Food is not just fuel. Food is how we connect with each other, how we build community, and how we shape our world. This truth was at the heart of Whole Foods Market when it started as a small natural foods store in Austin, Texas in 1980. Back then, it wasn’t about quarterly earnings or shareholder value – it was about bringing good food to people who cared about their health, taste, and where their food came from.
I’ve spent the last 20 years trying to answer one simple question: why don’t local farms feed local people? Whole Foods once seemed like it might be part of the answer. They built their brand on connecting consumers with local producers, telling the stories of farmers and artisans, and making organic, sustainable food accessible to more people.
When Whole Foods went public in 1992, something fundamentally changed. The pressure to deliver consistent growth and profits began pushing against their founding mission. Store by store, year by year, the original vision of a community-focused natural foods market transformed into something else entirely – a high-end grocery chain more focused on premium margins than producer relationships.
The 2017 acquisition by Amazon wasn’t the beginning of this shift, but it was the final chapter. Now Whole Foods is just another arm of one of the largest corporations in the world.
But here’s the thing: we don’t really want a local and independent food economy built around one giant corporation anyway. People who care about local food aren’t looking for another centralized system with a different logo. What they want is an independent food economy based on direct connections between the people who grow/produce the food and the people that eat it. They want to support small and medium-sized independent businesses. They don’t want a few large corporations controlling what they eat.
We can build a new independent food economy driven by direct connections between farms/food producers and the people that eat the food. This isn’t too much to ask for.
Every meal is a choice of how we want to live, eat, and work together. While Whole Foods may have lost its way, the spark that inspired it – the desire for real food grown by real people – is still very much alive. It lives in farmers’ markets, food co-ops, CSAs, and innovative new models that prioritize direct connections between producers and consumers.
Together, we can build a food economy that rebuilds the connections between rural and urban communities. One that supports farms like the one I grew up on, so a farm kid like me sees a future on the farm. One where we know who grows our food, and they know who they’re feeding.
We don’t need another Whole Foods. We need thousands of independent food businesses, each one deeply rooted in its community, each one helping to weave together the fabric of a more resilient, more connected food system.
This isn’t just about food – it’s about the kind of society we want to build. One meal at a time, one connection at a time, we can create something better than what we’ve lost. Yes, we’ve lost Whole Foods from the independent food economy, but it was never really about Whole Foods anyway. It’s about something much bigger – our deep desire to eat good food and produce good food in our country, to create meaningful connections with each other through the food we share. That’s what we’re building toward, and that’s what can’t be bought or sold.