Whole Foods --, and Choice

I used to be really emotionally opposed to whole foods, for all sorts of reasons, many of which I then thought were fantastically radical and pleasantly self-evident.  Boy I must have been an [ironically] smug bitch!  Of course, part of my reaction was framed around my own relatively poor environment growing up, such that anything like a supermarket was most emphatically nothing to second guess, outside of the range of coupons one could cut to use on ground meat, or you know, tater tots. 

I used to have a physical reaction to the place.  I'd get itchy, and antsy, and want to leave, badly.  The people freaked me out.  The produce freaked me out.  The prices freaked me out, and here's the catch, even though they weren't astronomically high.  It never occurred to me that the prices could be good, considering what you get for the fee. And that means: high quality food. 

It is always popular to demonize institutional (large) players in the field of life where we choose to shop, eat, socialize, or fornicate.  The four fundamental freedoms being what they are, we want to maximize our individual stance in regard to them, like some boxing match.

Here's the news though (for me): what pissed me off about whole foods wasn't so much whole foods in itself; it was, instead, the people who chose to go to whole foods, and the radical idea that they could make different decisions relating to the four freedoms, and that, gasp, it was possible to even make decisions regarding those four.  See, unlike many (but not all) of my friends, when I grew up, I didn't choose where to eat, or shop, or socialize, or fornicate.  There were no choices.  You just did.  And that just doing was a bit of a norm.  And that norm mean that a slew of actions that could make me incrementally happier made me incrementally sadder when I realized I could have been incrementally happier and was not; to wit, those bastards who had decided to nourish their bodies and taste decent food (city bastards, no?; effeminate and elite and no good!) and not pay that much for it  (they're not all morgans and vanderbilts in whole foods, you'll note), well, fuck them.  Whole foods was a cancer!  The only logical conclusion, I'm sure you'll agree.