The General Mills Organic Tomato

Check out this post on Anna’s Against the Grain blog.

After all my years in banking, this kind of thing shouldn’t surprise me.  But with food, it does!  The difference is, when a bank acquires another bank, the acquired bank effectively ceases to exist – when Bank of America bought Fleet, you stopped seeing the Fleet brand.  (Sad for any New Englander interested in history, since it was one of the oldest banking brands.)  So you can’t help but notice that a merger has been effected and money (or, really, stock) has changed hands.

But when General Mills acquires Muir Glen, you still see the Muir Glen brand everywhere.  I guess it has more cachet than suddenly seeing “General Mills Organic Tomatoes.”  But doesn’t it seem sort of deceptive?  I thought I was buying those tomatoes from a certain kind of business, and now it turns out I’m buying them from a completely different kind of business.

Plus, when banks swallow other banks, there is at least some show made of having public hearings.  You can’t fail to notice if your do-gooder community bank gets bought by another to whose practices you object.  But if a producer of organic food is swallowed up by some giant corporation that, in its other lines of business, buys tainted food from China, irradiates its spices, uses milk from cows fed rBST, buys genetically modified corn from Archer Daniels Midland, and makes baby formula out of Roundup-sprayed soybeans – well, unless you have habit of combing through the back pages of the business section, you may never know about it, and even if you know about it, there’s unlikely to be a public hearing, and even if there is a public hearing, the hearing is not exactly shouted from the rooftops the way it is in banking.

The rationale for this in the banking industry is that banks control the money supply, and therefore they control the economy, so we have to be careful what we allow them to do.  I don’t disagree (too much) with this principle, but … isn’t food even more important than money?  What about the people who control the food supply?  Whether you believe in more regulation or less, shouldn’t we at least have the right to know who is producing our food?