Whole Food
I was employed at Whole Foods: Lincoln Park, Chicago for several years in the late nineties, and wrote about the experience, including conflicts and specific as well as philosophical ideas for improvement. The Nutrition Team is responsible for the vitamins, herbs, supplements and body care items sold in this giant health food store, as I called it, and that was my team. Whole Foods Market is still open today, and it has retained its focus on healthy food produce and grocery products, over the years, but its commitment to herbs and other supplements seems to have lessened (our large Edgewater store has no herbs in bulk, not enough space for a full range of vitamins and supplements and limited boxed teas, which make it a reduced-service instead of a complete health food store. I bemoan this fact.).
“‘The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.’ So spoke Thomas Edison, who bequeathed us so much; if he is right, the health food store will become ever more important as years pass.” -“Plans for a Healthy Health Food Store, March 3, 1998
Here’s a quote from our higher up bosses: “To All Nutrition Team Members: Thank you all for everything you have done. It is a privilege and honor to work with you all.” -Bob C., Jim M, March 19, 1998
“My team is expected to suggest to our customers solutions for the healing of their bodies that they might in the past have paid a a traditional (Western) doctor good money to hear! Our company doesn’t hire experts to dispense this wisdom, but poorly paid persons like myself…We are expected to learn and research healing possibilities on the job.” -Report to Whole Foods: Lincoln Park Team Members, January 14, 1999
“Our whole society is suffering because nutritional knowledge is not in the hands of the majority of the consumers. Whole Foods is a testimony to how shoppers will buy when they become somewhat educated and to their desire to get educated. Whole Foods suffers in its mission because its food store consciousness lags behind its health food store consciousness: the store suggests powerful solutions, then frustrates customers when its hobbled limbs cannot keep up with their desires to buy, buy, buy!” and thus better their lives…
“The Whole Foods: Lincoln Park Nutrition Department puts power in the people’s hands and they respond by buying and feeling better about themselves and attaining better health. Our wisdom needs to be disseminated: only greater service to the community and profit for the store can result. It is a scandal that our medical care system continues to lag behind alternative health care; more and more consumers are turning away from doctors and to it for answers that traditional medicine is not equipped to provide, and, shamefully, many of these answers include nutritional knowledge, such as Whole Foods’ low-paid employees dispense at the drop of a hat.” -“Store/Company/Industry Alert in Preparation for the Year 2000: Plans for an Expanded Healthy Health Food Store,” April 1998
“The commitment of my Nutrition [Team] co-workers is incredible; we must, for a small wage, act as therapist and doctor, oftentimes, which we do, out of love!” -Email to Susannah Frishman-Phillips, subject: Inner Views news from Lincoln Park, Chicago, July 10, 1998
“We make so damn little money anyway, and besides, we care! We in Nutrition are very knowledgeable, skilled, and patient, and we put up with such low salaries not because we are stupid or bad workers, but because we empathize with customers in search of an alternative to traditional American bullshit.”
“If these ideas sound rational and hopeful, it’s because they are!…
“Even if there is no other alternative, we must desire to be the very best we can, for our eyes are in the future, and I predict that changes will come fast and soon; we must be sure that our feet also land there—on the Earth.” -“Store/Company/Industry Alert in Preparation for an Expanded Healthy Health Food Store,” April, 1998
“Public ignorance of nutrition and natural healing seems, at this time, to reward big business more than new herbal, vitamin and alternative medicine products and services challenge it.” -“Peasce Watch 1998: Radical Nutrition Information and Issues”
“It’s nearing the end of the millennium; let’s pretend that we are interested in making a new, improved version of an American health food store, shall we? Here are my ideas on the topic. They are not dependent on the assumption that the future will be the same as today. I see a future that, for instance, might have a truly progressive American president—perhaps a woman, and perhaps in a less threatening world climate—and might see government subsidization of food stores as public services… such that all produce (fruits and vegetables) might be free to the public (this would a long way toward establishing a baseline of good public health, providing for the defense of our country from the inside out)…
“When employees really know food and herbs they become educators of needy customers, transporters into health and greater self-sufficiency. The basic lesson of Utopianism when it comes to food products is that it never pays to keep a customer in the dark—knowledge is power and empowerment is good, for it leads to strength, the opposite of weakness; strength is what our new world needs! You can serve me better if I can help you on to your own two feet—we can then work together…
“Were Whole Foods to convert to doing things the “Holy Foods” way, it could cut its executives’ salaries, which are not excessive, according to J[ohn] Mackey; while he contends that he must pay his executives salaries comparable to those they would elsewhere receive, they should be willing to take cuts and so should he, if they are willing to become involved in a public health project with the future as a core value rather than today’s superficial successes!
“The Holy Foods employees need to be educated about nutrition. They need to work for their entire store, not just for their departments. For example, a customer with a question about ginger supplements for anticipated seasickness who asks a Nutrition Department worker about her options should never be shown only the (most expensive) ginger pills, but should also be told about the fresh ginger root in the produce section of the store. A caring employee will always have the best health of customer and planet in mind when he or she responds to a customer question.
“Let not a corporate body claiming to be progressive try to hold back change for the better!” -“Plans for a Healthy Health Food Store,” March 3, 1998
“Dear Jenny,…
“[Whole Foods] is an accessible public forum (as a capitalist enterprise) in which ideas about health are often exchanged, which is beneficial to both the customer and myself. New avenues of perception are often opened as a result of these interactions, assigning meaning to Whole Foods as a place of enlightenment and its commodities as talismans to guide one on these new paths of consciousness. The ultimate lack of appreciation at this job for what we are truly doing is a great source of frustration for me, and I keep a tenuous balance between this frustration and the satisfaction I get from actively and consciously participating in whole foods as a public health project.” -Seanna, Nutrition Team Co-worker, ~1999
“The phenomena at the store cried to me, elicit us!”
-Job Dialogue, April 1998
“education, this refueling, I say, reach for it! And in the mean time, visualize whirled peas! bee-(a)-cause GREEN IS GOoD, as seedleSs Skateboard Company says!
From the desk of Jenny Walbridge