Whole Foods: The Mother Ship

The Whole Foods chain started here in Austin, where the mother ship store sits at 6th and Lamar downtown. It is not the original store, which was much smaller and a couple blocks away, but it is the stand-in for it and the mythical heart of the organization today. We put off our first visit for a time when we could dawdle, pause, stare, peruse, sigh and otherwise fully appreciate the experience: a Thursday date night.

Whole Foods and I go way back. I lived in Berkeley in the late 1980s when Whole Foods was just beginning to invade the Bay Area. They took over what used to be a co-op grocery store there, which caused a lot of protest, made worse because Whole Foods is non-union. Today, Whole Foods continues to be in political hot soup thanks to the peculiar views of its CEO, who most recently earned notoriety for writing a WSJ op-ed against Obama's health care plan. For these kinds of reasons, I have always struggled with Whole Foods.  But when Whole Foods took over a mainstream down-on-its-luck grocery store in my previous home of Redwood City, CA, I celebrated. I was there on opening day, smiling at every "team" employee and thanking them all from the bottom of my property-owning heart. Being near Whole Foods meant our house value increased, a boost that even those of us in the Silicon Valley could appreciate.

Our quality of food also shot up. In our neighborhood, mostly working class but slowly transitioning to a Google enclave, being seen with the green woven WF bags was not necessarily a good sign because many folks refused to pay that kind of money for groceries. (Back in the day, my Berkeley grad school peers called the co-op replacement Whole Paycheck.) For me, shopping at Whole Foods was a personal money-management choice: We drove low-end, high-quality Japanese cars and kept them until they nearly died, then took the money we saved on vehicles and spent it on upscale American mustard. There's logic in there somewhere. And with a small child in the house, grocery shopping at Whole Foods while leaving my daughter at home with her dad became a kind of therapy, a relaxing stay in a gently-lit setting where I could sip a latte while poring over the ingredient labels on marinade bottles. No mainstream grocery store - like Safeway in California or HEB in Texas - could come close to providing that kind of escapism. I won't claim that we reaped all the health benefits of our choice because we still had flaws in the conversion process (raw vegetable to gourmet dinner) back home. As we wryly noted, we simply had a higher quality of vegetable rotting in the bottom bins. But we couldn't really blame the store for that.

So back to the Mother Ship, aka 80k square feet of sheer amazing food displays. There must be at least half a dozen little cafe-like areas where you can sit down and dine on food prepared before your eyes: BBQ, pasta, burritos, vegan concoctions, or, as we did, seafood. I had a superb crabcake made with Maryland blue crab, pared with a great chardonnay. Our WF stores back in CA were mere shadows of this one, which will become a destination stop for our visiting friends and family. Call me a fan, high prices and all. As an added bonus, there are the nifty cart escalators that transport your groceries to the basement garage. Having date night in the grocery store would speak really poorly of Austin if the store were not the mother ship Whole Foods. Go there and see what I mean.