Toyoda Ruff’s son, a freshman honor student, had just crossed the 300-pound mark, and she was taking him to a children’s weight-loss clinic. At 270 pounds, her husband wanted to lose weight, too. And Toyoda wanted to change the way she ate.
Could the answer be the new Whole Foods that had just opened in Detroit?
That’s just one of the questions Tracie McMillan asks in a fascinating piece in Slate published in cooperation with the Food and Environment Reporting Network, an independent, non-profit news site supporting investigative reporting on food, agriculture, and environmental health. McMillan is a freelance journalist, a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University, and the author of The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table, published in 2012. (Disclosure: She and I were journalism fellows at the University of Maryland in 2004.)
Most of us understand that the product line at Whole Foods is not aimed at Detroit where, as McMillan writes, one-third of the population lives below the poverty line. But company leaders told her the store “was about social equity as much as profit.” Not only would it make healthy food available to Toyoda Ruff, her family, and her neighbors, but “there would be lower prices, too, to make the store accessible to ‘all of Detroit,'” said Walter Robb, the CEO of Whole Foods.
Ruff’s first visit, McMillan reports, was overwhelming. “While many shoppers were black, as Ruff is, nearly everyone wore professional or stylish attire (or hospital scrubs). Ruff was in sweats and a T-shirt. She compared it to someone watching a football game for the first time: “You have no clue as to what you’re watching…And you’re just sitting there like, ‘What the hell is going on?'”
With that intro, McMillan backs up to tell us the story that led to the store’s opening. “You need to understand three things,” she writes: “The city’s reputation, its officials’ interest in changing it, and, most of all, Whole Foods’ larger aspirations.”
At that point–even before then–I was hooked.
McMillan does a wonderful job of taking us through a quick recap of Detroit’s situation, Robb’s first visit there, and the discussions that led to the store’s opening. She follows Ruff to a Whole Foods class on savvy shopping, and has a thoughtful discussion with Ruff about her reaction to the class. When Whole Foods declined her request for a list of its competitive prices, she wasn’t deterred. “I compiled a list of 40 common grocery items and documented their prices at both the Detroit Whole Foods and King Cole, a neighborhood grocer in Detroit’s North End neighborhood,” she writes.
She evaluates the advice Whole Foods gives to its Detroit shoppers. Does buying a $100 blender to make healthy smoothies make sense for somebody living on disability checks?
Throughout the story, McMillan shows herself to be equally at ease with the store’s balance sheet, city leaders, nutritional issues, and the shoppers she interviews.
And her conclusion?
No spoilers here. Take a few minutes to enjoy this fine piece of journalism for yourself.
-Paul Raeburn
Leave a Reply