Whole Foods Market

Whole Foods Market is an amazing place -- just walking along the aisles instantly makes you feel ten times more wholesome and health conscious. While waiting for the afternoon traffic to clear out, I ducked into a local Whole Foods Market to grab a bottled water to tote with me to the bookstore where I was planning on browsing through magazines to pass the time. What was intended as a quick in-and-out operation turned out to be an hour's worth of marveling at the 'culture shock' of being surrounded by products that sound so healthy, organic, fresh, natural, nutritional, clean, hearty, environment friendly... ARRRGH! I just can't find enough adjectives to sufficiently convey that WHOLESOME feeling that you get by being surrounded by such amazingly WHOLESOME stuff!

To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here's a list of random items I've jotted down on my notebook:

• Lakefront Organic ESB (never seen the word 'organic' on a beer bottle label)
• Seventh Generation 100% Recycled Bathroom Tissues (whitened without chlorine bleach, the label adds... I didn't care for that bit, but what I did care about was that this was not recycled from other paper product, and not 'previously utilized' bathroom tissues!)
• Lamb and Brown Rice Dinner for Dogs (yes, your pet do cares that this is not the unhealthy white rice)
• Nature's Path Organic Hemp Plus Granola (hemp???)
• Fantastic Always Natural Falafel, Humus, Tabouli (and other Middle Eastern flavors)
• Organic Evaporated Cane Juice Sugar
• Ten Tree Oil and Neem Toothpaste (what's 'neem'?)

Here are some more things I noticed:

• A whole section dedicated to Odwalla juices in delicious sounding flavors such as Berries GoMega
• No baking goods made with white flour... in fact, it was the first time I've ever seen whole wheat hotdog buns
• Cashew butters. Nice.
• More than twenty varieties of flax oil
• Unholy absence of products from the mega-brand labels, such as Kraft, Dean Foods, Nestle, Johnson&Johnson
• Definitely no Lucky Charms
• The best looking produce section I've seen: everything so... picture perfect!

I had one final thing I needed to check: and yes, all of the greeting cards sold here are made of 100% recycled papers. (Recycling greeting cards definitely seem to make more sense than recycled bathroom tissues!)

The one really weird thing that seemed out of place was the general music selection. It seems to be some sort of adult contemporary top 40 from 80's and 90's. (I was rocking out to 'Pour Some Sugar On Me' as I was cruising through the cereal section... it's ironic that Whole Foods Market doesn't seem like an organization that will promote a habit as unhealthy as 'pouring some sugar' on anything.)

Moseying my way around the aisles in Whole Foods Market, overcome with a blissfully wholesome euphoria, I could not help but get disgusted when I thought about the types of food I eat when I'm on the road (fast food all the way!) and on the weekends (bar food all the way!). This place felt as far away from the greasy fast food burgers and pizzas and vending machine snacks as I could imagine. Well, speaking of vending machine snacks...

Overheard on my way to the check out counter:

Kid1: "I really like these Organic Fig Bars."
Kid2: "Yeah, they're pretty sweet. Are they kosher?"
Kid1: "Don't know. Gotta ask m'moms."

Poor kids... they've probably never had a taste of Skittles. Perhaps life is not so bad outside of Whole Foods Market. Absurdly enough, I felt better about myself after this.