Whole+Foods

"Joel and Bev are concerned there isn’t a world of difference between Whole Foods and Wal-Mart. Both are part of an increasingly globalized economy that turns anything it touches into a commodity, reaching its tentacles wherever in the world a food can be produced most cheaply, and then transporting it wherever it can be sold most dearly" (403).

"At least that's what I discovered when I traced a few of the items in my Whole Food cart back to the farms where they were grown. I learned, for example, that some (certainly not all) organic milk comes from factory farms, where thousands of Holsteins that never encounter a blade of grass spend their days confined to a fenced 'dry lot,' eating (certified organic) grain and tethered to milking machines three times a day" (227).

"One of the company's marketing consultants explained to me that the Whole Foods shopper feels that by buying organic he is 'engaging in authentic experiences' and imaginatively enacting a 'return to a utopian past with the positive aspects of modernity in tact.' (224).