A fun story about the food we eat

From The Atlantic:

The Great Grocery Smackdown
Buy my food at Walmart? No thanks. Until recently, I had been to exactly one Walmart in my life, at the insistence of a friend I was visiting in Natchez, Mississippi, about 10 years ago. It was one of the sights, she said. Up and down the aisles we went, properly impressed by the endless rows and endless abundance. Not the produce section. I saw rows of prepackaged, plastic-trapped fruits and vegetables. I would never think of shopping there.

Not even if I could get environmentally correct food. Walmart�s move into organics was then getting under way, but it just seemed cynical�a way to grab market share while driving small stores and farmers out of business. Then, last year, the market for organic milk started to go down along with the economy, and dairy farmers in Vermont and other states, who had made big investments in organic certification, began losing contracts and selling their farms. A guaranteed large buyer of organic milk began to look more attractive. And friends started telling me I needed to look seriously at Walmart�s efforts to sell sustainably raised food.

Really? Wasn�t this greenwashing? I called Charles Fishman, the author of The Wal-Mart Effect, which entertainingly documents the market-changing (and company-destroying) effects of Walmart's decisions. He reiterated that whatever Walmart decides to do has large repercussions�and told me that what it had decided to do since my Natchez foray was to compete with high-end supermarkets. �You won�t recognize the grocery section of a supercenter,� he said. He ordered me to get in my car and find one.

He was right. In the grocery section of the Raynham supercenter, 45 minutes south of Boston, I had trouble believing I was in a Walmart. The very reasonable-looking produce, most of it loose and nicely organized, was in black plastic bins (as in British supermarkets, where the look is common; the idea is to make the colors pop). The first thing I saw, McIntosh apples, came from the same local orchard whose apples I�d just seen in the same bags at Whole Foods. The bunched beets were from Muranaka Farm, whose beets I often buy at other markets�but these looked much fresher. The service people I could find (it wasn�t hard) were unfailingly enthusiastic, though I did wonder whether they got let out at night.

During a few days of tasting, the results were mixed. Those beets handily beat (sorry) ones I�d just bought at Whole Foods, and compared nicely with beets I�d recently bought at the farmers� market. But packaged carrots and celery, both organic, were flavorless. Organic bananas and �tree ripened� California peaches, already out of season, were better than the ones in most supermarkets, and most of the Walmart food was cheaper�though when I went to my usual Whole Foods to compare prices for local produce, they were surprisingly similar (dry goods and dairy products were considerably less expensive at Walmart).

WalMart stays in business because it delivers products that people want. For all the people that argue about the big box stores, it is hard to compete with this fact.