An aggressive attempt to rewrite the food model  

I am so impressed with Chipotle. We were there yesterday for the first time in a while and I noticed that all their meat is now hormone free and vegetarian fed. I don't know if that's a change or if it's just a change in the way they're promoting it. But anyway then I was reading the back of one of their soda cups and it explained that they've recently moved to the same kind of hormone free, vegetarian fed livestock for their sour cream as well.

Of course, they don't make the sour cream themselves, so they had to work with their supplier, Daisy, to ensure that the livestock supplying their milk was hormone free and vegetarian fed. What interested me about this is that Daisy is a big name in sour cream -- one you can find at your local grocer -- and they were able to work something like this out for a high volume customer like Chipotle. I'm guessing this doesn't mean all of Daisy's sour cream is hormone free and vegetarian fed, mainly because they don't mention anything about it on their website and it seems like they'd want to if they could. Still, I think it illustrates the power of a high volume customer to insist on terms -- and in this case, terms that are better for our health and the environment.

I remember reading some months ago about the Chipotle in Charlottesville VA working closely with a nearby farm to get pork that was locally raised. While the model seemed to be working in Charlottesville, there wasn't really any talk about scaling the relationship up, because there simply isn't enough capacity in locally produced pork to sustain the quantities eaten at a national chain like Chipotle. But what Chipotle does have is leverage -- leverage that could be used to change practices on a much larger scale, as they did with Daisy.

I guess my takeaway from this is just that while the current food culture tends to demonize -- or at least frown upon -- large scale food production and its methods, that's where the action is going to have to be if society is going to change its eating habits.