"People threatened employees with guns, knives and sticks. They flung food, screamed, fought and tried to defecate on the floor..."

"... according to records of 568 emergency calls over 13 months, many depicting scenes of mayhem. 'Male w/machete is back,' the report on one 911 call states.... A man with a four-inch knife attacked several security guards, then sprayed store employees with foam from a fire extinguisher, according to a third...." 

I'm reading "In San Francisco, a Troubled Year at a Whole Foods Market Reflects a City’s Woes" (WNYUZ).

Whole Foods is watching me.

Yesterday, as I was browsing amongst the fruits and vegetables, a voice came over the loudspeaker saying we should check our shopping carts for the sunglasses somebody had, apparently, lost. I heard it, thought about it, but assumed I knew what was in my shopping cart and continued on my way.

Over by the cheeses, as I was standing about 15 feet from my cart, I thought I heard someone call my name, "Ann... Ann..." I glance over and see no one I know and assume, as I've assumed since I was a first grader, that when the syllable that happens to be my name is heard, it's probably not an effort to get my attention.

"All told, Whole Foods terminated workers in at least six states for wearing BLM apparel, according to a complaint brought by the National Labor Relations Board...."

"NLRB officials are now prosecuting Whole Foods, seeking a change in policy and reinstatement for the workers. The company’s defense has yielded one of the stranger spectacles in contemporary US labor law. Whole Foods not only denies doing anything wrong, it’s also effectively putting BLM on trial. 'At one point, President Trump referred to Black Lives Matter itself as, quote, "a symbol of hate," and like it or not, a significant number of the former president’s supporters share his view,' company attorney Michael Ferrell said during his opening statement at the NLRB trial in Boston this spring. Yes, Ferrell said, Whole Foods believes Black lives matter, but the BLM movement is 'controversial,' its protests have been marked by looting and violence, and the company had good reason to worry that stores would become dangerous if workers were allowed to show their support on the job. If Whole Foods is forced to permit employees to wear BLM logos, Ferrell said, then why not let them wear Confederate flag masks, or go shirtless?...'It is for Whole Foods’ leadership to decide,' Ferrell said. “It is not for the hourly store team members.' That’s a point the NLRB’s top prosecutor, General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, is eager to litigate.... 'I’m not sure that all circuit court judges, or even district court judges for that matter, fully understand all the nuances of labor law,' she says. 'We try to educate them as best we can.'"

From "Washington’s Top Labor Prosecutor Battles Whole Foods Over Black Lives Matter Masks/Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel at the NLRB, is seeking a ruling that would give US workers something more like free speech" (Bloomberg).

I'm not sure what "would become dangerous." Is it that workers who didn't choose to wear the slogan could be threatened? Is it that customers might go ballistic? Was Ferrell talking about physical danger or some sort of emotional "danger"? Some people might feel hated when they read the slogan "Black Lives Matter" — is that a "danger"? I'm thinking of the vogue concept that words are violence. But stepping back from that puzzling word "danger," I can see that management has to worry that some customers may sense hostility and decide to shop elsewhere. The mask itself already embodies the hostility of the deadly virus. Writing an aggressive — or merely confusing — message on the mask has a synergistic effect. 

Some Whole Foods employees are walking out because they're forbidden to wear "Black Lives Matter" masks and other gear.

Fox News reports.

Now, maybe you're like me and the first thing you think is the important thing is whether Whole Foods has a neutral policy against wearing messages. That ought to make it an easy question. But no. The company did have that all along:

“In a customer-focused environment, all Team Members must comply with our longstanding company dress code, which prohibits clothing with visible slogans, messages, logos or advertising that are not company-related,” the company said in a statement. “Team Members who do not comply with dress code are always given the opportunity to comply. If a Team Member is wearing a face mask that is outside of dress code, they are offered a new face mask. Team Members are not able to work until they comply with the policy.”

The message at Whole Foods is: Whole Foods.  But the company does support the cause. It's given "$10 million to organizations fighting for racial justice." And the company's website says: "Racism and discrimination of any kind have no place at Whole Foods Market. We support the Black community and meaningful change in the world."

But that's not good enough for some people:

“We can’t just put a label on this and say we care and not let our own workers wear stuff in support of the movement,” Savannah Kinzer, a white employee who walked out of the Cambridge store, told the Globe. “Until we see it as a white person’s problem and not a Black issue that white people have to empathize with, racism will persist.”

I have empathy for businesses that are trying to operate as businesses. Keep the workplace politically neutral. That's supportive of diversity.

"[T]he co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods only eats only three organic, vegan meals a day, barely drinks water and never snacks — or eats dessert — except for an occasional Medjool date."

"[John] Mackey estimates that he eats about 15 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. 'A plant-based diet is pretty high in water,' Mackey says, 'so, the actual truth is I don’t need to drink water most of the time.' And if he did snack outside his three meals, he says he would get a stomach ache. Mackey is so dedicated to his rigid diet and wellness routine that when he travels for work, he typically packs a rice cooker with him (to make his morning steel-cut oats) to ensure he doesn’t slip while on the road... At 5 a.m., Mackey wakes up and does his spiritual practices for about 30 minutes to an hour. That includes meditation, reading an array of spiritual literature and daily affirmations.... At 6 a.m. Mackey either has one of two breakfasts: a smoothie or steel cuts oats (the oats are usually for when he’s on the road).... After breakfast, Mackey exercises by going on a short walk followed by some yoga.... Mackey says he eats lunch early, at about 11 a.m., to beat the crowds at the Whole Foods’ buffet line, which is connected to its corporate offices.... After work, Mackey heads home at about 7 p.m. to make dinner with his wife, Deborah. 'We’ll chop up a bunch of different veggies and throw it in the steamer,' he says, 'And then we’ll have some kind of lentil or beans with it and a nut sauce.' Mackey puts down his phone for the night at 9 p.m.... Mackey reads for bit and then heads to bed at 10 p.m."

CNBC reports the virtuous if boring routine of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey.

What part of John Mackey's daily regimen bothers you the most?

Skimping on drinking water.

So much roughage in his digestive tract.

That he's telling us all these details about his personal life, invading his own privacy.

He's flaunting virtue and assuming we'll admire him for it.

I'm worried about Deborah and her life of throwing vegetables in a steamer.

What the hell is "nut sauce"?

Multimillionaire carts his rice cooker with him when he travels.

Grown man contends he'd get a stomach ache if he snacked.

With all these details, why nothing about the timing and dimensions of his bowel movements?

 

pollcode.com free polls

Not the usual.

The big rainstorm "massively flooded" the Whole Foods on University Avenue, or so I was told by the people who said they were store employees, as I stared at the shopping carts full of sodden merchandise. The store was closed and will be closed for days, they said.

I circled around to try to get back home, avoiding left turns on University Avenue, where all the traffic lights were set on blinking red. I took a back road and then turned north onto Shorewood Boulevard where it crosses the railroad tracks. On either side of the tracks, the entire foundation under the rails had been washed away, so that sagging (though not broken) track hung over empty space.

Much worse: "The body of the man swept away by floodwaters Monday night has been found in a retention pond on the West Side," the Wisconsin State Journal reports.

"The minute the phrase 'having it all' lost favor among women, wellness came in to pick up the pieces."

"It was a way to reorient ourselves — we were not in service to anyone else, and we were worthy subjects of our own care. It wasn’t about achieving; it was about putting ourselves at the top of a list that we hadn’t even previously been on. Wellness was maybe a result of too much having it all, too much pursuit, too many boxes that we’d seen our exhausted mothers fall into bed without checking off. Wellness arrived because it was gravely needed. Before we knew it, the wellness point of view had invaded everything in our lives: Summer-solstice sales are wellness. Yoga in the park is wellness. Yoga at work is wellness... The organic produce section of Whole Foods. Whole Foods. Hemp. Oprah. CBD. 'Body work.' Reiki. So is: SoulCycle, açaí, antioxidants, the phrase 'mind-body,' meditation, the mindfulness jar my son brought home from school, kombucha, chai, juice bars, oat milk, almond milk, all the milks from substances that can’t technically be milked, clean anything. 'Living your best life.' 'Living your truth.' Crystals...."

From "The Big Business of Being Gwyneth Paltrow/Inside the growth of Goop — the most controversial brand in the wellness industry" by Taffy Brodesser-Akner in the NYT Magazine.

From having it all... to having little symbols of nonexistent meaning... essentially having nothing... but nothing in a graspable, tangible form. And it even has a face. The face of Gwyneth Paltrow.

ADDED: The "mindfulness jar" really is a thing kids are making. I did a search to make this image. Click to enlarge and read:

"A media kit for the restaurant said, 'Yellow Fever … yeah, we really said that.'"

"The kit said the name was attention-getting but that 'we choose to embrace the term and reinterpret it positively for ourselves.' In a statement on Saturday, Ms. Kim added, 'Yellow Fever celebrates all things Asian: the food, the culture and the people, and our menu reflects that featuring cuisine from Korea, Japan, China, Vietnam, Thailand and Hawaii.' Dr. Padoongpatt said the Kims’ statements hint at a more troubling issue: It is not that they do not know how loaded the phrase is — it is that they know and do not care. 'We want to be able to say, Just educate yourself,' he said. 'But not caring is much more aggressive. It’s much more explicit, and basically mocking.'"

From "Yellow Fever Restaurant at California Whole Foods Sets Off a Debate" (NYT).

Naming a restaurant after a horrible disease and inviting charges of racism — it's just so extreme maybe you have to laugh.

But this is — I thought — the Era of That's Not Funny.

ADDED: I've never forgotten this description:

A viral disease, it was called yellow fever because the skin of victims often turned sallow. The real symptoms, however, were high fever and black vomit. Yellow fever came into America aboard slave ships from Africa. The first case was in Barbados in 1647. It was a horrible disease. A doctor who got it said it felt “as if three or four hooks were fastened onto the globe of each eye and some person, standing behind me, was dragging them forcibly from their orbits back into the head.”

From Bill Bryson, "At Home: A Short History of Private Life."

Lion's Roar, How to Survive Anything, Chicken, Mindfulness.

Those were the 4 magazines staring me in the face at Whole Foods today. I didn't buy any of these, but I did entertain myself with the fantasy that it was a multiple choice test, and I decided: Chicken.

What's up with the empty shelves at Whole Foods

Business Insider investigates:

• Whole Foods employees say stores are suffering from food shortages because of a newly implemented inventory-management system called order-to-shelf, or OTS.
• Whole Foods says the system reduces unnecessary inventory, lowers costs, and frees up employees to focus on customer service.
• Employees acknowledge that less food is spoiling in storage rooms, but they describe OTS as a "militaristic" system that crushes morale and leads to many items being out of stock.
• "Last week, we ran out of onions and potatoes twice," an employee of a Brooklyn Whole Foods store said. "Entire aisles are empty at times."
• "It has for weeks had empty shelves, and I shop there twice a week," one customer told Business Insider. "The prepared-food section is not refreshed, and food looks stale."

ADDED: The Madison Whole Foods is nowhere nearly as bad as what you see in the photographs at the link, but there are gaps in the shelves, giving an impression of deficiency where once we saw abundance. It makes a big psychological difference! The real-world store is theater, and it's not at all like a website.

I really just wanted to know if Whole Foods has ciabatta today. They don't always have it.

I'm not confusing it with art, but I am a little confused about finding the answer to my question on the internet. I mean, my search found me this:

That's from "All The Houses: A Novel," by Karen Olsson.

"Amazon Cuts Whole Foods Prices as Much as 43% on First Day."

Bloomberg reports.

The item that's 43% cheaper is the very thing I bought last Friday: Organic Fuji apples. From $3.49 a pound to $1.99 a pound.

A texted conversation about comedy that got me looking up what jokes people told about Hitler during the Nazi Era.

Meade was off on a couple of errands. 1. To Whole Foods, for provisions and to return an off-tasting vat of freshly ground peanut butter, and 2. To Batteries + Bulbs — there is such a place — to get the weird battery that fits in the strange AT&T Uverse device that started screaming at us this morning. We'll join this texted conversation in the middle of things:

Meade: The checkout guy at WF was very nice to me

Althouse: About the p nut butter?

Meade: Asked if I had any plans for the day

Althouse: What did you say?

Meade: Fix a battery

Althouse: Did he use your straight line to make a good wisecrack

Meade:

N
Too nice to make wisecrack
Only the gals are allowed
Guys have to be nice
And smile
Wisecracks for guys might = rape

Althouse:

I remember when guys were able to be funny.
Now, “it’s not funny” has become an article of faith

This made me research the question what jokes were made about Hitler in Nazi Germany. I found this article in Spiegel from 2006 about a book by Rudolph Herzog called "Heil Hitler, The Pig is Dead" (published in English as "Dead Funny: Telling Jokes in Hitler's Germany"). From the article:

Hitler visits a lunatic asylum. The patients give the Hitler salute. As he passes down the line he comes across a man who isn't saluting. 'Why aren't you saluting like the others?' Hitler barks. '“Mein Führer, I'm the nurse,' comes the answer. 'I'm not crazy!'

That joke may not be a screamer, but it was told quite openly along with many others about Hitler and his henchmen in the early years of the Third Reich, according to a new book on humor under the Nazis.

But by the end of the war, a joke could get you killed. A Berlin munitions worker, identified only as Marianne Elise K., was convicted of undermining the war effort 'through spiteful remarks' and executed in 1944 for telling this one:

Hitler and Göring are standing on top of Berlin's radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to cheer up the people of Berlin. 'Why don't you just jump?' suggests Göring.

Meade: When Trump starts executing people for telling bad jokes, we'll know he's literally Hitler.

"Amazon is buying Whole Foods..."

"... for $13.7 billion."

"Are You Planning A Cake Hoax? These 5 Tips Will Make Sure It’s A Success"

"#1 Pick A Believable Villain...."

So... not Whole Foods in Austin, Texas... not for an anti-gay cake message. Come on!

Orange you glad Whole Foods is peeling oranges for people?

Some are glad but many are very angry:



I love the debate in the comments at the tweet. It goes from utter anger, using my personal go-to swear phrase...

Fucking hell. That makes me unbelievably angry actually. Talk about necessarily contributing to plastic taking over the planet.

... to the empathetic vibrations of the Betsys of this world:

Just FYI, not everybody is physically able to peel an orange.

On sale at Whole Foods: 16 ounces of water with 3 stalks of asparagus in it, labeled "Asparagus Water" and priced at $5.99.

"[A] gentleman in the produce department who did not want to give his name... explained that the product was new, 'We've had them on the shelf for the last few days.'"

When asked how the item is made, he said, "It's water, and we sort of cut asparagus stalks down so they're shorter, and put them into the container." When Eater asked what it was for, there was a long pause before he said, "Well, it's... to drink." He elaborated, "The nutrients from the asparagus do transfer into the water."

Later, Whole Foods' Senior Media Relations Specialist Liz Burkhart made a statement asserting that item was carried in only one store (in California) and that the store was making it wrong: "It was meant to be water with the essence of vegetables and/or mushrooms to be used as broth (similar to a bone broth), which are typically made over a long period of time soaking in water."

The photograph at the link looks like something some anti-Whole-Foods prankster made. It would be funny as a joke. It's even funnier knowing it was actually, seriously made and put on the shelf for sale.

And by the way, Whole Foods sells homeopathic stuff, which is based on a much stupider idea than "The nutrients from the asparagus do transfer into the water." Wake me up when they walk that back.

"Is the name kaffir lime racist?"

We buy a lot of limes, because Meade makes limeade just about every day. If you've read this blog for a long time and also have a long memory, you may remember when Meade was only a commenter here, and his screen name included his first initial, so that it was l.meade, and that looked like "limeade" with the bottom two thirds of the "i" dropped out.

We tend to food-shop at Whole Foods, where there can be a choice of different limes — the limes that look like green lemons, the darker rounder sort of lime, key limes. I don't really keep track, because without a sense of smell, the basic tastes are exposed in raw form, and sourness is the worst. Imagine what a lime would be like if you couldn't smell it. I'll tell you, in a word: bad. To me, limeade is a way to take a glass of water and cause it to need a whole lot of sweetener to make it drinkable. And then Meade's sweetener of choice is stevia. What the hell! "Here's What The Stevia Sweetener Really Is — And Why Some People Think It Tastes Bad." I'm one of those people. So Meade's drink of choice is a horror to me.

Yesterday, at Whole Foods, we saw a type of lime we'd never noticed before. It was small and warty and twice as expensive as those other limes. What are "kaffir limes"? There must be some reason people want to pay double for something uglier, though perhaps it's a trick to make nitwit shoppers assume it must be great, because it's twice the price and weird-looking. That might be one dimension of the Whole Foods scheme to manipulate consumer psychology — along with friendly staff, happy butchers, vast variety in chosen places (notably, cheese), godforsaken aisles of questionable curatives, magazines at the checkout point that signal lightweight spirituality and moderate athleticism, and puzzling racks of canvas slip-on shoes and flimsy, cottony shirts and leggings.

We were told kaffir limes might have something to do with Thai cooking, and we declined the produce person's offer to slice one of those things in half right now and give us a sample, which seemed frightening both because of the small machete she brandished and because of the sourness of lime in unadulterated form. I said we'd look it up on the internet.

So, I'm looking it up and the first thing I find is a Slate article: "Is the Name Kaffir Lime Racist?" The short answer is that although the word is a racist slur in South Africa, the use as the name of those limes seems to have arrived in English by a different route:

As the Oxford English Dictionary points out, Scottish botanist H.F. Macmillan used the term in his 1910 Handbook of Tropical Gardening and Planting to refer to a lime found in Sri Lanka, the home of the ethnic group that refer to themselves proudly as the Kaffirs. Macmillan lived there for 30 years, and it was there that he wrote his botanical handbook. It is difficult to say how he, and the other people he heard using the term kaffir lime, understood the connotation of the word, but it seems at least possible that the name began innocuously....

University of California researcher David Karp has alerted me to an even earlier published instance of the name kaffir lime than H.F. Macmillan’s: In The Cultivated Oranges, Lemons Etc. of India and Ceylon, published in 1888, author Emanuel Bonavia briefly mentions the fruit, noting, “Europeans call it Caffre-lime.”...

Karp and his colleague Cara De Silva have posited a different explanation for the name, speculating in 1998 in the food journal Petits Propos Culinaires, “Indian Muslims most likely encountered the fruit as an import from lands such as Thailand and Sri Lanka, where Buddhists and other non-Muslims predominated. ... From this Indian usage, intended to convey otherness and exotic provenance, the term passed into English.” This theory suggests that the name’s roots lie closer to the original Arabic meaning of kafir than to the 20th-century racial slur, although of course the term’s potentially benign origins don’t invalidate modern-day concerns about the word’s offensiveness.

It seems to me that if you have a product with a name that some people will experience as offensive, you might want to change the name, even though there's a pleasant-enough explanation. (See: Pee Cola and Barf dishwashing detergent.)

But in the case of kaffir limes, the explanation is not all that pleasant. It's old-fashioned othering. I thought we were eschewing that too. And by we, I mean, we, the kind of people who shop at Whole Foods.

"Whole Foods Market will continue to carry colloidal silver due to responsibility for misuse."

So reads the "warning" sign that caught my attention the other day:



Click to read the fine print which says that there's "insufficient data to confirm the effectiveness" of this product but that it "can cause severe adverse consequences, including argyria." Argyria is your skin turning blue!

Here's a woman who took silver long ago — dosed by a doctor:



She speaks of strangers on the street shunning her and of losing employment opportunity, but I don't understand why she doesn't wear foundation. The gray face — and its awful expression of sadness — repels people, but she has chosen not to conceal what she could easily conceal and not to smile. Take some responsibility for that. But she's participating in a TV show here, and she's dramatizing her predicament and warning.

And here's a man who's accepting having turned blue and continuing to take silver and to recommend it:



Why is Whole Foods selling this? The phrase "due to responsibility for misuse" is a bit weird, but clearly it means due to responsibility for misuse belonging to you the customer, because we've issued this warning. It's your damned fault if you consume this stuff, get no benefit, but turn blue.

Meanwhile, check out the price tag. 4 ounces of what is only 10 parts per million cost over $25.00. There's not much silver. Maybe I'm getting more silver eating with silver forks and spoons. So what's the problem? It's your $25.

"I was amused that you quoted Virgil on arugula ('the rocket excites the sexual desire of drowsy people') since I eat the stuff every day."

"And I was most surprised to learn of boring old celery’s properties as an erection-enhancer and pheromone-jogger. What were you most surprised by?"

I was most surprised by the price of arugula.

Remember when powerful conservative voices were writing things like: "John McCain may be gaining what Obama is losing among women because of Obama’s 'Arugula Gap'"?

“Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” Obama asked an Iowa crowd in 2007.... Most people don’t shop at Whole Foods (which specializes in “organic” foods and other environmentally-fashionable products). And most women, I suspect, aren’t looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of their high school French teacher than of John F. Kennedy....

It’s not Obama’s Ivy League bowling skills that are apparently hurting him among women voters. There are at least three factors. Obama is suffering from his effete personality, feminists’ hard feelings about Hillary’s fate, and Obama fatigue.

Obama is an effetenik, a white teacup, pinkie-in-the-air sort. Hillary is more of a shot-and-a-beer guy than he is. Obama is a prig: a moralizer who lectures people, a rhetorician who suffers badly when, deprived of a teleprompter, he’s left to his own devices....

Obama, the organic liberal chicken, doesn’t want to be the main course on McCain’s dinner menu. He is, as Fred Thompson said, George McGovern without the experience. The Arugula Gap may well sink him in November.

For the annals of it just goes to show how wrong you can be.

Arugula was an aphrodisiac.