Edible Virtue: Unpacking the Rhetorics of Community and Sustainability at Whole Foods

• In Event: Food, Culture, and the Environment: New Directions in Critical Food Studies

Abstract

With 270 locations in the U.S. and the U.K., Whole Foods lives up to its own claim as "the world's largest retailer of natural and organic foods." Its purchasing power alone sets agendas and influences tastes, and its marketing efforts reach millions of consumers annually. And, given the company's focus on the "experience" and "excitement" of food, its stores are designed to overwhelm the senses while educating consumers in the ethics of eating well in the Whole Foods way: "Whole Foods, Whole People, Whole Planet." This essay examines the ways in which Whole Foods stores and marketing materials work to visually, materially, and performatively produce a particularly privatized discourse of community and sustainability that positions consumerism as environmentalism. It delves into the problematics of invoking "the local" as a unifying discourse that aims to substitute "buying in" for community engagement and participation in local politics. This matters, to extend Danielle Allen's arguments, in terms of citizenship and the possibilities for reciprocity: what kind of cultural work do these rhetorics do as they attempt to produce a particular sense of environmental citizenship in one's local (Whole Foods-centered) community?

Author

• Cindy Spurlock, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill