MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. And the fight for the future of America's diet will take place in the aisles of Wal-Mart. Yes, the same low-price, big-box store where you can buy everything from clothes to cribs, to cleaning supplies. The same massive chain that gets labor activists across the country bent out of shape is now a grocer committed to putting healthier foods on its shelves and pushing people along the food supply chain to come along with it or so it says. Wal-Mart announced plans last week to reduce sodium and sugar and eliminate trans fats in some of the products it sells. It also pledged to support local farmers and to improve the nutritional information it makes available to consumers, all these while federal regulators are pushing policies to help us adopt healthier diets. So could it be that Wal-Mart, not Whole Foods, not the Yes! Organic chain, is the industry player that could end up making the biggest difference in how we eat? Joining us to have this conversation is Lyndsey Layton, a reporter at The Washington Post. Lyndsey, good to see you again.

MS. LYNDSEY LAYTONOh, it's great to be here, Kojo.

NNAMDIAnd joining us from studios in Boston is Corby Kummer, senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes a monthly column on food and curates theatlantic.com's Food Channel. Corby Kummer, thank you for joining us.

MR. CORBY KUMMERThanks for having me.

NNAMDICorby, you wrote for The Atlantic about a year ago that up until recently you had only been to one Wal-Mart in your entire life -- same here, actually. That you visited a store in Natchez, Miss., 10 years ago, saw rows of prepackaged plastic-wrapped fruits and vegetables, to use your phrase, and determined that you would never buy your food there, but you returned to a super center near Boston a decade later and had trouble believing you were in a Wal-Mart. What did you find there?

KUMMERWell, my shock of disbelief was walking in to this store and seeing actual open bins of produce that I could pick myself, instead of those of horrible plastic-wrapped packs like out of a convenience store, you know, where everything is dried and shriveled and probably rotten inside, and then seeing a pick-your-own apple bag, the white ones with handles running across, and it was from the very same orchard I had seen in Whole Foods two days before. So I thought there's something going on here. What is it? And also, there were kind of support local farms, Massachusetts-grown banners in the Wal-Mart that were straight out of a Whole Foods playbook. And I just didn't expect to see any of this. So a friend of mine named Charles Fishman, who wrote a book "The Wal-Mart Effect," had told me, you have to go to Wal-Mart because they're going after medium-end supermarkets, not high-end, right under Whole Foods. And indeed, I was amazed by the amount of produce I find, and I looked in, and I was able to pry some information out of Wal-Mart, which anyone who's reporting on Wal-Mart, like perhaps Lyndsey, will know it's not an easy thing to do. And they were -- then in the testing phase of an initiative they announced last fall, I think at the end of October...

NNAMDIYup.

KUMMER...which they misleadingly call heritage agriculture. It's not what we foodies think of as heritage, which means old heirloom braids, but it's heritage in the idea that say that right around Bentonville, Ark., where its headquarters are, there used to be commercially imported apple crops. But that all faded away in the '20s and '30s when New York State, California, Washington and the other ag states, Texas and Florida, started taking everybody's business. And those plants were no longer -- those crops were no longer planted. And Wal-Mart said we'll help buy these crops if farmers will plant them again, because we'll save in transport cost, and we'll be able to give customers fresher produce.

NNAMDIThat was last October, but last week, Wal-Mart had another announcement. It's been trying to go organic in parts of its grocery section for a while now. Could you tell us about the announcement last week?

KUMMERYeah. Organic, we can just put aside for now. Wal-Mart made tremendous progress in organics starting at least three or four years ago. This wasn't about organics. This was about fresh produce and reducing levels of -- it's about its packaged Great Value house brand line, and the reformulations it's going to make in that to start answering the calls of people like Dr. Thomas Friedman, who was an extremely activist and I think very admirable commissioner of health in New York City. Now, of course, he's the head of the CDC in Atlanta. So he started something called the National Sodium Reduction Initiative or Salt Reduction initiative.

KUMMERAnd Wal-Mart itself said, we are going to take 25 percent of sodium out of all of our house brands within five years. Five years sounds like a long time, but taking salt out of food is a very difficult thing to continue having consumer acceptance. And they're taking added sugars out of food. They committed to 10 percent. What I like about their initiative -- there's a lot of things I like. First of all, the large point of your program, I think, for having this segment at all is that when Wal-Mart does something, it can affect the entire country, and it will affect the entire country, because the people who supply their house brands are also making name brands that we know about.

KUMMERIf they find the technology to make lower sodium foods taste okay and acceptable, that means that they can offer it to everybody else. Same thing with added sugars. They've taken a lot of flak for not -- for still pumping out bargains on actual full-sugar sodas, but their point -- and I think it's an important one -- is we're taking the sugars out of ketchup and condiments and meals where you don't think there's sugar. Same thing with sodium. Sodium is all over desserts, as I'm sure your other guest knows. So it's the hidden levels that are hurting us, and that's what they're committed to reducing. And I think it will have a huge effect.

NNAMDILyndsey Layton, in your piece last week, you announced that Wal-Mart announced -- it plans the healthful food initiative plan at the Arc last week, which is a community center that offers a nutritious eating program to residents from surrounding neighborhoods. Was that your piece?

LAYTONActually, it wasn't, Kojo.

NNAMDIThat's what I thought. It was somebody else.

LAYTONThat's a colleague's.

NNAMDIBut it was a colleague's.

KUMMERSay it was.

NNAMDIYeah. And that's a significant location to do it, because the Arc is -- for those people who don't know it -- is located in what's known as Ward 8 in the District of Columbia, which is one of the city's poorest wards and one of the wards which has the least access to nutritious foods.

LAYTONRight. It's what, I guess, you know, Corby and others would call a food desert.

NNAMDIYes.

LAYTONAnd so one of Wal-Mart's plans when it was rolling out this initiative last week was to address that food desert problem and, in addition to lowering the sodium and the sugars and the fats in the processed foods, the company says that it's going to reduce the prices for fresh fruits and vegetables and make those more readily available to communities where it's hard to find, you know, a fresh plum or a peach. So that's also one of the goals.

NNAMDIIt's food Wednesday. You can join the conversation by calling 800-433-8850. Do you purchase your groceries at a big-box store like Wal-Mart? Why do you shop there? What responsibility do you think big-box stores like Wal-Mart have for offering their customers access to healthy foods? 800-433-8850. Or you can send us an e-mail to kojo@wamu.org. Lyndsey, the food industry, as a whole, rolled out a nutritional effort late last month that was advertised as -- quoting here -- "monumental and historic," an initiative to improve labeling for processed food and beverages. What exactly did they promise to do, and what seems to be the impetus for them doing it?

LAYTONWell, what's going on here, Kojo, is that the black and white nutrition facts label that you find on every processed food in the -- basically every food in the country, it's been around since '94, and studies have shown that it's lost its effectiveness. That people are either they're so pressed for time, they can't bother to turn around the package and study it, or they just don't know what to make of it, and they need more help and guidance in the supermarket aisles. So the government -- the Food and Drug Administration has been working for some time on developing front labels for packages and what would be required on the front. And they've been negotiating with the food industry for the past year about this, trying to come to some agreement on what should be on the front, which right now is a very pricey real estate on a box of cereal, and it's used to promote that cereal and market it.

LAYTONAnd the government would like to get some basic nutrition facts out there. And talks between the government and the industry broke down some time this summer, and the industry basically just went ahead and unilaterally announced that it was rolling out its own plan, which was immediately greeted by a lot of criticism from the public health community, because the industry says that: On the front, it's going to disclose fats, sugars, sodium, calories, but also, it will promote a couple of positives. Food makers will have a choice. They can choose two of -- between one or two from among eight positives.

LAYTONSo the positives include things like potassium or vitamin C or fiber or protein. So the reason why this was met with a lot of criticism from public health experts and a real tepid reaction from the government is that you could take a product like ice cream and, you know, tout the calcium value on -- for that product and put that out front. And folks, you know, the critics say this really doesn't help consumers make better choices in the supermarket. That this is really just going to add to confusion and create, you know, make some products look better than they actually are.

NNAMDIDo you know the old Bill Cosby routine when his kids ask him -- when he asks his kids what their mother prepared for them for breakfast and they said they had milk and eggs, and he decided to give them chocolate cake because it had both milk and eggs in it?

NNAMDII guess that's the policy some of them are following. Corby, let's go back to Wal-Mart for a minute here because we’re also talking about a business voluntarily moving in the direction of nutrition. What do you feel is in it for Wal-Mart, and what sense do you have for the kinds of steps that retailers will not take on their own without prodding from regulators?

KUMMERWell, what retailers aren't gonna do -- and it directly relates to front of pack that Lyndsey was talking about -- is say that something is bad for you. So there's been all this attack about the two positive nutrients they're going to roll out. You know, it's saying that Froot Loops are high in vitamins so forget all that added sugar in them which is why their smart choices initiative was laughed out of stores. I mean, they had to take that out. I'm not sure about whether the public is really gonna be fooled by calcium in ice cream or, you know, chocolate cake for breakfast, which sounds awfully good to me.

KUMMERThere, I said it. And I like the idea that there's going to be all this nutrition information, and I think if GMA and industry do this hoping there's gonna be an end run and it gives FDA a fantastic base to build on. So if they finally wait for the Institute of Medicine report that's due out, that will have lots of recommendations for this, if they issue regulations, the public will be used to having a lot of good information on front of packs. So maybe some of the misleading stuff will go away. Your question about Wal-Mart. I wanted to add that Wal-Mart is going to put on a voluntary seal of approval that is designed -- they decided they were just gonna stay out of this bramble patch of front-of-pack arguments because everybody knows that industry has been fighting with FDA about this, and that industry was gonna come out ahead to, you know, run things its own way.

KUMMERSo Wal-Mart is gonna have a seal of approval on its house brand -- all their food products that will say, you know, this is good for you. And what everybody is waiting for, kind of, with bated breath is based on what criteria? Are they decent? You know, can we trust them? Or is it gonna be, look at all the calcium in ice cream or all the protein in meat? That's the other big attack of the new front-of-pack initiative, the idea of highlighting protein when we get much too much of it in our diet anyway and people are unjustly worried about getting enough protein. So the idea that Wal-Mart is doing this -- it's not as far as the public health community wants, which is yellow and red lights.

NNAMDIIndeed.

KUMMERThe industry is never gonna volunteer to put red lights on their food package.

NNAMDILyndsey noted that shoppers in the UK have that traffic light system at their disposal, that healthy products are marked with green lights and...

KUMMERThey had it. It got withdrawn.

NNAMDIReally? And unhealthy ones with red lights.

KUMMERYeah. David Cameron's government -- David Cameron's government back down, and it's off. It was a noble experiment.

NNAMDILyndsey Layton, is there any kind of data on how that kind of system affected consumer decisions?

LAYTONWell, I -- actually, you know, I haven't seen it. I know that it was quite popular among consumers. The food industry was very cool to it, although this wasn't voluntary effort. This was -- the British food safety agency prodded and cajoled the industry to voluntarily do this. So this wasn't really -- I mean, it wasn't legally required. This was government pushing the industry in using all of its leverage and the industry responding. And then, as Corby noted, with the new government, it's now been withdrawn. I don't know if you can still find products on the shelves in the UK that still have this packaging on it. I do know consumers liked it. They -- the whole idea of a red, green light may seem very simplistic but, you know, when you're walking down the supermarket aisle and you got -- you stop in front of a package. You pick it up. You're looking at it, and you're thinking, well, 275 grams of this, is that good or bad?

KUMMERWhat does it mean?

LAYTONRight.

NNAMDIExactly.

LAYTONIt actually -- you know, people need a little guidance.

NNAMDIAnd, Corby, the chance -- now that the Cameron government has withdrawn that in England, the chances here were probably always twofold, slim and none. Does the recent November election reduce those chances to one? None?

KUMMEROh, yeah. I don't think we're ever gonna see -- we're never gonna see red lights and yellow lights on package. I think the best we can hope for -- and because I happen to have a lot of faith in how smart the people at Wal-Mart are, you know, we're leaving labor aside in all of this. But I think that they certainly have been talking to very good nutrition people, what they make of those talks, we have to see. But they've said to me, when I did some reporting on this with Andrea Thomas, the vice president of sustainability, she said it was now under a six-month review. So if they make those criteria transparent, and they put their seal of approval on, as Lyndsey was saying, shoppers just want some quick way of deciding, is this good for my family or bad for my family? So nobody's gonna say, hey, lady. This is bad for your family. But if they say this is good for your family, you know, that can be helpful, especially if the nutrition community doesn't look at the criteria Wal-Mart is using to say it's good and say, oh, that's a load of rubbish.

NNAMDII have one more question, before we take a break, for both you and Lyndsey, Corby. First, you, Lyndsey. Under what circumstances would you pick up a food with a red light on it?

LAYTONOoh.

LAYTONOoh, late at night, sometimes...

NNAMDIYou've answered the industry's question. (laugh) Corby Kummer, under what circumstances would you pick up a food with a red light on it?

KUMMERYou know, I like ice cream, and nothing's gonna stop me from eating it. So, you know, for example, that.

NNAMDICorby Kummer, ice cream and chocolate cake for breakfast. We're gonna take a short break. When we come back, we will continue this conversation on food Wednesday. The Wal-Mart diet? Taking your calls at 800-433-8850. Talking about chains getting into the business of more nutritious foods. You can also go to our website, kojoshow.org, and join the conversation there. If you have already called, stay on the line. We will get to your call. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWelcome back. It's Food Wednesday and we're talking about Wal-Mart and other chains getting more and more into the food business in general and into the healthy food business, in particular. We're talking with Lyndsey Layton, a reporter at The Washington Post and Corby Kummer, senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes a monthly column on food and curates theatlantic.com's food channel. Taking your calls at 800-433-8850. Corby, it's my understanding that you observe a taste test between Wal-Mart and Whole Foods products and that some of the people who tasted the food we're not entirely happy when they found out that some of the food they preferred came from Wal-Mart.

KUMMERAnd what's worse, I designed it. I came up with it with my pal, James McWilliams, who's a very provocative writer in Austin, Texas about the food industry. He often takes a kind of pro-industry stance, although he is completely vegan himself, that infuriates people and is anti-meat but is often pro-industry. In any case, we have long been wanting to dream up an organic versus non-organic test. And instead what I came up with was Wal-Mart versus Whole Foods. So he got his pals at a local restaurant called Fino, which, like every restaurant today, specializes in only local produce. And they devised the menu and agreed that they would make two versions of each dish, four courses. Same dish, same recipe but the ingredients would come from Wal-mart on one side and Whole Food on the other. And I did the shopping with my spouse. We arrived at Austin at 11 o'clock at night and, of course, you know, everything is open.

NNAMDIOf course.

KUMMERSo we went and then we went with these huge amounts of plastic Wal-Mart bags. And the prep cooks who saw us coming in to their walk in at that restaurant, Fino, thought -- get right out of here. You're not coming in here with those Wal-mart bags. You know, the Whole Food bags were one thing. So they made the four courses the next night. They were a bunch of not just foodies, but really smart palates that the manager, Brian, at Fino had assembled for this taste test. They just knew that it was gonna be the same dish with ingredients from two different places. They had to rate them and, you know, in many cases, it was a tie and often it was in favor of Wal-Mart. Where Wal-Mart lost was the chicken breasts, which were slimy and awful and ivory colored instead of white, and everybody knew they've been soaked in brine and tasted terrible, exactly as if they come from a fast food joint. But other than that, people were really embarrassed and annoyed to find that they had preferred Wal-Mart in a lot of cases.

NNAMDIWas that surprising to you, Lyndsey Layton?

LAYTONWell, I guess so -- not the chicken because the plumping chicken is like a -- that's a whole other show, Kojo.

NNAMDIGood.

LAYTONBut, you know, yes, in fact, you know, the freshness of the produce that's what in Corby's piece, he pointed out that there was -- one of the tasters was a farmer who was renowned for her greens and, you know, she preferred the Wal-Mart spinach over the Whole Foods.

KUMMERNo. No. She recognizes -- she was the one person, Carol Ann Sayle, who writes for the Food Channel.

LAYTONOh, she noticed...

KUMMERAnd she's fantastic. She had brought around arugula, which is really like the world's best. It's unbelievable. What she did was she picked up one of the baby mesclun mix leaves from Wal-Mart and said, look at that little brown spot, it means age. (laugh) However, it -- people have -- didn't have the visual clues and they actually prefer the Wal-Mart salad, too, a lot.

NNAMDIOn to our listeners, who have been waiting patiently and thank you for that. Brian in Columbia, Md., you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

BRIANHi there, Kojo. Thanks for having me on. I'm a local organic farmer and I also teach class in sustainable agriculture in College Park. And we'd look at this very thing. One thing, what does Wal-Mart get out of it? They get free advertising. I mean, they have not done any of these things. There's a new pledge. So they can release press releases, basically, through The New York Times like they did. Direct marketing is what I do. Farmers markets' people are discovering that, yes, you could get the same. You could get that or apples here or there, same bag, but it's not the connection to agriculture. It's environmental, the social, the political and economic spectrum hasn't been held.

BRIANMonopoly is in control of the market. I don't want Wal-Mart telling me what to do and how to grow things. I've been growing organically my whole career and a seal of approval coming from Wal-Mart is one of the scariest things that what they love to do is muddy the waters. They wanna control the market by taking over this niche. And if you and I are interested in environmental sustainability and we wanna go by that and we can see that on a couple of labels, then we can come to Wal-Mart too. You see what I mean? We can get everybody that way. People need to maybe appreciate that we can't go with the very laziest thing to do all the time. If we do, then all of our food is gonna end up coming from Wal-Mart. And ice cream is okay, I mean, you get ice cream from a local farmer and that are raising their cows on grass and feeding them properly and keeping the way that my cows normally do. I eat ice cream from up in Lancaster from people that are doing it the right way. And a lot more...

NNAMDIOkay. Allow me to have Corby respond. Corby, the White House plans to hold Wal-Mart accountable with independent progress reports, tracking how well Wal-Mart is adhering to the timelines that it announced. What do you say to Brian?

KUMMERWell, you got there first. What I say is I roll up my sleeve and really, I now dig into these arguments and I don't cower. I've spent my life promoting people exactly like your caller. I want nothing more than to go to Lancaster and have organic ice cream. I spend my life telling people don't go to any market if you can go to a farmer's market. If you can meet the farmer and you can give money that will go directly into the pocket of the farmer, you can keep small farms alive in places they're dying, and they're dying at an alarming rate. We have to do everything we can to directly support farmers. I'm completely in that camp and I've built a whole career on it. The reason I applaud -- the seal of approval is, as long as they're not, and I don't think they are, trying to put farmers' markets out of business, it's an entirely separate thing. It's for people who can't go to farmer's market or don't.

KUMMERAnd, you know, when this piece came out, I was on a show where there was a woman saying, I'm about to move back to California. I've been in a food desert, but I've grown very accustomed to going to Wal-Mart. I really like it. I'm going back to California, and I'm tempted to keep going because it's cheaper for my family. And I said, being able to give fresh produce to your family and feed your kids on a very low income, which she has, is crucial, but if you can go to a farmer's market, go to a farmer's market. I'm talking about the people who don't have access to healthy food. They have no idea what it is. And I think this can help it, as long as it's not directly trying to put people, like your caller, out of business.

NNAMDILyndsey, the food industries are also adjusting to new federal rules about traceability, information about where products come from and the supply chain that produce them. What's that all about?

LAYTONWell, Kojo, last year, the Congress passed the sweeping new federal food safety law. And one of the requirements of that law has to do with traceability, that everybody in the food chain should be able to -- should know where their food or their supplies came from, and after they're done with it, where it went. And the idea -- this is the public health aspect. Because when we've got an outbreak of food borne illness, it's very hard -- or it has been very difficult for the FDA to trace the origins of that outbreak and shut it down, get that food out of supermarkets and off the shelves before others get sick, because our food chain is so complicated and lengthy and because, basically, there's not a lot of record keeping. Records are kept sort of willy-nilly, you know, in paper form. It's very complex, and it's hard to know exactly what the chain of custody is for a product from the farm to the table.

LAYTONSo this new requirement takes effect. And it's created a gold rush, really, for a lot of tech companies who are trying to figure out the proper solution in the software. And there's some really interesting stuff going on around this issue. I wrote a story about this a couple of weeks ago. And I looked at a company called YottaMark in California. They produce this product called HarvestMark, which the Kroger supermarket chain has purchased. And they've got it on all of their fresh fruits and vegetables.

LAYTONBasically, what it is is a two-dimensional barcode. And they've hooked in the consumer into this loop on the food chain. So that if you're a shopper and you go into a Kroger supermarket, and you picked up an apple, and it's got one of these barcodes on it, and you've got a smartphone, you wave your smartphone over that apple and you can find out when that apple was harvested, where it was grown, what the name of the farmer is. You can send the farmer an e-mail, if you're so inclined -- if you're moved by that apple or you're complaining about it. And it really -- it loops the consumer into this long traceability chain.

NNAMDIWe got an e-mail from Joseph who says, "Labels like this probably won't matter with emerging smartphone apps that read UPC codes and can tell shoppers what is healthier to buy and what is not healthy to buy." Exactly what you're talking about.

LAYTONRight.

KUMMERAnd if I -- oh, if I may, I went through...

NNAMDISure.

KUMMER...Lyndsey's great clips. And she had Phillip Bauman, a 42-year-old watermelon farmer in Washington State. Somebody shows up at his door, (laugh) and says, you know, I didn't like your watermelon. (laugh)

LAYTONI love that -- that guy.

KUMMERIt is such...

LAYTONWell, he actually -- he got a letter. And this is a -- this is -- he's a -- it's similar to the Amish. This is a farmer who does not use technology. So he doesn't, you know, use a lot of modern gizmos. He doesn't have Internet service. He doesn't have a television. But he's got -- he sells to Costco. And Costco says, you must have a traceability system. So he buys the HarvestMark system. He's got it on his watermelons. He gets a letter in the mail from a customer who is unhappy about the watermelon. And he sees the code. And he checks the code. And he realizes that that watermelon was harvested in August. And the consumer bought it in a store in October, okay? So that's why he's unhappy. This is a two-month, three-month-old watermelon. So it really provides some accountability, I think.

KUMMERBut, Lyndsey, have you played with any of this? Because I'm the opposite of a technophobe. I'm -- I mean, you know, I'm obsessed with my smartphone. But do you think people are really gonna use this? I think it's so good for health departments. But do you think the customers will be, you know, e-mailing the Phillip Baumans?

LAYTONWell, I think there is this...

NNAMDICustomers under 30, will. (laugh)

LAYTONI think there's a certain segment...

KUMMERIt's a good point.

LAYTON...of the market that's -- you know, as you said, Corby, people like connecting to the farmers. They like this idea, this romance, you know, of the farm. And they wanna know where their food came from. They're interested in growing practices. I think there's a certain segment of the population that will certainly use this, probably not most.

NNAMDIBack to the phones for some conflicting responses to all of this. First, we'll go to John in Washington, D.C. John, you're turn. Go ahead, please. Hi, John. Are you there? John? John? I'm gonna put you on hold, John. Hopefully, you're still listening. And I'm gonna go to David and then we'll come back to you, John. Here is David in Accokeek, Md. David, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

DAVIDHello?

NNAMDIHi, David. It's your turn.

DAVIDHi. I just wanted to say that I thought it was really suspicious that we're hearing all these things about Wal-Mart now, because they're trying to open the four stores in D.C. And I was confused as to why it was such a great thing that they were promising that, five years from now, they would stop selling apples with the equivalent nutrient content of Twinkies. And I don't understand why this is something we should be promoting. But we know that regular grocery stores have been selling perfectly good produce and food for forever.

NNAMDIOkay, David. Thank you for your call. Let me try John again. John, are you there?

JOHNYes.

NNAMDIGo right ahead, John.

JOHNSure. I'm extremely excited to hear the news about Wal-Mart. I normally buy 90 percent of my food at Costco or Sam's Club simply because I'm totally uncomfortable with the idea of buying my food from a place whose profits are inversely proportional to the quality of the food that they sell me. So, you know, I look at grocery stores and the worst the food that they sell me is, the better their profits are, and that seems to me across the board. So that in and of itself is great. I look at Wal-Mart and Costco as people whose profits come from various places and therefore they're not totally dependent on merchandising bad food. Finally -- and I'd love to hear some comments around that point. And finally, I would like to say is my theory has always been that the more you mess with food, the more it becomes feed. And, you know, I'd like to be treated better than that. So...

NNAMDICorby Kummer...

JOHN...I will continue to listen off the air. Thank you.

NNAMDIJohn, thank you so much for your call. Corby Kummer it raises several issues. It's hard to separate Wal-Mart from the political food fights that follow the company about its labor practices you mentioned early. Those fights followed Wal-Mart here, when it made its announcement to open stores in Washington D.C. last year. You wrote that those politics could end up affecting how Wal-Mart's healthy food mission will be received in rural and urban areas. How do you see this playing out geographically? In this urban area, you heard our caller who said, I'm just suspicious.

KUMMERSo we've heard a high level of cynicism following this announcement that they're a wolf in sheep's clothing and that they are trying to go in to urban areas that don't want them, don't need them and where they will undercut competitors, drive out local businesses. And goodness knows, Wal-Mart has a history of doing that. And they are now -- they're in a huge fight in East Harlem. And in fact I was watching a webcast of the press conference, and I think Lindsay actually attended, in -- is it Anacostia -- where a woman was very familiar with that controversy in East Harlem. They need all the leverage they can get to go into communities that oppose them, and many communities oppose them.

KUMMERI applaud their going into places that are in rural areas that don't have fresh produce at supermarkets because they've got the distribution system and they're working very much on their hub and spoke distribution, which sounds boring and is huge. That's the only way local agriculture can help, if there are short distances between the farm and the warehouse. And that's something that they are very actively working on, which other chains are not. But as for -- I haven't been reporting, as Lindsay might have, on the controversies over local neighborhoods that don't want them. I just wanna see them go into urban areas that don't have supermarkets, that don't have fresh produce or bodegas, and rural areas that don't have fresh produce.

NNAMDIWell, before we go to the phones, there's this comment posted on our website from Debora. "I walked into Wegmans the day after the Wal-Mart announcement and found right in front of a lovely display of bad apples with large signs that said, 'These are only 39 cents each.' A great change from a dollar albeit specialty apples. They knew they have to react to compete. It was a sight for sore eyes." Lindsay Layton.

LAYTONWell, it's true. Wal-Mart sells the, you know, they sell the most groceries in the country. They have got incredible market muscle and so everyone else has to compete with them or everyone else from Whole Foods below has to -- or now Whole Foods has to compete with them. So...

NNAMDIJanney Capital Markets estimates that Wal-Mart has about 33 percent of the grocery market.

LAYTONIt's huge. And I think, you know, the cynicism that Corby is talking about that does exist around this announcement, I think that David, the caller from Accokeek...

NNAMDIYes.

LAYTON...actually, you know, makes some valid points. This is a company that got incredible news coverage. It had the first lady, you know, on stage, making -- supporting this announcement. It's unbelievable what kind of -- you can't buy that kind of good PR. And so -- and this is a company that certainly is very controversial and is looking, you know, to capitalize on some of this to help change its image, I'm sure, that's...

KUMMERYou know -- if I can jump in. Part of the reason that this is getting the support that it has from the White House is something that Lindsay was reporting on in -- when she wrote about the Food Safety Modernization Act, which has been passed but not funded. And so, who knows whether all of these more frequent inspections and better traceability are actually gonna come to pass because it took so -- it would took so long to get that Act funded. So when Wal-Mart announces this, it's a ton of free press, yup. But it also might be doing something and speeding along a process that otherwise would take years for the government to try to regulate if it was able even to get regulations pass.

NNAMDIGot to take a short...

KUMMERI think that's why the White House is supporting it.

NNAMDIGot to take a short break. When we come back, we'll continue this Food Wednesday conversation on the quote unquote "Wal-Mart Diet." If you've already called and the lines are filled, we'll try to get to your call. But if you can't get through, just go to our website kojoshow.org, join the conversation there or send us a tweet @kojoshow. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWelcome back. It's Food Wednesday. We're talking with Corby Kummer, senior editor of The Atlantic. He writes a monthly column on food. And Lindsay Layton, reporter at The Washington Post about Wal-Mart moving more and more into organic and healthier foods and other chains that are carrying more foods. As I said, the phone lines are busy so let's start right there with Ron in Silver Spring, Md. Ron, you're on the air. Go ahead, please. Hi, Ron. Oh, that was my fault that time. Ron, are you there? Oh, for some reason or the other, I can't seem to connect with Ron right now.

NNAMDIWhile we're trying to do that, the flipside of this publicity issue Whole Foods, Lyndsey, the grocery got -- a lot of people associate Whole Foods with healthy organic food, but Whole Foods got into a bit of PR debacle this past few days that some people on the Web are calling organic gate. It has something to do with supporting coexistence with genetically modified alfalfa planted by the company Monsanto. What's that controversy about and why is it attracting so much attention online?

LAYTONOkay. So let's see, in 2005, the Monsanto and another company developed genetically altered alfalfa seed. And alfalfa, you know, is basically hay, and it's a huge crop in the U.S. It's like the fourth largest crop. And to this point, it's either been -- a small percentage is organically grown, and the rest of it is conventionally grown with regular pesticides. But -- so Monsanto develops a seed that is genetically modified, and you can plant it and you can spray it with this pesticide called Roundup, and the alfalfa plant survives and, you know, the weeds and the pests die. So it's a very valuable product for Monsanto, and they wanted permission to plant it. But the USDA, which regulates this, didn't -- was about to approve it and was -- there was this push back from organic groups and environmental groups who said that the agency hadn't done sufficient environmental analysis. So the concern is that this crop would -- because of cross-pollination, the genetically modified alfalfa would contaminate regular alfalfa or organic alfalfa, which is a big problem for organic farmers who try to sell this to markets like Europe, which won't accept any genetically modified foods.

LAYTONSo this was tangled up in the courts. It actually went up to the Supreme Court. The agency was directed to do a full environmental impact analysis. And for a time, Secretary Vilsack from the USDA was talking about trying to come up with co-existence, some plan where the genetically engineered alfalfa could co-exist with the organics and they would semi-regulate this and create buffer zones between them. And he was talking about the need for co-existence. And then after the election this fall, the Republicans in the House applied great pressure to USDA. Monsanto and the other biotech companies, the industry also applied great pressure. And last week, Vilsack announced that, basically, they were not going to regulate this crop. It was going to be able to be commercially grown without stipulations, which now has got -- it now goes back to the courts because all the organic groups are now going to sue to stop this.

LAYTONBut Whole Foods found itself in the middle because Whole Foods, in talking with USDA, was realizing that the choice was either going to be this partial regulation or no regulation. And Whole Foods said, we support partial regulation. It will be something. Let's do that. And so now it's being vilified by a lot of critics who say that Whole Foods basically sold out and didn't fight hard enough.

NNAMDICorby, what does...

KUMMERThere were a lot of -- sorry. There were...

NNAMDICorby, what do stories like that one or stories about Wal-Mart and healthy foods say to you about where the idea of social responsibility fits into the conversation about grocers and their business models?

KUMMERWell, I think that what Lyndsey is describing is this kind of loyalty oath, black and white conception. There were a number of other, I think, very respectable but large-scale organic advocates who are involved in these negotiations. And the idea is if you -- the idea that if you come to the table, you are a sellout and you have abdicated your social responsibility to your customer I think is naive and unrealistic even though I'm sorry to see this blanket authorization of GM alfalfa because I would have liked some kind of co-existence. In an ideal world, I'd prefer that there be only organic allowed. Economically, it's not feasible and it's not gonna happen. So I would be in favor of buffers. Some kind of protection is better than none. But it's very interesting that the community has become so polarized. I guess you can view it as, you know, politics writ large or writ small, in the case of GM alfalfa. That's the way the country is going.

NNAMDIHere's Ron, again, in Silver Spring, Md. Ron, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

RONHi, Kojo. Can you hear me?

NNAMDII can.

RONMy question to your guests is, do your guests think Wal-Mart might go so far as to require manufacturers to remove the chemical BPA from all their canned goods?

NNAMDIAny ideas about that, Corby Kummer?

KUMMERI don't think they've taken a stand on BPA. I think that as with the front-of-pack labeling, there are fights that they wanna stay out of. And BPA has been banned by a number of states. I think my state, Massachusetts, is going to do it. The FDA has been under great pressure. Hasn't it been banned from baby -- from anything that comes in contact with babies? So it's probably on the way. I don't think that that's the kind of thing where Wal-Mart is gonna tell the suppliers how to do because it's going to take a very radically advanced position. I think that what they've done with sodium and sugar has been years in the making and is really laudable. But I doubt that they would choose BPA or an individual component.

NNAMDIRon, thank you for your call. Lyndsey, let's talk politics for a minute. Republicans on Capitol Hill are threatening to cut spending everywhere and the new Food Safety law is going to cost money to implement. How do you see the upcoming budget battles affecting the implementation of the new rules?

LAYTONWell, I think it was pretty clear. It was actually right around Christmas. It wasn't very long after this bill was signed into law, the Republicans came out of the box, saying, you know, we're looking to cut government, not expand it. And the Food Safety law would significantly expand the FDA's reach, authority, staffing, cost.

NNAMDICongressional Budget Office said it would cost about $1.4 billion in its first five years, including the cost of hiring an estimated 2,000 additional food inspectors. For some members of Congress, that's a non-starter.

LAYTONRight. The only thing that, I think, the FDA has going for it is the -- this coalition -- which is really kind of unprecedented -- that was behind the passage of this law. You have interests as divergent as U.S. per joining hands with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. You know, it was a really broad coalition. If they can hold it together and press for funding or at least, you know, make the case that the FDA shouldn't be significantly slashed, if they can apply that same campaign to the funding issue, I think that the agency has a chance. But it doesn't look very clear.

NNAMDICould be an uphill battle. Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, the ranking Republican on the Appropriations Subcommittee that oversees the FDA, has said that the number of cases of food-borne illnesses in the country does not justify the costs of the new law.

KUMMERThat's just crazy. It's gonna save everybody money, especially the health care system. Do they just wanna see it charged to somebody else instead of industry so they wanna see the public paying out of their taxes for all of the costs associated with food-borne illness?

LAYTONWell, that's why you have the Chamber of Commerce and the Grocery Manufacturers Association and all the major industry groups, the produce people saying, please, regulate us, please, because, in the end, you know, these massive recalls, these rolling recalls that go on for weeks can decimate the industry. And so they want more precise trace back, you know, outbreak investigations. They want better management of outliers, bad players, bad actors who can destroy a whole industry.

KUMMERYeah, because -- Lyndsey had a piece with the road kill of the $100 million of the Florida tomato industry loss during a 2008 salmonella break. It was peppers from Mexico. So there's lots of road kill there.

NNAMDIIndeed, the -- Robert Scharff, a former economist at the Food and Drug Administration, estimates that food-borne illnesses cost the country $152 billion a year in medical costs, lost productivity and other expenses, a figure that does not include cost to the food industry incurred when a product is recalled. And I'm afraid that's all the time we have. Corby Kummer, thank you so much for joining us.

KUMMERAlways fun. Thank you, Kojo.

NNAMDICorby is the senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes a monthly column on food and where the curates theatlantic.com's Food Channel. Lyndsey Layton, good to see you again. Thank you for joining us.

LAYTONMy pleasure, Kojo.

NNAMDILyndsey is a reporter at The Washington Post. And thank you all for listening. Eat carefully. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.