The Anarchist's Cookbook

It's unlikely there would be organic milk in every supermarket coast to coast, and it's hard to believe Dole would be busy scouring Central America for farmland to convert to organic production if Whole Foods' sales hadn't tripled, and tripled again, since 1994. Says Doug Greene, founder and former editor of Natural Foods Merchandiser, the 25-year-old trade bible of the organic- and natural-foods business: "If you look back 100 years from now, history will show that Whole Foods will be in the top-five companies that changed the world."

http://images.fastcompany.com/magazine/84/wholefoods_duck.gif) no-repeat top center; padding-top: 45px;">Still, for all of Whole Foods' success and influence -- one meat supplier uses the un-hippielike word "juggernaut" -- the organic- and natural-foods business remains a pretty small niche. True, production and sales are growing at more than 20% a year in an industry that, overall, is stagnant or drifting up at only the glacial rate of population growth. But the total U.S. market for organic and natural foods is now estimated at about $13.5 billion, between 1% and 2% of all foods sold in the United States, and less than the sales at any of the top-11 grocery chains in America. Cropland and grazing land is rapidly being converted to organic production, but for all the talk, right now less than half of 1% of U.S. land is certified for organic growing or grazing. "Wal-Mart spills more milk than we sell every year," says Organic Valley's Siemon.

But here's the funny thing. The production of natural and organic foods is a virtuous cycle: You have to start off with clean land to grow grain for your clean breakfast cereal, or to feed to your clean chickens. The baby-boom demographic trends are all surging in Whole Foods' direction; the Columbus Circle store is already filled with little old ladies loading their grocery carts. Americans are on hair-trigger alert to issues such as mad cow disease. It's hard to envision the market doing anything but growing.

Mackey believes we will shun factory farms that treat animals like products.

Mackey's new determination to raise Whole Foods' standards for animal care -- a command decision to which there has been nothing but assent internally -- may rock the cattle, pork, and poultry industries. After six months of meetings, Whole Foods settled on rules for ducks, and this summer will begin setting standards for pig raising. And Mackey believes Americans will soon shun factory farms that raise and slaughter 9 billion animals a year as if they were protein products, not creatures. "Right now," he says, "Americans have to pretend factory farms don't exist. They turn their eyes away, because there's no alternative, there's no choice." Once there is a choice, he says, we will allow ourselves to be outraged. Equally dramatic transformations have happened in the past 25 years. Consider the revolution in attitudes about drunk driving and smoking in the United States.

In 20 years of making predictions about his company and his business, Mackey has never missed a bet, except for underestimating the market for organic and natural foods. (At one point in the early 1990s, he said there were only 100 good sites for Whole Foods markets in the entire country.) Sitting in his office in 2004, he says without hesitation, "Twenty years from now, factory farms will be illegal in the United States."

As bold, and even outrageous, as that prediction is, Mackey is nothing if not a hardheaded realist. And he hears regularly from counterculture critics who complain about the corporatization of their stores. "People write me letters, they send me emails. They say, 'You've forgotten the people who made you.' They say, 'How can you let people who drive SUVs shop at the stores?' "

Mackey says they simply don't get it. "The stores are larger, nicer, prettier -- they are more inviting to the mainstream shopper," he says. "Whole Foods is not a business for a clique, or for the elite. We wanted the philosophy of the stores to spread throughout the culture. We wanted to change the world."

Mackey is a persistently puzzling fellow: self-effacing, but with a hint that he senses his own legacy. During 2002, in the heart of the recession, he took four months off to hike the Appalachian Trail, fulfilling a longtime dream.

People who hike the whole trail end up with "trail names," a moniker that acknowledges that the Appalachian Trail is a universe unto itself, a place where the roles of the outside world are set aside. Mackey had been warned in advance to pick his own trail name, lest he be tagged with something derisive, as is the custom.

"My trail name is Strider," he says. For someone tall, lanky, and energetic, it seems an innocuous enough choice. "I'm a great admirer of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings," Mackey says. "Before I was in high school, I had read it five times. And one of the characters I admired was Strider."

But as with much about Mackey, that nickname is not quite what it seems. "Strider isn't his real name; it's his nickname on the trail. He is really Aragorn, the king. But he wasn't a king on the trail. In 2002, when I was hiking, I was certainly the richest guy hiking the Appalachian Trail. I was a kind of secret king. But that wasn't my identity, or my role, on the trail."