Food Groups at the Whole Foods

Note: I use the word ‘hippies’ in this article not as a term of derision, but as a descriptive adjective. Most of my friends growing up were (and still are) hippies. And I use the term with boundless affection merely to describe.


Sadly, my year with BOB has come to an end and today I moved out my last bit of stuff and moved much much closer to work which will only be a good thing, I think. While checking out the surroundings near the new place while at lunch one day, I found one of those ‘healthy food’ grocery stores. I think it was a Whole Foods but maybe not – but that’s what I’ll call it.

So, I’m in a Whole Foods and I suppose it’s important to point out that at the time I’m in uniform. As a white male I can’t say I’ve ever been in a social setting where I felt more conspicuous – unless you count that one Friday afternoon in chop-chop square in Riyadh, but that’s an entirely different story.

As a native of a state that specializes in tie-dye t-shirts and henna tattoos, I suppose that somewhere in me there is a little bit of a hippy - I’ll admit that and happily so. But there’s also a little Native American in me too (Blackfoot), but I’d still stick out if I was wandering around one of their gatherings. But I like to think that all the prejudices we hold are fading at least a little as we mature as a nation.

So I’m trawling around the store looking for, I don’t know, any one of the four food groups I’m familiar with – sugar, caffeine, chocolate and the orange stuff in the middle of a Butterfinger – and I’m not finding any of it. Even the sugar is unrefined and looks most disturbingly unlike any sugar that I’m used to.

Thinking I see an aisle of solace, I notice a sign that says, “snacks.”

I think it’s fair to say that people who are familiar with WF, and by association, clothing made from hemp, know that this sign does not lead to any of my four food groups. The Whole Foods snack aisle is made up almost entirely of … well, I’m not sure. I swear I’d never seen most of these things before in my life. I’m pretty sure much of it was fruit or vegetable matter of some form – dried, desiccated or in some other fashion wholly and entirely not made of chocolate.

To be fair, WF does have chocolate. Green & Black’s organic chocolate to be precise. It’s vegan-approved. I know this not because I lunged toward it in the snack aisle, but because I worked with a woman in England who was a Vegan and it was the only thing I could get her that I knew she could eat when the rest of us were having cake or it was Secretaries Day or her birthday or something.

So, feeling like a lost leper, I keep wandering through the WF. The granola people would stare at me at first and then, remembering that the first Gulf War in 1991 was the catharsis moment of my generation which gave Americans permission to love the soldier, hate the war, they would smile and carry on.

An aside here regarding the smile. It wasn’t a ‘friendly’ smile…it was meant to be, but really it was an “I feel sorry for you” smile. And again, I don’t think they felt sorry for me because I’m in the military. They had the same look you get when you see a really old person wandering in the grocery store looking for something they can’t find, like their feet. There was some genuine compassion there, but neither party to the smile was really sure why.

So I wandered around for a little longer and finally found a case where they sold sandwiches – and lunch was all I was really looking for to begin with. As I picked up a sandwich, I turned around and saw an African-American lady standing next to me. We gave each other a nod and something just short of a giggle. She and I both knew two things at that moment: First, that we were the only ones like us within 40,000 square feet; and second, that somewhere in that store one of the workers kept a box of ding dongs hidden in his locker for his smoke break.

Maybe we are maturing as a nation - maybe the majority of us now look at our differences as people as the thing that makes up our strength as 'a people'. Still, I wasn’t about to buy the brownie they were offering for $4.95.