Shop Whole Foods Now!

I have (very) mixed feelings about Whole Foods. There are a few things I really like about the store, mainly the milk and bread. The value of Whole Foods is, that on any given day, I can get the outstanding milk produced by Amish farmers from Iowa called "Farmer's All Natural Creamery", and I can get a pretty decent loaf of bread (not the best but as they say, more than decent). What I almost always skip is, the produce.

While I want organic produce, I really deplore the way that Whole Foods does it. I know it is not accurate to call it faux organic as organic is organic, but the corporate and imported fruits and vegetables that make up Whole Food's inventory surely violates certain ideas behind "organic". For one thing Whole Food's produce does not support "regular" farmer's. For another thing, another thing, how good can all of this shipped in produce really be? It aint farm fresh. Yet, there is hope.

Yesterday at Whole Food's in River Forest, they were selling Illinois peaches. I know, I know, where exactly do we define local? Is something close to St. Louis local food for Chicago? Well, for me, yes. My boundaries for local basically follow the Big Ten Conference. Alas, I digress. Whole Foods was selling peaches from Eckert's Farms in Bellevue, Illinois. I grabbed a bunch just to help convince the Whole Food's powers that be that there was a market for this stuff.

But you know what really infuriated me? An employee was poo-pahing the peaches to another customer, essentially, as far as I could tell, because they were still mostly hard. He decided to offer samples to this customer, and then since I was there, to me too. Turns out he was quite wrong. I thought he should have been pitching the peaches just to get people to eat local. Seems he should be pitching these peaches because they are pretty good too. Shop now, who knows how long they will be there.