Whole Foods still not cool

For those who participated in the Whole Foods discussion after Chad Hanna’s article in February, Asad Raza of the 3Quarks blog does a beautiful takedown of the Whole Foods in Manhattan today. Here’s a sampler:

There is something else alienating about Whole Foods: it posits a universe in which we are all only consumers. The holism its name gestures towards is not the holism of a community in which buyers and sellers know each other. Instead, it’s purely about the foods themselves: one’s interest in food is projected as only another form of self-interest. Industrial organic food production has many of the same faults as the conventional food industry; it doesn’t matter. That organic food is roughly a third the price at socialist institutions like the Fourth Street Food Coop, or the superb Park Slope Food Coop, is also unimportant. These neoliberal shoppers prefer the impersonal embrace of a corporate parent, disguised as some vague moral goodness.

Read the rest.