Whole Foods

Whole Foods is of course a wonderful place, an emporium of high-quality, politically correct food that is a mecca for those of us lucky enough to have the discretionary income to pay their prices. We live here and now in an amazing food age, where the world is truly our oyster in terms of seeking out global cuisines and finding the ingredients to make an unparalleled range of dishes. Publishers pump out a neverending stream of ever more beautiful cookbooks with recipes our parents never dreamed of.

Often you can find the ingredients these recipes call for at Whole Foods, and often you can't. Sometimes this is surprising, and you discover the flip side of Whole Foods becoming such a dominant supplier with all the constraints of a big business.

For instance, a number of duck recipes call for "duck legs" -- presumably the leg and thigh, though I wouldn't know, because I've never found them at Whole Foods or anywhere else. When I inquired at the new Friendship Heights WF, I was told they don't carry duck legs because their former duck supplier, who provided duck legs, violates company policy by also selling foie gras, and their new supplier, Bell and Evans, doesn't provide duck legs. If I were willing to trek out to the suburbs to find a good Oriental market, I'd probably have a better chance of getting this ingredient, but I won't find it at Whole Foods.

Something much simpler -- stone-ground grits. This is the age of authenticity and stone-ground grits are in, but not at WF. When I finally found a grocery clerk who knew anything about it, after being sent on a number of wild-goose chases through the store, he explained that Arrowhead Mills, which had supplied their grits in the past, for some reason no longer met WF's very high quality standards. He was waiting for an email, he said, from a different supplier, in the hopes that they would be in conformity. "It makes us look bad," he said guiltily, "because other stores have it."

It's clear that a big nationwide business like Whole Foods has to have high standards, especially since that underpins the high prices and profit. If the chain dared to carry duck legs from a provider that sold foie gras, it could face a boycott from zealots who think that is evil (the pros and cons of foie gras are too much of digression here, but I don't think it's an open and shut case).

It's a natural result of WF expanding aggressively, taking over most of its competitors and pushing many of the others out of business. WF sets and enforces the standards, and consumers are left with little choice. I remember in Princeton, my landlady's natural foods store was threatened when big, bad Wild Oats came to town, though that huge chain was subsequently swallowed up by WF, after it digested Fresh Fields and any number of other former competitors. And yet, as the homely little photos plastered on the wall at the Friendship Heights location show, WF too had its humble beginnings in Austin, much like my landlady's little store in Princeton.

It's a reminder to me, once again, that as seductive as Whole Foods is, it's import to support its competitors whenever possible, from farmers' markets to the Grubb Road co-op to Safeway. Perhaps the new Georgetown Safeway or the other new one going up in Bethesda will start offering some big-chain competition to WF.