Whole Foods (or more popularly, Whole Paycheck) Market is a wondrous place. For a foodie, walking through a Whole Foods elicits the same slack-jawed astonishment and effervescent glee as a child entering the Chocolate Room at the Wonka factory. New wonders await around every turn, all organic, natural, and priced for people who can afford to care. Organic? For $8.00 a pound, those chicken breasts had better be orgasmic. But anyplace that lets you grind your own peanut butter, almond butter, or peanut/chocolate butter and offers real maple syrup and olive oil in the bulk foods section gets a silver star in my book.
The bulk foods aisle is like something out of a science fiction film. Row after row of lucite canisters line the shelves, each offering up some exotic grain, dried whoozit or yogurt-covered whatzit. In fact, last night while searching for some bulk Soylent Green (every bit as good as the brand-name stuff, no matter what the rumors say about what goes into it), I stopped short. I'd never really thought about it before, but I'd just assumed that QUADRATRITICALE, the favored grain of tribbles, was a construct of David Gerrold's imagination. But there in front of me was a grain-filled canister labeled TRITICALE. It was like a clueless M*A*S*H viewer learning, years later, that while there was no 4077th unit, there were in fact mobile army surgical hospitals in Korea.
I gave the canister a raised eyebrow any Vulcan would have been proud of and moved on to the $6.99/lb hot food bar.
Posted by Peter at December 22, 2005 4:36 PM