Whole Foods: America’s Temple of Pseudoscience

Daily Beast ^ | 02/24/2014 | Michael Schulson

[SeekAndFind]

Americans get riled up about creationists and climate change deniers, but lap up the quasi-religious snake oil at Whole Foods. It’s all pseudoscience—so why are some kinds of pseudoscience more equal than others?

If you want to write about spiritually-motivated pseudoscience in America, you head to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. It’s like a Law of Journalism. The museum has inspired hundreds of book chapters and articles (some of them, admittedly, mine) since it opened up in 2007. The place is like media magnet. And our nation’s liberal, coastal journalists are so many piles of iron fillings.

But you don’t have to schlep all the way to Kentucky in order to visit America’s greatest shrine to pseudoscience. In fact, that shrine is a 15-minute trip away from most American urbanites.

I’m talking, of course, about Whole Foods Market. From the probiotics aisle to the vaguely ridiculous Organic Integrity outreach effort (more on that later), Whole Foods has all the ingredients necessary to give Richard Dawkins nightmares. And if you want a sense of how weird, and how fraught, the relationship between science, politics, and commerce is in our modern world, then there’s really no better place to go. Because anti-science isn’t just a religious, conservative phenomenon—and the way in which it crosses cultural lines can tell us a lot about why places like the Creation Museum inspire so much rage, while places like Whole Foods don’t.

My own local Whole Foods is just a block away from the campus of Duke University. Like almost everything else near downtown Durham, N.C., it’s visited by a predominantly liberal clientele that skews academic, with more science PhDs per capita than a Mensa convention.

Still, there’s a lot in your average Whole Foods that’s resolutely pseudoscientific. The homeopathy section has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver. The book section—yep, Whole Foods sells books—boasts many M.D.’s among its authors, along with titles like The Coconut Oil Miracle and Herbal Medicine, Healing, and Cancer, which was written by a theologian and based on what the author calls the Eclectic Triphasic Medical System.

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[HereInTheHeartland]

“But walk the perimeter of the store and you get some very good produce, fish, meat, dairy products and nuts at very reasonable prices. “

I observe it’s all very expensive. The produce is the same brands I see at my normal grocery store. Whole Foods just marks them up.

[Daffynition]

I have said this many times on the forum...WF has a good business model, I can support......the customers who frequent WH are the most pretentious people on the planet.

In this long, cold snowy winter, I'll take my GD there to do her homework....the sunny, clean and bright eat-in restaurant is quiet and civilized...we get a nice snack and have a *girl's* moment. Grazing at WF is an art form.

The customers I see in the checkout lane are buying overpriced prepared foods that are better if you fix them at home. I know some of these people....who earn six-figures....live on the *other side of the tracks* and carry home the goods in the Benzs, Rovers and BMWs .......put their organic WF in their Sub-Zeros...in their $250K kitchens...which they don't use for food prep, except to have available when the hired chef caters their next party.

Case in point....I went to WH a few days B4 Valentine's Day to find some long-stem strawberries...for my GD to dip as a present to her Mom & dad for the holiday. WF didn't have them...which surprised me...but I found them in my cheap-as-dirt grocery store I frequent on the *other side of the tracks*. Meh.

[Ellendra]

The “whole foods” movement is strong enough that the foods that you could only find at Whole Foods a few years ago are now cropping up in every grocery store, for a fraction of the price and with fewer scowling yuppies.

I was glad to see things like whole-milk yogurt and whole chia seeds turn up at my regular grocery store. Whole-milk yogurt tastes 100X better than the low-fat slime. And I use chia for erosion control on my land :)

[Ellendra]

Yeah. I’ve tasted honest-to-goodness organic free-range eggs, and they are nothing like the overpriced ones at the grocery store.

[warsaw44]

Same here but they should not cost 6.00 a dozen.

Prices at Whole Foods is shocking. The meat department alone is gold plated.

[Darren McCarty]

Hey, I like organic food. Free range venison and free range turkey. I can shoot it myself......

[yldstrk]

Great article

whole foods is such a load of steaming crap

organic to me means insects and poop, yuck

I like kosher just fine thanks, at least it’s clean

oh the cool hoity toity shoppers at whole foods, so plastic

fruit leather indeed eye roll

[catnipman]

You know what’s worse than shopping at a Whole Foods?

Shopping at a Whole Foods in Boulder, Colorado. I kid you not. This place is infested with nothing but know-it-all limousine liberals, University of Colorado professors, professors wives, professors mistresses, professors children, professors students, rich “hippies”, and other assorted liberal scum. This place is packed tighter than sardines in a can with such people, and the amount of smugness and righteousness trapped under one roof is so thick you could cut it with a knife.

[minnesota_bound]

I was at Whole Foods for the first time this past weekend and bought some ‘back to nature’ cookies and some chips. Neither of which gave me any headaches. I have to carefully shop to avoid msg which will ruin any snack or meal by giving me headaches.

With that said I was shocked at their $12.99 price for steak when I can buy it at $5.99 at Albertsons. Maybe there is a difference but I ain’t paying to find out!

I also was amused about their cooked chicken that displayed on the package the 5 steps in how the chicken was humanly treated. Ahem, it still ended up dead and cooked by step 6 ....!

[minnesota_bound]

There are fractions like the 7-11 stores.....

[LoneRangerMassachusetts]

Whole Foods meats and poultry are better than the common supermarket hands down. Sure there are a lot of strange looking shopper there, but their butchers are regular guys.

[VerySadAmerican]

20-20 years ago had a segment on organic foods. The organic had a lot more bacterial.

[Ellendra]

Same here but they should not cost 6.00 a dozen.

The ones I had were $2 a dozen, direct from the farmer :)

[toothfairy86]

I buy most of my meat, fish, milk and eggs at WF. The butchers really know their stuff. Sure it’s usually more expensive than a traditional grocery store, but it’s cheaper than what you’d get at a restaurant. If you’re into bacon, ham, and pepperoni, check out Wellshire Farms products. Yum!

[dalereed]

“Coconut oil - great stuff. Foods not drenched in pesticides, herbicides and petrochemicals - great stuff. Probiotics - great stuff.”

Pure crap!!

Organic food=throw crap at it and hope for something edible full of bugs!

[aMorePerfectUnion]

“Pure crap!! Organic food=throw crap at it and hope for something edible full of bugs!”

Crap has been used as fertilizer for centuries - great fertilizer... but not the only fertilizer used in organic food production.

Other than that, the rest of your thought or exclamation is crap. I suggest you do more research. If you can back it up with a fact or two, I’m glad to discuss it. If you want to keep it as just your opinion, I respect that.

[GunRunner]

The homeopathy section has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver.

Mankind can pat itself of the back for microprocessors and space travel, but there's no better evidence that we're only a few thousand years out of the caves than the fact that people still buy homeopathic products.

My wife bought some homeopathic "gripe water" for our infant, and was convinced it worked, even though I poured it out and replaced it with tap water as soon as she bought it.

[warsaw44]

We had chickens when I was growing up and there isn’t anything like a farm fresh egg.

So much protein the yolks are orange!