We’ve all seen the slow drip of companies away from the Food Marketing Institute Show in recent years, and it’s become easy to view the two emergent replacement gatherings of the food and beverage industry as polar opposites. In one corner, you have the place to be seen for good-for-you foods and beverages, Natural Products Expo West – “good for you, good for business, good for everyone,” as its slogan had it this year. In the other corner is the show for bad-for-you items (well, Pepsi, for one, prefers to say they’re “fun for you”), the National Association of Convenience Stores show. Expo West products are all-natural, sometimes organic and generally not tainted by taboo ingredients, like high-fructose corn syrup, that render them unworthy of retailers like Whole Foods. By contrast, NACS products generally taste better to the “average American” and most likely sell in numbers that are an order of magnitude greater.
Given these Manichean opposites, it was fascinating to attend the keynote speech by Michael Pollan at this year’s Expo West, in Anaheim, Calif., in March. Pollan, of course, is the best-selling author of such influential books as The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. With his excoriation of the industrial food business, Pollan has been regarded by many in the natural foods sector as a crucial ally. In many ways, he is. But as the natural foods business has scaled up, and as industrial players have bought their way in, Pollan has been hard at work warning consumers to be skeptical about the claims aimed their way by natural foods purveyors. After reading Pollan’s description, in Omnivore, of how industrial producers define “free range” (a strip of grass separated from an industrial barn by a tiny door that the enclosed livestock almost never traverse), my wife and I stopped paying a premium for free-range chicken.
Chalk up those activities, maybe, to unscrupulous food processors gaming the system. But Pollan’s critique poses a challenge to natural food purveyors in a far more fundamental way, and that was the gist of his speech at Expo West. If in some ways it was accusatory, his mild tone and subtle sense of humor insured it was only gently accusatory. But it had to be disquieting to many in the audience who are used to feeling pretty good about themselves and what they do for a living.