I got pretty upset prior to bed last night as I came across a Wallmart video while watching an archived Arrested Development episode on Hulu.com. If you haven’t already noticed, in addition to advertising the redesign and expansion of their stores, global discount corporate retailer Wallmart is advertising their new business practice of (trying) to be green. Greenwashing, that is the practice of companies disingenuously spinning their products and policies as environmentally friendly, is becoming all too common in all levels of business.
In the commercial John Stoll, director of produce - self proclaimed Wal-Mart lettuce guy was discussing the company’s partnership with organic farms across the county, its desire to bring organic produce to the Wal-Mart customer at affordable prices and objective to deliver organic lettuce “straight to the stores at the same price as regular (or conventional) lettuce”.

I couldn’t help but to have a drop knee reaction to this commercial. As Americans, we want organic food but aren’t necessarily willing to pay for it. Proportionately, we pay less of a percentage of our total budget to our food bill. Simply put - food has become cheap; economies of scale or rising crop yields (volume) have been the primary cause of this.

There are so many variables affecting our crops and consequent intervention by farmers (use of petro-chemical based herbicides, fungicides and fertilizers) to ensure a successful harvest. Unfortunately this comes at significant cost as it toxifies our foods and destroys our soil. It works for now so we’re indifferent and accept our conventional farming models.

We have got use to cheap food since the 1960’s when subsides were introduced to the US agriculture industry – we took that food savings, increased other categories of our budgets and got use to our new luxury goods. Were not so willing to go back to our previous realistic budgets.

When Wall-Mart low balls the price of organic produce to you the savings and actual price you didn’t pay gives the organic farmer no incentive to continue to grow organically.

Wall-Mart says that consumers shouldn’t have to pay more for a product that is good for their families and good for the earth. Wrong, food isn’t cheap to grow. You get what you pay for, our food is cheap and dead and affecting our health.