A few weeks ago, I blogged about Meghan Gurdon’s excursion to Target — or Tar-shay, as we speakers of Franglais prefer. Today’s shopping trip is to Whole Foods, at the other end of the — er — food chain.
Like the author of the Weekly Standard piece on Whole Foods, I love going there. The painlessly killed offerings in the butcher’s display case are enticing and the cheese section is pure heaven. Where else can I find that goat milk gouda that is so delicious?
But there’s always this feeling…
“The produce is fresh and, by demand, ’organic,’ one of the new synonyms for ’virtuous.’ Samples of expensive cheeses and other culinary delights make the procession up and down the aisles a gastronomic treasure hunt, and there are no Cap’n Crunch displays to impede your cart and depress your spirit along the way. With a massage therapist in the front of the store charging only a dollar a minute, the place is a veritable culinary day spa.
“The downside to the Whole Foods experience is that its success is driven by one of our era’s more grotesque phenomena: the upwardly-mobile urban dweller, the one who wants to indulge class-conscious epicurean yearnings and save the world, too. Whole Foods is a wonderland molded to accommodate the psyche of the socially-responsible, guilt-ridden liberal–the crunchy Kucinich capitalist.”