Walmart's Healthy Food Plan: Good Policy or Just Good PR?

By now many of us have read the widely divergent reactions to Walmart's new Healthy Eating campaign. Anna Lappé came out with a withering assessment, Marion Nestle expressed a great deal of skepticism, and Corby Kummer has written not one, but two defenses of Walmart. Jane Black writes that Walmart is right to take small, slow steps because that is the most customers will tolerate. I think the campaign is a (teensy) step in the right direction, but it merits little more than a polite golf clap.

Here's a brief outline of what, exactly, Walmart plans to do through its Healthy Eating campaign:

• Work with manufacturers to reduce sodium, sugar, and trans-fats
• Narrow the price difference between "regular" and "healthier" versions of the same foods
• Continue selling produce at competitively low prices
• Create front-of-the-package seals of approval for "healthier" foods (although the store hasn't defined its criteria for this yet)

Black is correct in saying that Walmart is making changes at a rate that's most comfortable for its customers. But as I see it, Walmart is just doing the absolute minimum it needs to do in order to break into the last remaining markets — namely urban food deserts. This looks like PR spin engineered to make the company look a little more attractive to New York City hunger advocates.

Walmart's changes are broad in scope — the company is is attempting to influence an enormous swath of the food industry. But these changes are also narrow in vision. If we really want to change the food system, if we want to make serious progress in improving American's health, we need to see beyond narrow segments of the food system (like making processed food slightly less unhealthy) and we need to take a more holistic approach. What is the big picture of Walmart's impact on a community's health? As long as the company's employees are underpaid, that's going to offset whatever health benefits the community gets by Walmart reducing sugar by 10 percent. Purchasing $1 billion in local produce is great, but not if prices paid to farmers are so low that these growers barely break even. It's going to take a lot more to erase the link between Walmart and obesity.

Here's a plan that would impress me:

• Pay local farmers 10 percent more than other retailers do for their produce
• Push the produce to the front of the store and processed food to the periphery
• Offer in-store healthy cooking demos
• Pay employees a living wage, provide good benefits, and allow them to unionize if they want to
• Reduce added sugar in non-treat foods (breakfast cereals, yogurt, bread, etc.) by 25 percent
• Stop incentivizing unhealthy choices with widely advertised specials on junk food

I know it's idealistic, but it's the public's job to ask Walmart "What else are you going to do for us?" We owe it to ourselves to be very hard on this giant, wealthy corporation. We're not going to hurt Walmart's feelings, and we're not going to scare the company away from making more positive changes. Where do you think the bar for corporate responsibility should be set — where corporations feel most comfortable, or where we consider ideal? If we don't keep the heat on, this is the full extent of change that we'll see from big box retailers like Walmart.

Meanwhile, if we don't like what Walmart has to offer — especially in food deserts — we need to work harder to make alternatives like food cooperatives and farmers' markets more wide-spread and successful. Right now, Walmart is trying to move into one of these food deserts in a Brooklyn neighborhood of New York City. If you want to promote local food systems instead of big box retailers like Walmart, sign our petition asking the New York City Council to keep the city Walmart-free.

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Photo credit: mjb84 via Flickr