"Dollars & Sense", Whole Foods, health care, and where the well-heeled omnivore is eating

There's a nice point-by-point rebuttal to the John Mackey op-ed that sparked the Whole Foods boycott on the Dollars & Sense blog, here. The author's Joel A. Harrison, who has previously written for the magazine on privatization of profit and socialization of cost in US health care delivery.

As an aside, Michael Pollan has come out against the boycott, as both Dollars & Sense and boycott organizers Single Payer Action note. In a note on the conservative New Majority (really?) site, he posits Whole Foods as part of "an alternative food system," based on support for farmers and better-quality food more sustainably grown, and adds that when, thanks to health care reform, insurers can no longer cherrypick the healthiest individuals they will have a stake in changing the food system to emphasize "prevention, which is to say, in changing the way America feeds itself." Why this hasn't happened already, given that even if you can legally snag the healthiest customers and shed the sickest, you should also have a stake in keeping the fit fit, Pollan doesn't say.