Saturday, January 12, 2008

Welcome To The World Of Hippie Food

My supermarket time has mostly been spent in the regular standard markets that we all know and love. It's been the Alpha Betas or Safeway's of Albertsons for me though there was also the 24 hour market in South San Francisco that I used to frequent when I needed to shop after the other places closed. I'll always remember that place for the night I stopped in after work at around 2am and found a woman in the produce aisle talking to the melons. You just don't tend to forget a thing like that.

This past week found me experiencing a new store that I had never shopped in before. I wasn't purposely avoiding the place. It just never wound up being a place that I purposely went to. Yes, it was time for me to go into the Whole Foods Market near my apartment.

The situation came down to my roommate, who had driven us to the the place that she works and I was temping at, needing to stop off and pick up a couple things on the way home. Unlike your standard stores, it did amaze me to see how compact everything was. People complain about grocery stores being built like mazes but Whole Foods just proves it.

The main part of my excursion turned into me looking at all of the amazingly worded labels on the boxes and bags of food. I understand that you can do a lot more with veggie versions of meat these days but it left me giggling when I saw the "Vegetarian Chicken Sandwich" in one of the freezer cases. It was amazing to note just how many ways that there are to make things healthy or, at the very least, better for you. A person would think that gluten was the devil when you see how rejected it is in that store.

As I walked through the aisles, I found what could now be called my favorite food label that I've ever seen. This was something that I nearly purchased just for the name alone. I'd have no real need for the thing but it just screamed out to be bought. The winner product is...

"Free Range Chicken Broth"

Now I know what they actually mean by the name but it just made me crack up in the aisle. You just can't say no to a label like that.

For those of you looking for the stereotypical "hippie market" idea that people tend to have about Whole Foods Market, you can go with my cashier who walked up to the register loudly singing along to the Grateful Dead song playing over the muzak system. If that floats your boat then you can go with it. For me, the place seemed pretty cool to me and it was even better when I paid for my organic ketchup.