Yeah, Mackey actually joked about the Whole Paycheck moniker. When Pollan brought up the issue, his first response was “you’re not going to give me the ‘Whole Paycheck’ thing, are you?”

Community or individual gardens are a great idea. 101 cookbooks recently ran a link to a page on the old victory gardens of the 40′s. Those little home gardens fed a lot of Americans back then, cheaply and sustainably.

I think Marc mentioned People’s Grocery out here in Oakland. They’re a mobile grocery selling fresh organic produce in poor inner city neighborhoods. There’s also Alice Waters’ famous school gardening program in Berkeley. I think this program is also being copied in San Francisco, and perhaps other cities in the Bay Area. It would be great if someone started a national organization to develop such programs in every urban area.

In the end, it might be more feasible to help low-income people start community gardens or individual container gardens.

Anyway. What they might do is create a “downscale” chain with a different name, one that isn’t associated with forking over lots of money for something you could get cheaper elsewhere. With a good name, a good advertising campaign, and a good inner city location, this just might work.

Great point. He also didn’t address the issue of access to Whole Foods for low income people. How many WFs are in West Oakland or Detroit or the Bronx? In many low income communities, it is a struggle to get any fresh food, often involving riding multiple buses or taking a taxi.

A great project for one of WF’s foundations or venture capital funds would be a chain of stores in low income neighborhoods that focused on fresh fruit and vegetables, with the goal of selling the produce desired by that community. Or, perhaps, funding projects like the People’s Grocery in Oakland. In the short term, it might lead to a short term loss of revenue, but over time it might open up new opportunities for WF.