• Whole Foods Detroit: Can a grocery store really fight elitism, racism, and obesity?
    http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2014/11/whole_foods_detroit_can_a_grocery_store_really_fight_elitism_racism_and.html

    ... if you consider Robb’s broader initial goals—to reach families just trying to eat healthier, to make truly healthy food truly accessible to a broad swath of the city, to tackle the class divide in health—Whole Foods hasn’t gotten very far. Robb’s eloquent talk aside, Whole Foods isn’t too preoccupied with finding a market among shoppers like Ruff and Williams, for whom the pitch that cage-free and genetically modified are healthier than other food doesn’t merit the markup.

    Shoppers wanting simple, affordable healthy food, rather than an aspirational product, have better options elsewhere. And for indisputably poor people like Brown, who aspire to buy what Whole Foods sells, the prices simply aren’t low enough to work. This is not to call into question the sincerity of Robb’s desire to improve health outcomes in Detroit, but rather the impracticality—if not disingenuousness—of tying such a broad social goal to a marketing plan that requires, by definition, spending 29 percent more on your groceries.

    For anyone looking to address health and diet disparities, the lesson from Whole Foods in Detroit may well be that the problem is not food, but poverty. And that is a problem that requires more than a supermarket to solve.