Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's Utterly Disappointing Worldview

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's Utterly Disappointing Worldview
  • Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:58:18 -0600


Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's Utterly Disappointing Worldview

* By Ethan Nichtern
The Huffington Post, August 15, 2009
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_18860.cfm

There is a Whole Foods across the street from the Interdependence Project in
New York's East Village, the Buddhist-inspired nonprofit organization which I
direct. Some nights, after teaching or participating in a class on meditation
and Buddhist psychology, or after yoga practice, I head to the Whole Foods on
my way home, to buy convenient, healthy food for one of those 10 pm dinners
New Yorkers know all too well. Since our organization works directly with
issues of responsible consumption and environmental activism, it's always
nice to be able to find local and organic produce, even if it traumatizes my
slender wallet to shop regularly at "Whole Paycheck." Five-dollar pre-washed
spinach from the North Fork of Long Island! It's late, I'm exhausted; what
could be better?

Of course on the surface, a Buddhist shopping at Whole Foods makes a lot of
sense (almost to a degree of neo-hippy caricature). I practice, study, and
teach a tradition of mental health and wellbeing, a path for people to
systematically learn to take care of our own minds and extend that
care-taking to others around us. A healthy diet and an interest in eating
both local and organic foods are -- for me -- the physical extensions of that
mental mindfulness practice.

However, the Buddhist teachings on the truth of interdependence don't allow
us to stop at the level of individual health and well-being. The more we pay
attention to reality, the more we see the total impossibility of taking care
of our own bodies and minds without taking care of others. The more we see
interdependence -- that our lives do not happen in a vacuum, separate from
the lives of others -- the more we realize that our own health is
inextricably bound up with the health of others. If you are healthier, then I
am healthier, and vice versa. This is true physically, this is true
psychologically, and this is true communally.

A few years ago I wrote a book about updating the Buddhist philosophy of
interdependence for the 21st century, called One City: A Declaration of
Interdependence. In researching where the term interdependence has surfaced
outside of Buddhist thought, I came across Whole Foods' mission statement on
their website, which, serendipitously, is also called a "Declaration of
Interdependence." Read it -- it's uplifting and full of good intentions on
taking care of oneself and taking care of each other. An excellent corporate
mission statement for sure. At that time, I was heartened by the thought that
-- during the dark and separatist cynicism of the Bush era -- interdependence
was still making deep inroads into corporate America.

Then this week I read Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey's Wall Street Journal
op-ed piece, which struck me as a highly fearful and regressive take on the
healthcare debate, which is undoubtedly one of the most interdependently
pressing issues of our time. Mr. Mackey's Wall Street Journal piece might
alternatively be titled "A Declaration of I, Me, and Mine."

The worldview on display in that piece of writing is one of selfish
individualism, mistrust for the very notion representative government itself,
and continued support for a system of profit on anabolic steroids. The piece
is also amazingly dismissive of the most interdependently-minded president
we've had in a long time, taking the term "Obamacare" straight from Rush
Limbaugh's playbook. The cognitive dissonance between the worldview that
seems to inform Mr. Mackey's views on healthcare, and the "Declaration of
Interdependence" on his company's website are too much for me to continue to
support, at least for now.

As a Buddhist practitioner, I work hard to identify and slowly transform my
own internal hypocrisies. Most of them take the following form: I declare
good intentions to benefit myself and others. Yet, I fall prey to deepseated
destructive habits and fearful self-obsessions instead. As a practice,
whenever I recognize a destructive habit or a cognitive dissonance, I set an
intention to work mindfully and diligently to open myself to a larger, more
compassionate, and less fixated worldview. This work is slow and difficult,
and I look like a hypocrite myself a large percentage of the time. But unless
I choose to recognize my own hypocrisies, the work of positive transformation
never begins at all. An extension of this practice is to not support the
obvious hypocrisies of a friend (and my wallet, at least, has definitely
befriended Mr. Mackey for years), especially when the friend is in a position
of enormous power and influence.

So until Mr. Mackey learns that truly declaring interdependence means we take
care of each other no matter what -- a declaration best furthered in the
healthcare debate by supporting a single-payer plan, or, at the very least, a
strong public option -- I am not going to support his cognitive dissonance on
interdependence with any more of my hard-earned
local-organic-neo-hippie-spinach money.

We are all interdependent. And therefore we must take care of each other and
support policies that promote real interdependence. Especially those of us
who go so far as to proclaim interdependence as a corporate mission statement.




  • [Livingontheland] Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's Utterly Disappointing Worldview, Tradingpost, 08/21/2009

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page