food politics

If I had a list of wishes, pretty high up would be that people realize that Whole Foods Market... well... sucks.

Here are a few reasons to avoid them and support your local grocer instead (if you're lucky enough to have one, that is):  

• Whole Foods violates their workers' rights to unionize, including busting up a union in Madison, Wisconsin and hiring armed guards to stand outside the Tysons Corner, West Virginia, store, in response to workers starting to talk of unionizing. 
• Whole Foods doesn't buy locally. They centralize their food buying and favor large corporations, at the expense of local farms and economies. Can you imagine a world without small farms?
• They're complicit in perpetuating the brutal conditions facing farmworkers.
  

Last week I was on a radio program to discuss Skinny Bitch, the vegan/animal rights manifesto wrapped in chick-lit veneer that became a bestseller after Posh Spice was photographed holding it.

Quoted in the New York Times about the hateful Skinny Bitch vegan "health" book phenom. Cheers to reporter Julia Moskin for including Debbie's critical viewpoint—that skinny and healthy are not the same, and vegan junk food is still junk, that these books stop short of the challenge to our industrialized food system that a more politicized vegan analysis would provide.

I'd been looking forward to interviewing vegan author Isa Chandra Moskowitz all week. We met up at the Vox café in Brooklyn.