Whole Foods Junkie

A while back I wrote about Stew Leonard's, the three-store supermarket chain that features its own dairy products, singing cows and a giraffe and monkey, I believe, and a zigzag maze that winds through the store in a throughly market-researched design that ends in the piping hot prepared foods section that you can't walk by without buying something, like their awesome storemade meatballs.

Today, we turn to Whole Foods, the hip, organic, ecofriendly market. There is a store in Glastonbury, the next town over, where I work, and where we do most of our shopping. The store is powered by a fuel cell, and they donate 5 % of their profits to some cause that I don't quite remember.

I am a sucker for Whole Foods. I pretty much like everything there. That's an exaggeration, but it is a truth that you can't go there without spending at least $50 (my friend Jeremy maintains the figure is $100 for him.)

From their Italian rustic pizza (I ate it tonight) to their milk (not glamorous, but organic and relatively cheap) to cajun shrimp (great in pasta) to cereal bars (good when you're running out the door in the morning), the salad and hot foods bar, cookies, bread, olives, the place features aisle after aisle of good food. Their beer selection is also impressive. Their store brand dark chocolate bars are the best I've eaten.

The quality of course comes at a price. We spent $78 tonight and essentially got dinner, two chocolate bars, some frozen foods, and a bunch of the aforementioned products. But the thing is, we didn't buy much, only two shopping bags of food.

It is a weakness of ours, definitely, and we have no business shopping there, living on one salary. However, the food is so good that it's hard to turn the car from there at times (not for full blown groceries, but once every few weeks for special dinners/lunches) and go to Stop and Shop, or worse, Shaw's. Can't do Shaw's.

We're grocery store snobs. We know it. We'll go broke in the process. At least we'll go broke with good food in our stomach.