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I used to sometimes go to the Whole Foods store when I lived in Baltimore. I don’t know what they are like now, but I recall back when I went, they sold both “organic” and so called “conventional”, e.g. non organic produce but they were labeled as such but both were more expensive than my local grocery store. The only reason I would ever go there is when I wanted to cook something special that required ingredients that I just couldn’t find in my local grocery store like ingredients to make paella (real saffron and very fresh clams and real Spanish chorizo sausage for instance).

Their produce section was amazing, full of very fresh produce of all kinds. And I loved their cheese department, one of the few places I could find real imported Norwegian Gjetost. I also loved their seafood department. I’ve had some very bad experiences buying supposedly fresh seafood at my regular local grocery store (I bought a bag of muscles from Super Fresh – what used to be A&P but when I got them home, they smelled so bad, so rancid and reeked of ammonia that I nearly threw up. I put them in a heavy trash bag and took them back to the store for a refund but the store manager at first refused to refund my money, trying to tell me that’s what muscles are supposed to smell like ) but the seafood at Whole Food was very fresh and premo, although it was also at a premo price.

I also recall buying veal and some very good spring lamb at Whole Foods. I got a cookbook from a neighbor and good friend one Christmas, a Williams and Sonoma cookbook; Snow Country Cooking that had a recipe for Braised Veal Shanks (Osso Buco) that I really wanted to make for her and her husband as a “thank you” and I went from grocery store to grocery store looking for veal shanks and couldn’t find them or any veal in any store until I finally found them at Whole Foods. And the guy at the meat counter was very friendly and very helpful as were all the Whole Foods employees I encountered.

Now some of their customers did, as someone said, look rather “crunchy”. I saw a fair number of pasty looking, vegetarian, dreadlock wearing, smelling of patchouli oil PETA types but in all fairness, none of them gave me a hard time and I also saw a lot of upper income types and just “foodies”, people who like to cook like me.

Now that I live in central PA, the only major grocery chains are Giant and Weis. Giant is somewhat better than Weis but I’d really love to see a Wegmans open up near me. The closest one to me is in Hunt Valley MD and Mechanicsburg PA, both an hour drive away.