Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [74]
The single most important first step in rediscovering the traditional, healthy diet is changing where you shop. As long as you are wading through 15,000 choices in a supermarket, coming up with something healthy will seem like an incredible challenge. But if you are shopping in a community cooperative store filled with whole foods and foods from local producers, all your senses will be tantalized—but in the right direction for your health. Part IV lists some cooperative networks and some excellent guides to getting such a cooperative food store going in your community.
2.
Who Asked for Fruit Loops?
AT A PARTY not long ago I was talking with a man I hardly knew about the ideas in this edition—how I was struggling to grasp the forces behind these eight radical and risky changes in the American diet. “Well, don’t blame the corporations,” he told me. “If people are stupid enough to eat junk food, they deserve to get sick. Naturally corporations are going to make what sells best.”
I think he summed up pretty well how most Americans view these changes in our diet. They are seen as the more or less inevitable consequences of combining the corporate profit motive with human weakness. And since you can’t change either, why stew about it?
I’m convinced that this view is popular because while it appears to assign responsibility (to the gullible individual), it is really a way to evade responsibility for our economic ground rules. Once accepted, these ground rules justify such practices as feeding 145 million tons of grain to livestock. And they make the expensive, energy-consuming, life-threatening changes in our national diet inevitable.
To understand corporate logic, pretend for a few minutes that you are the chief executive of Conglomerated Foods, Inc.
From the Point of View of Conglomerated Foods, Inc.
Get off the elevator on the top floor. Enter the executive suite. Say hello to your secretary, settle down in your big leather chair, and gaze for a moment out the picture window. Think. How would you make Conglomerated Foods prosper? Even if you don’t have a degree from Harvard Business School, I think you’ll find that certain obvious strategies come to mind.
Ah, yes … first expand sales. But how?
The “Takeover” Strategy
Your most obvious step in expanding sales is to squeeze out, or buy out, smaller, often regional, producers. (As Proctor & Gamble did when they bought a small southwest coffee company called J. A. Folger about ten years ago.1) Then you launch an advertising blitz and a deluge of coupons and even reduce the price of your product below your cost. (You can follow International Telephone & Telegraph’s example—it sold its Wonder, Fresh Horizons, and Home Pride breads at a loss to drive smaller bakeries out of the market.2) Since you’re a conglomerate selling many different products, you can make up for any losses simply by raising prices in your other product lines. And why not expand your sales overseas through takeovers? (As Borden did when it bought Brazil’s biggest pasta manufacturer.3)
THE IMPACT OF YOUR STRATEGY
Walking into the supermarket, customers still see Aunt Nellie’s Pickles and Grandma’s Molasses. This illusion of diversity hides the reality that your strategy has succeeded making the food industry one of the most tightly controlled in America. In the scramble to capture national markets, half of American food companies have been bought out or closed down during my lifetime. Most of them were not inefficient producers; they simply could not withstand the financial muscle of the cash-laden conglomerates.
Take Beatrice Foods, for example, a company whose name is unknown to most Americans. This one company has bought out more than 400 others.4 Names like Tropicana, Milk Duds, Rosarita, La Choy, Swiss Miss, Mother’s, and Aunt Nellie’s, and even Samsonite and Airstream—all these