"Supermarket Pastoral is a most seductive literary form, beguiling enough to survive in the face of a great many discomfiting facts. I suspect that's because it gratifies some of our deepest, oldest longings, not merely for safe food, but for a connection to the earth and to the handful of domesticated creatures we've long depended on." (p. 137)
[WS:] I find this rather odd. I shop at Whole Foods because they have items that I like and price them competitively vis a vis other grocery outlets in the area, e.g. bread, soy products, cheese, butter, or frozen veggies. I do not buy their seafood because it is too expensive and I can find much better prices at Asian gorceries. I do not buy their meat either, because I do not eat meat. I suspect that most people who shop there do it for similar reasons.
Quite frankly, I do not think most shoppers have any anxieties over not producing their own food - instead, their anxiety is over rising food prices. I met only one person who expressed willingness to grow her own food, but she tends to shop at farmer's markets rather than Whole Foods or other grocery stores.
I also think that Whole Foods maketing is not much different than that used by other retailers. Everyone uses marketing gimmicks to make their merchandise look sexy and appealing. What else is new?
As to the longings for connection to domoesticated creatures, we have two cats, three birds, and a fish that give us quite a bit of connectedness and then some. Sometimes I think less of it would really be appreciated, especially at night, when we want to sleep.
I heard someone once commenting that in the "good olden days" a snob would buy "intellectual books" and prominently displayed them on the shelf in his parlour. Today, however, a snob looks at "intellectual books" on his shelf and says to his guests "I really need to get rid of this stuff, or perhaps take to the pawn shop, so a snob can buy it and put it on a shelf in his parlour." This literary genre of Whole Foods - and retail shopping in general - bashing looks like a new chapter in that story. Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------