The food business is, and always has been, a playground for neurotics with eating disorders. Food is right up there with sex as a primate activity that mixes necessity and pleasure, which confuses many and invites superstition. Opportunists play status and dominance games seeking to control others and elevate themselves. It is no accident that religions often have food laws, sometimes in direct opposition to one another, none of them having anything to do with human or environmental health, though they all tend to make such claims in the attempt to justify themselves.

In our times one of the chief religious conflicts about food involves those of the quasi-pseudo-semi-socialist persuasion - the loose association of various strivers who seek to elevate themselves by harming others - mostly though not exclusively on what calls itself "the left". And so, there was some consternation when the high priest of a chain of drive-by houses of worship - Whole Foods Market - spoke out against an effort to extend social control in the US.

The right-wing hippie is a rare bird, and it’s fair to say that most of Whole Foods’ shoppers have trouble conceiving of it. They tend to be of a different stripe, politically and philosophically, and they were either oblivious or dimly aware of Mackey’s views, until the moment, this summer, when Mackey published an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal asserting that the government should not be in the business of providing health care. . .

In that article Mackey opened with a quote that teatanized the rag tag remnants of the post-socialist left. "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." — Margaret Thatcher. Then he broke it down plainly:

While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment. . .

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That's because there isn't any. This "right" has never existed in America. . .

At Whole Foods we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund. Our Canadian and British employees express their benefit preferences very clearly—they want supplemental health-care dollars that they can control and spend themselves without permission from their governments. Why would they want such additional health-care benefit dollars if they already have an "intrinsic right to health care"? The answer is clear—no such right truly exists in either Canada or the U.K.—or in any other country.

This isn't right-wing much less conservative thinking, though those on the left use "right-wing" as an epithet to demonize anyone who doesn't reflexively and unthinkingly support the party line. And Mackey isn't as rare a bird as claimed. If anything he is a better representative of the revolutionary changes of the hippie era than the juiceless prigs who now claim that inheritance. The sex, drugs and rock revolution was more libertarian than anything, but mostly apolitical: they dropped out of the rat race, including the political charade. It wasn't until later - after the revolution - that some of the drop outs came home from war to become academics, politicians, stock brokers, and seemingly staid families. Others continued the revolution by going electronic - home brew, open source, networked computing and the information revolution which is still unfolding.

A better understanding of Mackey is found in his views about industrial agriculture. The issue for him isn't capitalism - Whole Foods is a capitalist enterprise - it is government collusion with a certain kind of capitalist to dominate markets and exclude free competition. His arguments are muddled so this isn't very clear, even perhaps to him, but his ideas can be inferred from his reaction to the subversion of the organic foods segment by industrial agriculture, and a new threat emerging now involving the recently adopted grass fed beef marketing standard.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) last month issued a voluntary standard for "grass-fed" marketing claims, but according to grass-fed beef producers it won’t hold up to the consumer’s perception of the term. Producers of grass-fed animals have waited for years for the department to develop certification standards and procedures, like the organic certification and seal, to distinguish grass-fed animals from conventionally raised animals. . .

Mackey called the USDA’s new marketing claim for grass-fed beef “a joke.” “The new [grass-fed] rules are very inferior,” he said. “They will give Americans a false sense of quality.”

Asked why the government would issue such a watered-down standard for a term that evokes a very different perception among consumers as to how animals are raised, Mackey said that “the powers that be are scared.” . . .

The burgeoning movement of sustainable food means “people are waking up to the lies that have been told” about the true cost of food in terms of health and the environment, and that directly “threatens the vested interests”of agribusiness, which has almost unlimited access and influence to farm and food policy makers.

“Don’t let 'grass-fed' be bastardized,” he pleaded with the audience. “I saw [the marketing claim for] ”'natural’ be bastardized ” - and if you see [the claim] ” 'natural’ in any supermarket, be skeptical.”

Mackey can be disputed on the facts - his views are often not well informed by science and tend to the airy-fairy new agey dimension - but his obdurate opposition to the collusion of big ag and government can hardly be called right-wing unless the left has completely degenerated, which is arguably the case.

However, as a practical matter, Mackey has had little problem with doing business with industrial ag. That was a central complaint lodged against Whole Foods by Michael Pollan, who saw producers such as Joel Salatin as a better model. Salatin can be seen as a latter day version of the libertarian roots of current food consciousness. In Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal Salatin complains:

As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal’s office.

And it doesn’t stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process. . .

Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor. The fact that I can do it on my own farm more cleanly, more responsibly, more humanely, more efficiently, and in a more environmentally friendly manner doesn’t matter to the government agents who walk around with big badges on their jackets and wheelbarrow-sized regulations tucked under their arms.

Those regulations - like the organic and grass fed marketing standards - result from the collusion of the largest players in industrial ag and government. If, like Mackey claims, food and the environment are adversely impacted by the dominance of industrial interests; and if, as Salatin claims, the whole system of regulation adversely impacts food, the environment and the liberty of producers, then the regulation happy left is justified in demonizing these thinkers, but wrong to call them right-wing. They are what's left of the decent left, and we would do well to grasp this since for all of their faults and deficiencies they advocate a course that can more nearly achieve the objectives claimed by the left as justification for their oppression and collusion with industrial ag through an ever more intrusive regulatory system designed to protect and extend the interests of industry to the detriment of society.