Whole Foods claims to pride itself on–and demonstrably makes a lot of money by–offering products derived from whole foods that are free of questionable substances, and although I certainly wouldn’t eat/use everything on offer, I think it does a decent job. The conjunction of natural food and health outcomes is a constantly changing landscape, partly because it has been understudied until recently, when the worldwide surge of reduced healthspan caught the attention of a few researchers, and also because regular people experimenting with their own health have discovered, and started to demand, healthier choices for both food and remedies. WF employs quite a few folks company-wide who try to stay in front of food and supplement trends.

Customers of WF represent a wide spectrum of awareness of these trends. Some seem to have recently left their spaceship, encountered their first human, who happened to be a marketeer, then stumbled into WF demanding, Take me to your Coke! Coca-Cola products check a lot of WF no-no boxes, but of course you knew that already.

Other folks are natural solution contrarians. One woman looking at a wall of multivitamins confided, I’m a nurse, and I don’t want anything based on organic whole foods. She must have gone to nursing school during the race to the moon, when Americans rushed to eat TV dinners and replace every possible utensil with a plastic version. I struggled with my reply, taking a chance with, I’m sure some of these have synthetic components, which luckily did not make her flinch. I eventually left her reading labels.

Another gal sought antibiotic soap. I offered her hand sanitizer, which occupies four feet of shelf space since Covid, but she didn’t want that, and I had to send her away empty-handed. WF has literally zero choices for skin microbiome-destroying soap products. It’s pretty much pro-germ.

Some folks have trouble seeing the connection between natural food and natural remedies. I had a couple of regulars in the other day looking for cold remedies; we have some herb-based ones and a lot of homeopathic ones, which contain no active ingredients at all. (They are very safe.) The woman kept examining every package, and the man kept saying, You won’t find anything you want here. We should go to the drugstore. Which they ultimately did. Presumably they were trying to avoid a trip to a second store by blurring reality, until it glared starkly back from the shelves.

On second thought, the real trend-bucker here may be WF itself. My impression is that most people, at least in the US, are perfectly happy with the products of the industrial food system, and readily adapt to the reduced health status of each successive generation. WF is a niche market. There is a great future in plastics, not to mention GMO foods and synthetic drugs.

I didn’t mean for this to end so darkly three days before Christmas, but sometimes the blog leads and I follow.