A funny bit about Whole Foods and Rich White People

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**cincydooley**

Obviously this is toungue in cheek, but I bolded out a few of the parts I really like and found myself nodding with.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-maclean/surviving-whole-foods_b_3895583.html

Whole Foods is like Vegas. You go there to feel good but you leave broke, disoriented, and with the newfound knowledge that you have a vaginal disease.

Unlike Vegas, Whole Foods' clientele are all about mindfulness and compassion... until they get to the parking lot. Then it's war. As I pull up this morning, I see a pregnant lady on the crosswalk holding a baby and groceries. This driver swerves around her and honks. As he speeds off I catch his bumper sticker which says 'NAMASTE'. Poor lady didn't even hear him approaching because he was driving a Prius. He crept up on her like a panther.

As the great, sliding glass doors part I am immediately smacked in the face by a wall of cool, moist air that smells of strawberries and orchids. I leave behind the concrete jungle and enter a cornucopia of organic bliss; the land of hemp milk and honey. Seriously, think about Heaven and then think about Whole Foods; they're basically the same.

The first thing I see is the great wall of kombucha -- 42 different kinds of rotten tea. Fun fact: the word kombucha is Japanese for 'I gizzed in your tea.' Anyone who's ever swallowed the glob of mucus at the end of the bottle knows exactly what I'm talking about. I believe this thing is called "The Mother" which makes it that much creepier.

Next I see the gluten-free section filled with crackers and bread made from various wheat-substitutes such as cardboard and sawdust. I skip this aisle because I'm not rich enough to have dietary restrictions. Ever notice that you don't meet poor people with special diet needs? A gluten intolerant house cleaner? A cab driver with Candida? Candida is what I call a rich, white person problem. You know you've really made it in this world when you get Candida. My personal theory is that Candida is something you get from too much hot yoga. All I'm saying is if I were a yeast, I would want to live in your yoga pants.

Next I approach the beauty aisle. There is a scary looking machine there that you put your face inside of and it tells you exactly how ugly you are. They calculate your wrinkles, sun spots, the size of your pores, etc. and compare it to other women your age. I think of myself attractive but as it turns out, I am 78 percent ugly, meaning less pretty than 78 percent of women in the world. On the popular 1-10 hotness scale used by males the world over, that makes me a 3 (if you round up, which I hope you will.) A glance at the extremely close-up picture they took of my face, in which I somehow have a glorious, blond porn mustache, tells me that 3 is about right. Especially because the left side of my face is apparently 20 percent more aged than the right. Fantastic. After contemplating ending it all here and now, I decide instead to buy their product. One bottle of delicious smelling, silky feeling creme that is maybe going to raise me from a 3 to a 4 for only $108 which is a pretty good deal when you think about it.

I grab a handful of peanut butter pretzels on my way out of this stupid aisle. I don't feel bad about pilfering these bites because of the umpteen times that I've overpaid at the salad bar and been tricked into buying $108 beauty creams. The pretzels are very fattening but I'm already in the seventieth percentile of ugly so who cares.

Next I come to the vitamin aisle which is a danger zone for any broke hypochondriac. Warning: Whole Foods keeps their best people in this section. Although you think she's a homeless person at first, that vitamin clerk is an ex-pharmaceuticals sales rep. Today she talks me into buying estrogen for my mystery mustache and Women's Acidophilus because apparently I DO have Candida after all.

I move on to the next isle and ask the nearest Whole Foods clerk for help. He's wearing a visor inside and as if that weren't douchey enough, it has one word on it in all caps. Yup, NAMASTE. I ask him where I can find whole wheat bread. He chuckles at me "Oh, we keep the poison in aisle 7." Based solely on the attitudes of people sporting namaste paraphernalia today, I'd think it was Sanskrit for "go feth yourself."

I pass the table where the guy invites me to join a group cleanse he's leading. For $179.99 I can not-eat not-alone... not-gonna-happen. They're doing the cleanse where you consume nothing but lemon juice, cayenne pepper and fiber pills for 10 days, what's that one called again? Oh, yeah...anorexia. I went on a cleanse once; it was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I detoxified, I purified, I lost weight. On the other hand, I fell asleep on the highway, fantasized about eating a pigeon, and crapped my pants. I think I'll stick with the whole eating thing.

I grab a couple of loaves of poison, and head to checkout. The fact that I'm at Whole Foods on a Sunday finally sinks in when I join the end of the line...halfway down the dog food aisle. I suddenly realize that I'm dying to get out of this store. Maybe it's the lonely feeling of being a carnivore in a sea of vegans, or the newfound knowledge that some people's dogs eat better than I do, but mostly I think it's the fact that Yanni has been playing literally this entire time. Like sensory deprivation, listening to Yanni seems harmless at first, enjoyable even. But two hours in, you'll chew your own ear off to make it stop.

A thousand minutes later, I get to the cashier. She is 95 percent beautiful. "Have you brought your reusable bags?" feth. No, they are at home with their 2 dozen once-used friends. She rings up my meat, alcohol, gluten and a wrapper from the chocolate bar I ate in line, with thinly veiled alarm. She scans my ladies acidophilus, gives me a pitying frown and whispers, "Ya know, if you wanna get rid of your Candida, you should stop feeding it." She rings me up for $313. I resist the urge to unwrap and swallow whole another $6 truffle in protest. Barely. Instead, I reach for my wallet, flash her a quiet smile and say, "Namaste."

**Ahtman**

The other nice thing about Whole Foods is that it helps you know which areas to rob and which ones to avoid.

**Jimsolo**

Ahtman wrote:
The other nice thing about Whole Foods is that it helps you know which areas to rob and which ones to avoid.

Spoiler:

I lolled.

But yeah...yeah...

I was 'out' when Whole Foods got into the whole "we-have-a-right-to-sell-unpasteurized-milk-and-poison-our-customers" thing.

**cincydooley**

Spoiler:

Wow. Just wow. That's ridiculously hilarious, and a bit sad. But mostly hilarious.

The real question is what's going on with this Mountain View Area. Rich AND poor people? Living together? What is THAT?!

**Yodhrin**

The depressing thing is it's not that far off from the truth. I went into a "whole foods" shop over here in the UK and asked if they sold non-organic versions of all the stuff they sell you can't get easily in a supermarket(organic farming is a grotesquely irresponsible practice that, were it adopted as the default farming policy as some seem to wish, would result in the death by starvation of essentially the entire non-developed world), and I've never seen someone's face run through disgust, contempt, barely-contained rage, the sort of expression you imagine someone would have if a Cthulhu-esque monster appeared in from of them, and the strained politeness of shoddy customer service staff the world over so quickly

**Frazzled**

Spoiler:

Now there's good information to know Ahtman!

I hate Whole Foods with the burning passion of a thousand hot suns, if those thousand hot suns had a bit of a hangover and couldn't get roused enough to get a full fledged rage on. The one positive is I respect their ability to flim flam the people they flim flam, whom I despise even more.
It just makes my inner Lenin screaming out. Note I live in drigving distance fo their headquarters and there are real fanatics here about it.

Whats interesting is that with the REAL organic stores and markets I don't have this issue. Ok I will laugh at a Vegan occasionally dying near the entrance, but hey I'm just mean that way.

**gossipmeng**

I only shopped at whole foods for 2 months while I was on a business trip - so I had $60 per day food budget, but yeah it is not worth going there.

The employees would bend over backwards for you though, I asked if they had a particular brand/flavour of chips and the guy went on a 10 minute search, despite me telling him not to worry about it.

I've been into walmart maybe only 5 times - thankfully as it was unpleasant.

**hotsauceman1**

My mom used to shop there. They had awesome snickerdoodles.
Bread was great too. But their meat was too expensive.

**Mathieu Raymond**

I'm so happy there isn't a prevalence of this type of store in Montreal. There's a few, and you'll always find some bio (the French version of organic, as if regular food wasn't biological) in every store... but I'm not embarassed not to buy any.

I doubt even "organic" seeds these day don't come from something that has felt the touch of man. Since when did man-made become synonymous with evil, poisonous and destructive? We live twice as long as our ancestors!

**cincydooley**

See, I think we're a little bit lucky in Ohio when it comes to "organic" or "naturally" raised food because we have a lot of Amish and lot of farmers, and so can get legit small farm raised stuff pretty easily.

**Frazzled**

cincydooley wrote:
See, I think we're a little bit lucky in Ohio when it comes to "organic" or "naturally" raised food because we have a lot of Amish and lot of farmers, and so can get legit small farm raised stuff pretty easily.

Now thats cool. I'm absolutely down with farmer's markets. Good stuff!

**hotsauceman1**

If you want organic, got to your local Farmers market. They are decently priced(Not too bad) and yu directly support them.
I bet If i digged deep enough I could find something abut how Whole food screws farmers over.

**Alfndrate**

cincydooley wrote:
See, I think we're a little bit lucky in Ohio when it comes to "organic" or "naturally" raised food because we have a lot of Amish and lot of farmers, and so can get legit small farm raised stuff pretty easily.

Indeed! 3 chickens for every person in the state!

**SlaveToDorkness**

Huh, I must just be too white and rich, I love going there!

Their selection of meats and produce is insane! Granted we don't usually buy much of the boxed items, just produce, meat and coffee (OH the wonderful COFFEE!).

The article just seems like yet another subtle commentary inciting the class-war idea that everyone with more money than you is evil somehow.

**cincydooley**

Alfndrate wrote:
cincydooley wrote:
See, I think we're a little bit lucky in Ohio when it comes to "organic" or "naturally" raised food because we have a lot of Amish and lot of farmers, and so can get legit small farm raised stuff pretty easily.

Indeed! 3 chickens for every person in the state!

Yup.

I mean, we're not huge on organic food at our house, but amish raised chicken from Findlay Market in Cincy is, IMO, legitimately better tasting than it's "Tyson-style" counterpart. It's also usually a great deal smaller, which makes it much easier to cook.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

SlaveToDorkness wrote:
Huh, I must just be too white and rich, I love going there!

Their selection of meats and produce is insane! Granted we don't usually buy much of the boxed items, just produce, meat and coffee (OH the wonderful COFFEE!).

Why not Publix? Everytime we're in Spring Hill, Publix seems to have really great meat.

**Alfndrate**

cincydooley wrote:
Alfndrate wrote:
cincydooley wrote:
See, I think we're a little bit lucky in Ohio when it comes to "organic" or "naturally" raised food because we have a lot of Amish and lot of farmers, and so can get legit small farm raised stuff pretty easily.

Indeed! 3 chickens for every person in the state!

Yup.

I mean, we're not huge on organic food at our house, but amish raised chicken from Findlay Market in Cincy is, IMO, legitimately better tasting than it's "Tyson-style" counterpart. It's also usually a great deal smaller, which makes it much easier to cook.

My dad had a massive diet change last year, and the only thing we eat now is fish and chicken... I've had far too much chicken, I miss beef, but I do agree that amish raised chicken is tasty.

**cincydooley**

We tried to do Paleo for about a month, my wife and I did, and I learned two things:

1. It's really impossible, because there are things that are Paleo that you don't think should be (beans, corn).

2. Reducing my dairy intake really does make my feel a lot better.

The reason I mention this Alf: Red Meat is a primary protein in the Paleo diet.

**Frazzled**

The article just seems like yet another subtle commentary inciting the class-war idea that everyone with more money than you is evil somehow.

Wait they're not?

**BobtheInquisitor**

cincydooley wrote:

The real question is what's going on with this Mountain View Area. Rich AND poor people? Living together? What is THAT?!

It looks like it's close to Palo Alto and Stanford University. Rich college students and poor everyone else?

**d-usa**

Whole Foods coming to our city has been awesome because it forced all our regular grocery stores to step up their game.

Now the mean reason I go to Whole Foods are the fact that they have a pretty great Produce section and Cheese section. I could care less about the boxed organic non-dairy non-gluten whatchamacallits in the middle of the store.

But since Whole Foods got here, our regular grocery stores expanded their produce sections, got actual meat counters instead of vacuum sealed meat from who-knows-where, got good cheese and breads. And you still have all your normal (and normally priced) goods in the regular sections of the store.

**Frazzled**

BobtheInquisitor wrote:
cincydooley wrote:

The real question is what's going on with this Mountain View Area. Rich AND poor people? Living together? What is THAT?!

It looks like it's close to Palo Alto and Stanford University. Rich college students and poor everyone else?

if its near Palo Alto there are lots of rich folks too.

**BobtheInquisitor**

Even in the towns next to Palo Alto? Who works at the university cafeteria or on their buses?

**Frazzled**

BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Even in the towns next to Palo Alto? Who works at the university cafeteria or on their buses?

I didn't say all. I said lots. There are also lots and lots of middle class office types and very skilled technical/factory types too.

**Alfndrate**

cincydooley wrote:
We tried to do Paleo for about a month, my wife and I did, and I learned two things:

1. It's really impossible, because there are things that are Paleo that you don't think should be (beans, corn).

2. Reducing my dairy intake really does make my feel a lot better.

The reason I mention this Alf: Red Meat is a primary protein in the Paleo diet.

One of my co-workers goes through 'fits' of paleo diet. He'll come to work with nothing but things like jerky, nuts, fruit, etc...

I've also given up dairy in 80% of cases. We have Almond milk with is good if you get the vanilla or chocolate varieties, still have some regular milk for cooking and what not, and cheese. Other than that I don't eat dairy... I used to be a bowl of cereal at breakfast, cup of milk at lunch and cheese, and milk at dinner kind of kid...

I just miss red meat, thankfully I don't mind that we've gone gluten free in my household as gluten free bread is actually really good and toasts up nice and evenly (perfect for grilled cheese!) and gluten free brownies are tasty as hell

**Spacemanvic**

We raise our own chickens and get raw milk from our friend's farm, as well as local maple syrup and we have a large garden. We might get half a beef if my SIL goes in on it, cut and freeze the meat. In our garden, blight took out 24 tomato plants and half our potatoes this year, but our corn, cabbage, brocolli, cauliflower, peppers and spinach came up fine though. Going to the Mother Earth News Fair this weekend http://www.motherearthnews.com/fair/home.aspx to hang with the crunchy granola set

My wife loves whole foods, but for the homeopathic and supplements. The other stuff is just overpriced. We get just as good or better at Aldi's for a low price.

**pretre**

Alfndrate wrote:
I just miss red meat, thankfully I don't mind that we've gone gluten free in my household as gluten free bread is actually really good and toasts up nice and evenly (perfect for grilled cheese!) and gluten free brownies are tasty as hell

I cannot imagine not eating red meat.

Also, this may be news but... Normal bread toasts up nice and evenly and I've even heard that normal brownies are tasty as hell.

**cincydooley**

Alfndrate wrote:

I've also given up dairy in 80% of cases. We have Almond milk with is good if you get the vanilla or chocolate varieties, still have some regular milk for cooking and what not, and cheese. Other than that I don't eat dairy... I used to be a bowl of cereal at breakfast, cup of milk at lunch and cheese, and milk at dinner kind of kid...

That's about where we are. We use almond 'milk' in our breakfast smoothies, I don't drink milk anymore with meals or whatnot, and I now rarely eat cheese. I've had a bit more cheese the past two weeks, and quite frankly, its been wreaking havoc on my bowels.

We'll probably do some meat and cheeses during awards season (its like, our little tradition) but beyond that, my stomach just can't do it anymore.

**Alfndrate**

pretre wrote:
Alfndrate wrote:
I just miss red meat, thankfully I don't mind that we've gone gluten free in my household as gluten free bread is actually really good and toasts up nice and evenly (perfect for grilled cheese!) and gluten free brownies are tasty as hell

I cannot imagine not eating red meat.

Also, this may be news but... Normal bread toasts up nice and evenly and I've even heard that normal brownies are tasty as hell.

I still sneak in a burger here or there, but if I eat at home 6 nights out of the week I can bet that we will have turkey/chicken 'italian style' sausages at least once, chicken twice, fish twice, turkey patties once, and maybe ground chicken/turkey for tacos.

Also normal bread doesn't hold up as well as gluten free bread, and normal brownies are tasty as hell, but I don't mind the fact that we've gone gluten free in my house because those gluten free versions aren't gak.

**whembly**

Alfndrate wrote:
cincydooley wrote:
We tried to do Paleo for about a month, my wife and I did, and I learned two things:

1. It's really impossible, because there are things that are Paleo that you don't think should be (beans, corn).

2. Reducing my dairy intake really does make my feel a lot better.

The reason I mention this Alf: Red Meat is a primary protein in the Paleo diet.

One of my co-workers goes through 'fits' of paleo diet. He'll come to work with nothing but things like jerky, nuts, fruit, etc...

I've also given up dairy in 80% of cases. We have Almond milk with is good if you get the vanilla or chocolate varieties, still have some regular milk for cooking and what not, and cheese. Other than that I don't eat dairy... I used to be a bowl of cereal at breakfast, cup of milk at lunch and cheese, and milk at dinner kind of kid...

I just miss red meat, thankfully I don't mind that we've gone gluten free in my household as gluten free bread is actually really good and toasts up nice and evenly (perfect for grilled cheese!) and gluten free brownies are tasty as hell

Dude... try the Gluten-free pizza at Dominos... those things are sneaky good!

**Frazzled**

Wait you said Dominoes and good in the same sentence...