Let Them Eat Lifestyle

I liken Whole Foods to a certain mega-chain bookseller I once worked for. To the higher-ups books were simply salable units; ghost-written WWF-wrestler biographies and Shakespeare’s works enjoyed equal esteem. I see the same basic attitude at work in Whole Foods: the signs taxonomizing the food are in place simply to facilitate its movement from shelf to register to paper or plastic. Whole Foods’s marketing aesthetic is a thoroughly pragmatic one—one that attempts to ensure that not one organic banana goes rotten, nor one fair-trade espresso bean unground.

A priori delimited grocery purchasing options, which come courtesy of the cultural logic of late capitalism, are likely exacerbated by such entities as Whole Foods, but this may just mean that the terms and conditions under which smug, sanctimonious people express their smugness and sanctimony have shifted. The world will always have its assholes; the only relevant question is whether they wear the somber fustian of Puritans or the unbleached hemp of tree-huggers. Hence the pragmatism I sense behind Whole Foods marketing strategies. More than anything, they reflect not the shopper’s native impulse toward epimeleia heautou, but rather her acquired impulse toward self-actualization within the discourse of lifestyle politics. In other words, the experiential gratification of shopping at Whole Foods trumps the actual utility of shopping there. I mean, if Whole Foods were really about bringing healthy food to the people, about offering a viable (Or should I say “sustainable?") alternative to the factory-farmed fare on the shelves of conventional supermarkets, why the hell do they charge six dollars for a bag of granola? Because the foodstuffs therein are actually positional goods, of course! One can feel all earthy and earnest and bourgeois-bohemian while he also, and perhaps unwittingly, circles the wagons of class ever closer at a time when the foundational American principle of upward mobility has never been in greater jeopardy.

If the concern is to find some amenable grocery milieu in which to apotheosize one’s authenticity, then one need look no further than Whole Foods. If, however, the concern is simply to feel the wan thrill of self-congratulatory cosmopolitanism (I can think of no identity more alienated than that which has been fashioned in accordance with the injunctions of political correctness) then, by all means, one should visit the haphazard cornucopias of Chinatown and the farmers’ market. Cosmopolitanism as I use it here involves a dialectical double-movement where the ethno-geographically relative position one understands herself as occupying in the “global village” becomes actually a subtle re-assertion of Western prerogative—something Zizek inveighs against in The Ticklish Subject. This cosmopolitanism, or “one-world Weltanschauung,” is not, despite protests to the contrary, radically pluralistic Progressivism, but is rather old ethnocentric wine in new bottles—with a dash of Orientalism thrown in for good measure.