I am going to post a portion of an article the explains why I stopped shopping at Whole Foods.

“In a cleverly worded, but profoundly misleading email sent to its customers last week, Whole Foods Market, while proclaiming their support for organics and “seed purity,” gave the green light to USDA bureaucrats to approve the “conditional deregulation” of Monsanto’s genetically engineered, herbicide-resistant alfalfa. Beyond the regulatory euphemism of “conditional deregulation,” this means that WFM and their colleagues are willing to go along with the massive planting of a chemical and energy-intensive GE perennial crop, alfalfa; guaranteed to spread its mutant genes and seeds across the nation; guaranteed to contaminate the alfalfa fed to organic animals; guaranteed to lead to massive poisoning of farm workers and destruction of the essential soil food web by the toxic herbicide, Roundup; and guaranteed to produce Roundup-resistant superweeds that will require even more deadly herbicides such as 2,4 D to be sprayed on millions of acres of alfalfa across the U.S.”

source; http://nwoobserver.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/the-organic-elite-surrenders-to-monsanto/#more-8439

The majority of the food Whole foods sells is not Organic at all. Since giant agribusiness
realized they could make a fortune getting George W. Bush to redefine what is legally
called Organic food, and to lower Organic standards, they have been falling all over
themselves creating phony Organic brands, and buying old Organic companies then
gutting them. This new organic food could not be sold as organic under the old
standard.  Next stop is increasing GMO poisoned foods, and refusing to label foods that
have GMO ingredients. Whole foods has participated in the falsification of the market,
which will ultimately mean there is no difference at all between what they sell and any
non organic food seller. Americans are easily deceived by marketing and externals.
Soon the only way to obtain healthy food, and the benefits of that food will be to grow
your own.

Whole foods is overpriced; I know in Berkeley, you could go to the Berkeley Bowl and check out their organic produce section, and then find that yes, the whole foods produce had significant markup and was not the least bit better.  Whole foods is run by a far-right libertarian hack who is constantly supressing the will of WF workers to form a union.  I would not be interested in taking in the kind of narrow, limited political perspective he would allow in his film festival.

Whole foods might as well be wallmart; real organic philosophy is about localism, small scale, and food democracy.  Which you find at farmers markets and good nonprofit co-ops.

Scoff if you feel you must, but somebody’s got to get
the populace moving on eating right and taking care
of their health.

And if you know what to look for, you don’t have to
spend your whole paycheck at Whole Foods. Their house
brand foods are high quality and pretty reasonably
priced. But what I’ve found most helpful is their
bulk grains and spices. I now pay a tiny fraction of
what I used to pay for my grain and spice purchases.

Carolyn Kay
http://www.ManyYearsYoung.com

What we need is more nonprofit organic food co-ops, which do good things for the community and make truly healthy food affordable.  Whole foods is a gross big corporate joke, and they need to stop giving the rest of us a bad name.

Even the most humble street food markets in Italy have better, more high quality and seasonal food than Whole Paycheck. It’s amazing to me how well the uber-fuck capitalists who run Whole Paycheck have marketed this brand of over-priced, over-sanitized store.

What is it about Americans…that they will patronize this store?

Wasn’t the head of Whole Foods against healthcare reform? Just another elite brand for elite communities.

Whole foods is the gold standard for supermarkets——if you can afford to shop there.