The Blurring Line Between Big Food and Little Food

It's a curious feature of our culture that when we spell the word "Big" with a capital B, we often mean "bad." Big business. Big government. Big Ag. These Bigs aren't admiring adjectives. When we use Big like this, we are invoking our instinctive American fear of too much power being concentrated in too few hands.  By contrast, in our culture little is often good. We like small business. We root for the little guy. Increasingly we buy Little Food. Never heard of it? Michael Pollan, a literary godfather of the so-called food movement, recently used this term in an essay in the New York Times, he said Little Food comprises the farmers and processors that provide organic, local and artisanal food. All food, in Pollan's view, should be Little Food.  Please note Pollan's spelling. Doesn't that capital L smack of a Little that's on the verge of getting big -- or maybe even Big? Which raises an interesting question: How will the public react as the lines between Little and Big become blurred?  And blurred they are becoming. As individual Little Food businesses succeed, they inevitably grow; some of them have already matured into significant corporations. Collectively, according to Pollan, the sector has annual sales of $50 billion - which is little only in comparison to Big Food, whose annual retail sales are in the trillions. Then there's the biggest blurring of all, the fast unfolding trend of Big Food companies buying Little Food firms. There have been dozens of these acquisitions, as detailed in a chart at the website of the Cornucopia Institute, which promotes "sustainable and organic agriculture" . The most intriguing recent example is Tyson Foods' purchase of a 5% stake in Beyond Meat, a California outfit whose plant-protein burger is said to be so meat-like that it "sizzles and oozes fat while cooking on a griddle".