You need to read the market research that drives places like Whole Foods. Anxiety over not producing their own food is definitely part of the picture. I can recall countless conversations with customers concerning this. Admittedly Whole Foods has moved away from this somewhat as they have grown and sought additional customers but not to the point where price is more important to their customer base than maintaining the Supermarket Pastoral idea. Who coined that phrase? Pollan? I haven't read Pollan, and I probably won't, but from what I've read here he seems to mock this idea with regards to Whole Foods not because he has disdain for the idea but because he believes Whole Foods has sold out this idea or more likely never had it to begin with and simply traded on the image.
[WS:] At least half of marketing in this country exploits anxieties of one kind or another. Anxiety of safety drives the marketing of SUV, anxiety of health drives marketing of drugs, anxiety of crime drives marketing of security gizmos, and so on and so on. I do not think that health food stores are any different.
My point was not to deny that, but to question the literary genre that thrives on "deconstructing" such attitudes and motives. It is not merelry a research on marketing techniques (and deception) but a story with a moral in it. That kind of moralizing irks me. I gather that shag is also irked by it. 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------