Last week I took a trip to Whole Foods for the first time. I was on the hunt for organic lightly salted blue corn tortilla chips that I had at a work party and fell deliciously in love with. They are amazingly good. Anyway, I realized there was a Whole Foods a few blocks from work and I could not only seek out my beloved new chips but also explore a new store. Off I went, arriving just before 5:00 and parking far away from the door. Surely all of these people weren’t in Whole Foods, I was sure at least half of them were in Ben and Jerry’s considering it was so hot. Feeling particularly optimistic I grabbed one of the big push shopping carts instead of one of the hand held ones because I just knew I was going to find all kinds of particularly fantastic whole-foody things to buy in there. Once I walked in I immediately regretted my choice of shopping cart.
To say the place was a zoo was an understatement. Apparently no one was in Ben and Jerry’s lets just put it that way. I pushed my way around the produce section, having mini-strokes and heart attacks all along the way as I glanced at the prices. $8 for some strawberries?! Now granted, they were the most beautiful, scrumptious looking strawberries I had ever seen, but still… $8?! For that much they better come with chocolate and whip cream and a very cute man-servant to feed them to me. Trying to maneuver my way around the store was nearly impossible with my shopping cart given the fact that everyone and their mom/husband/loud child was there and the fact that they had packed about 10 aisles worth of products too many in that building. I had only been in there 5 minutes and had already almost knocked over a glorious display of organic peaches. I probably would have been charged a re-stocking fee had I knocked them over. I decided to leave the produce section and make my way across the store aisle by aisle. Once again I realized the mistake of my shopping cart as I kept apologizing for almost running into people. People who by the way looked extremely annoyed that I appeared to be browsing with an empty cart rather than mad-dashing around the store going for the exact organic-natural-taste-free thing I wanted. It was around this time that I started to feel out of place carrying my Coach purse and wearing my Jack Rogers.
Everywhere I looked I saw words like organic, natural, flax seed, soy, unsweetened, gogi, acai. My optimistic attitude was quickly leaving me and all I could think was fake, fake, fake. Then I stopped in front of the vegan display and saw this: rice vegan block, cheddar flavor. A flavored block? For serious? Not only that, but it was cholesterol, lactose, dairy, and soy free. What does that leave? A cheddar flavored block. A block of what exactly?? Hi, I’d like to order a blockburger please. No thank you. Moving on. Feeling quite defeated I made my way to the other side of the store where I saw an entire humongous display of cheese. Real cheese. Cue the bright light and angel choir. There’s hope after all! And there were samples… mmm this was better than Costco! I settled on some kind of cheese from Ireland that I had never heard of but was rather tasty when I sampled it. I’m sure my fellow shoppers were much less annoyed with me now that I was not pushing around a completely empty cart anymore. I eventually found the chip aisle and found the chips I was there to get in the first place. Feeling even more accomplished and successful I went back to the meat department to have a look around. I’m not really sure what happened at this point, I think I was still on a high of finding real cheese and my yummy chips and sort of spaced out. Before I knew it I was putting a wild basil and goat cheese salmon burger into my cart. Do I even know how to cook a salmon burger? No. But I like goat cheese, and I was particularly intrigued by this wild basil. I mean what makes it wild anyway, is it because of where it grows or is it a total party herb and the black sheep of the herb family? Curious. But I digress.
I made my way to the front to check out and got in line. Most stores I usually go in have candy, gum, and a magazine with Angelina Jolie on the cover at the checkout line. Here, they have stuff like organic ethanol eucalyptus and Echinacea (apparently Echinacea is pretty important because my auto-correct in Word keeps capitalizing it). I look around at the other lines and notice people pulling out their own reusable bags to put their groceries in to take home. I start to feel like a total jack-ass for coming to this natural and organic product store and not considering the environment and wonder if I will be black listed for having to use their paper bags. Luckily I made it out without incident with my cheese, chips, and wild salmon burger in tow. Assuming you consider almost running into about 15 people and almost knocking over about 5 different displays “without incident”.
The best part? In the freezer section, right next to the dairy and soy free ice cream, were little pints of Ben and Jerry’s. Hope is restored.
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