Breaking the Whole Foods Addiction

...or, alternatively, the "Whole Paycheck" dependency. So one might say I spend a lot of time at Whole Foods. One might go further and state that if the 14th and P St Whole Foods went out of business, I would starve. Each time I go in there for "just a few things" and poof, $35 grocery bill for about seven items, I rationalize it very carefully on the way home. Like so:

1. I have a very serious disease (celiac) that necessitates non-processed food or even food as close to its natural state as possible. Because of that...

2. I'm so close to bare bones eating, I might as well go organic and die from something other than long-term pesticide intake.

3. I'm awfully lazy.

4. I want to feel good about buying a lot of things, which is increasingly harder to do.

#3 works in several ways - Whole Foods is pretty darn close to my apartment, so I could be lazy ("I'm not going farther than five blocks, damnit!") and fight my laziness at the same time ("Oh, I can walk, it's only five blocks!"). Except lately I've been driving. Which is really pathetic if one of your feel-good rationales for blowing a significant portion of your income on organic bananas - that you're going to pull the pesticidy skin off anyway - is that you're doing something to not hurt the world any worse than you already have.

Or at least Whole Foods makes you feel that way. Lately I've developed an annoying conscience about recycling. I used to think "recycling is a great idea" and then come up with 15 reasons not to bother, least of which was that I've seen maybe one place in the District to toss bottles and cans (and it certainly was not my overpriced dump of an apartment building). But recently I've felt guilty that I haven't been doing my "part", so I've been doing little thing - not drinking bottled water (I'm still alive after consuming DC's Finest, thanks for your concern), recycling cans at work, etc. It's verging on annoying, because now I can't not recycle.

So what does this have to do with Whole Foods? Well, let's start with the fact that I'm more concerned about my footprint, as it were. I've been reading The Omnivore's Dilemna which goes into detail about the organic vs. local debate, and it makes sense - sooo, I'm eating organic avocados from Peru. How much destruction did that trip cause and how much did I choke up the air with that flight, the cooling system, transportation, etc? There I am, dropping a serious dime
that might be hurting more than helping. Clearly Whole Foods has heard this debate because all of a sudden they're highlighting local produce. Like, gosh, you wanted local overpriced food? We've been doing that the "whole" time, we just hadn't made any cute signs about it!

But the kicker was last week, after Marian and I went for our run and then to eat at Whole Foods. My apartment building recycles now (finally) and as I finished my drink-encased-in-plastic, I realized I had to take the bottle home to recycle it. From Whole Foods! And then I started putting the pieces together (slowly, so I don't get wrinkles) - they don't recycle their own bloody paper bags. They only just started recycling plastic bags. They offer only individually wrapped plastic utensils for dining in! I mean, who's fooling who here? So I wrote a nice, curt note about their hypocrisy and submitting it to the comment board. Strangely enough, it hasn't been posted.

Moreover, I just can't help feeling like a fraud while I'm in there. There's your combination of yuppies dressed like me in skirts and pearls (yeeeaaah, mine aren't real!); the married guys looking over their wives' shoulders at us; sweaty, I'm-much-healthier-than-you-look-at-me-eating-kale bicyclists; and then some shaggy dude with his old cloth bag getting old yogurt, and boy, everyone feels so good about their rampant unsquelchable consumerism when they're at Whole Foods. Want that chicken? Okay, we'll wrap it in double plastic! We'll give you back one stinking nickel for re-using your bags! Even IKEA charges for plastic bags in order to encourage bringing your own, but they're Swedish! We won't even let you put our salad bar offerings in your own box from home - gotta use a new one!

So now I'm trying to live without Whole Foods - okay, I'm still going to buy meat there - through a combination of Giant, Trader Joe's, and Eastern Market. Lemons at Whole Foods were $.99 each. They were three for $1 at Eastern Market. I bought nine. I also bought two big onions for $1.50. Trader Joe's takes back their paper bags. Giant sells cheaper organic vegetables, and there's usually a game of hearts going on in the parking lot.

The problem? I bought so much food this weekend I'll never be able to eat it all. I'm lying, I'm already halfway through it. But that was the real beauty of Whole Foods - it was so expensive, I ate a lot less! So if you see me waddling into the Giant, be kind. I'm trying to save the environment. My ass, I'll worry about later, when it's discovered that fat can be recycled.