It’s hard not to interpret these events as a victory for price over quality. Unlike Organic Valley’s farms, which average 65 cows each, Horizon sources a good part of its milk from highly efficient factory barns, including the roughly 5,000-cow Aurora Organic Dairy, in Colorado. Critics say that Aurora slips through a loophole in the federal organic law, and a complaint has been filed with the USDA (by the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute) alleging that the dairy rarely—if ever—lets its cows out to pasture. (Aurora claims that all its cows pasture, but will not specify if this happens during the milking life of a cow or, for example, only during its infancy.) The problem with cows that don’t eat grass, experts say, is that their milk contains 80 percent less of a powerful cancer-fighting agent—conjugated linoleic acid—than does milk from grass-fed cows. In addition, cows that forage have been shown to have significantly more vitamin E and other essential antioxidants in their milk.
Horizon’s milk meets the USDA standards for “organic,” but Wal-Mart appears to have opted for a milk that, like so many of its products, makes some definite compromises in order to meet the bottom line. Maybe that doesn’t matter so much for plastic mugs and dish mats, but with food, the implications for people’s health are worrisome.
Organic Valley, meanwhile, now has the dubious honor of being one of the few companies to bet that it can swim upstream, defying the gravitational wisdom that all companies must row with Wal-Mart to get to the big sea. The quandary of which way to swim epitomizes the essential problem of mass-marketing food. Smaller producers often sell items that are rare and of high quality—the heirloom tomato, the artisanal cheese—but supplies are neither vast nor consistent enough to satisfy the requirements of giant retailers like Wal-Mart. The mass marketers need constancy, not the variability that springs up with nature’s fickle seasons. Maybe Organic Valley will patch together enough family farms to take on Wal-Mart again. Maybe Wal-Mart will decide there’s some merit to buying milk from cows that spend their milking lives in the open air. Or maybe the chain will hit a rough spot and stop growing at the rate of 240 Supercenters a year, on target to dominate 35 percent of food sales by 2007. Maybe.
In the meantime, we will increasingly be eating according to mass-market tastes, shopping in massive Supercenters, and living in the world that Wal-Mart built.
Wal-Mart Facts
- Approximate number of customers worldwide who visit Wal-Mart stores every week: 138 million
- Percentage of U.S. households that made a Wal-Mart purchase in 2002: 82
- Percentage of U.S. food sales attributed to Wal-Mart in 2003: 15
- Percentage expected by 2007: 35
- Average percentage decrease of grocery prices in U.S. markets entered by Wal-Mart: 14
- Minimum number of U.S. supermarkets that have closed since Wal-Mart entered the grocery business in 1988: 10,000
- Minimum number of (mostly union) U.S. supermarket jobs that have been eliminated in that time: 12,000
- Percentage difference in labor costs at a Wal-Mart Supercenter vs. at a unionized supermarket in the same U.S. locality: 20 to 30
- Percentage difference in price of groceries: 15 to 30
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