>
> On Sep 19, 2009, at 11:23 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
>> ...the success of whole foods's genre of supermarket pastoral -- a
>> sentimentalized romanticism that induces people to buy crap based on images
>> of cows grazing in pastures when,in fact, such cows are not freely roaming
>> the pastures at all...
>>
>
> Odd. In my experience people shopping at WF seem to be the sort of people
> who look for the words "organic" or "grass fed." The sort of people who pay
> much more attention to the small print on ingredients lists than to pretty
> images. The sort of people who want to ensure that their children eat food,
> not crap.
>
> Shane Mage
>
Of course, the bastardization/reification of "organic" and "grass-fed" is legion. There are folks committed to organic/grass-fed/WF because of sentimental romanticism for a bygone agrarian past, there are folks committed to organic/grass-fed/WF because of health-phobic concerns about the poisons in conventional foods, there are folks committed to organic/grass-fed/WF because of ecoromantic beliefs that organic is better for Nature, and there are folks committed to organic/grass-fed/WF 'cuz its hip, clean and beautiful people shop/hang there. The trajectory of this stuff is one which started with a melding of the agroecological, the physiodynamic and the retrocommunal but which then - for reasons tied to both endogenous and exogenous relations - gradually splintered each off from the others and now is largely driven by faux-green consumerism serviced primarily by massive organic monocroppers producing both fresh, prepared and frozen/canned/boxed foods produced in usually the same hyperprocessed fashion but with "organic" ingredients.