enough money to spend $9 on a pound of cherries.They believe that shopping for groceries at Whole Foods instead of Safeway or Food Lion or Giant or Wal-Mart is the politically correct thing to do.They probably believe that the President and CEO of Whole Foods is a liberal like themselves.
To see the full article by Mokhiber, published recently at Commondreams, see: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0629-21.htm
You heard it here first. Regarding John Mackey, readers are urged to revisit what we said one year ago:
Friends of Animals’ Corporate Spin Alert: Whole Foods Market and the Artifice of Compassion
For the consumer with everything, now comes the “Animal Compassion” brand. Wall Street analysts say “the plan to sell more humanely harvested steaks and chicken breasts will help the bottom line,” but Whole Foods Market hopes to make the purchase of animal products seem like a charity donation.
The chain is working with animal welfare groups to create the ideal environments and conditions, they say, to support every animal’s needs.
Friends of Animals president Priscilla Feral responded, in an open letter to the grocery’s CEO, “What matters most here is that we have the ability to decide whether to keep bringing other animals into existence simply to be sold as food, while using up land and water resources that could be left to animals who really could have free and full lives.”
Making animal products look good is an affront to animal advocacy. It also thwarts principles of good health, of addressing world hunger, and of preserving the global environment before it’s too late.
A third of the world’s surface is already taken up with animal grazing. Expanding the space we allot for confined animals may worsen the situation for free-living animals.
And free living is the very essence of animal rights.
We think it’s time to question the idea that progressive activism is compatible with the corporate search for niche markets in animal products. For more, our full article is freely available at:
https://friendsofanimals.org/actionline/summer-2005/whole-foods-market.html