45 thoughts on “Whole Foods”

  1. “Michael Schulson is a freelance writer based in Durham, North Carolina. He holds a B.A. in Religious Studies from Yale.”

    Now this is a man who knows science….

        1. Was he spouting dogma? It looked like he was making comparisons of environmentalists to religion and magical thinking. His degree seems in line with that.

  2. Personally I think its all a bunch of bullshit. We have similar stores here. It gets as pathetic as me hearing people around the street say using fertilizer is evil because it ruins food. WTF.

    If I want apples I just go to the supermarket. There are good reasons to avoid processed foods. But not the ingredients themselves which usually have decent quality.

    As for GMO it is more about caution than anything else. Just because is not known to be bad that doesn’t mean it isn’t. Let someone else conduct the field trials for that junk.

    It is well known that before the Neolithic people just ate whatever they had around. If it was berries, nuts, roots, or meat, it just happened to be what they had around. To spend a lot of time thinking about it is useless.

    1. You do know that humans have been genetically modifying plants and animals for thousands of years, don’t you? The only difference between modern and traditional methods is that today we can carefully alter selected genes, instead of just randomly mixing thousands of genes and hoping for a desirable result.

      Those apples you buy at the store are *all* genetically modified. (I live in a foodie paradise, with no fewer than six gourmet food stores within a four-mike radius — but only one of them carries crab apples. And even crabs have probably been modified by selective breeding.)

      The “field trials” have been going on since before the dawn of civilization. They have produced some unpleasant results (the chihuahua comes to mind), but no great catastrophes. (Nature, on the other hand, is cooking up nasty surprises all the time.)

      1. it is one thing to cross breed apples or pears or peas.

        However, Modern Genetic engineering is allowing Gene Sequences from wildly segregated
        species in, or to sequence in whole synthetic protein expression.

        It’s probably very handy to be able to hijack butterflys to make synthetic virus proteins for Polio
        shots or hijack mice to excrete Human insulin or HGH but it’s somewhat problematic to
        have wheat expressing Glyphosphate or BT as self applicating pesticides.

        I mostly eat organic these days, because i think a lot of that is causing cancer.

        I believe i am acting as a consumer using choice, do you have a problem with the free market?

        1. “because i think a lot of that is causing cancer.”

          Any evidence to back that up or is it just a belief? It is fine to have beliefs but you have to also be aware that they are not necessarily reflected by reality.

          You could say, “I don’t have any evidence to back this up but I think these foods could cause cancer.” and we could respect that belief and your personal diet choices but when you take it a step further, “I don’t have any evidence but I think these foods cause cancer and I am going to ban all work in this area and dictate to farmers how to raise their crops.” then we need to take a look at the evidence supporting your beliefs.

        2. “it’s somewhat problematic to have wheat expressing Glyphosphate or BT as self applicating pesticides”

          Why? A lot of the anti-GMO sentiment I’ve seen is coming from people who seem to think that what you just mentioned might result in some kind of The Happening-style plague or something, and I’m not even exaggerating.

          Inserting a pesticide gene into a different plant won’t cause that plant to suddenly produce some unspecified kind of poison, but that’s what many anti-GMO people seem to believe.

    2. As for GMO it is more about caution than anything else. Just because is not known to be bad that doesn’t mean it isn’t. Let someone else conduct the field trials for that junk.

      Nicely closed mind there, Dogzilla.

      1. If you want to be a beta tester fine. I don’t. Let someone else eat the Windows Vista of food. It is bad enough that things like canola, which was selectively bred, are around. I prefer to stay out of genetic engineering ping-pong. I know enough about complex systems to know that changing one element is enough to cause hard to predict outcomes. In that you may get what you want, but you will get something else too.

        1. You as an individual are perfectly free to make your own choices. What I object to is when zealots in the genetically modified food arena refuse to allow others to make their own choices. Consider the case of golden rice. They spliced in genes to produce beta carotene in rice. This has the potential of saving millions of poor people around the world from going blind but to the zealots, golden rice must be stopped. They don’t have to worry about going blind and for all their moral preening, they don’t give a damn about others who will lose their sight due to vitamin A deficiency. How those ignorant moral pricks can sleep at night is beyond me.

          1. You as an individual are perfectly free to make your own choices.

            I am only free to make my own choices if I am allowed the information to do so.
            When the food is not labeled as GMO much less which GMO variant then I am not free.

          2. I have no problem with accurate food labels and gladly support them if they’ll let products that can help people come to market. A similar case can be made for food irradiated with gamma rays to kill bacteria. Some 4000 Americans die of food poisoning every year and likely many times that number die worldwide. Food irradiation – a technology that NASA has used for decades – could not only save a lot of those lives, they would save energy because food wouldn’t need so much refrigeration to remain fresh. However, the zealots are so convinced that someone, somewhere, somehow may get sick because of this technology that they’re overlooking the thousands of people who’re actually dying every year from preventable food poisoning.

          3. I do not think golden rice is a bad idea but can’t these people grow carrots or something? Most of the people with these nutritional deficiencies are in tropical climates where mangos grow easily and those have beta carotene too. Wheat doesn’t have beta carotene either and we do fine here. To me it is a solution in search of a problem. You just need to have a more varied diet. For whatever reason a lot of people have this fixation on producing some kind of food you can eat to replace everything else. No need to invent it. We already have it. It’s called milk.

          4. @Frank: “I am only free to make my own choices if I am allowed the information to do so.
            When the food is not labeled as GMO much less which GMO variant then I am not free.”

            Fair enough. But you also have the option of explicitly shopping for organic/free-range/whatever food, instead of buying whatever stuff of possibly-questionable provenance is at the supermarket.

  3. the Paleo diet is probably premised more on The Flintstones than it is on any actual evidence about human evolutionary history.

    The Paleo diet may be based on a cartoon version of anthropology, but Fred and Wilma were not yuppy enough to eat typical “paleo” recipes like “chicken walnut cheese wrapped in bacon,” “low-carb jambalaya”, “basalmic grilled zucchini”, “paleo chorizo sweet potato and kale stew,” and “organic catsup.”

    The real role model seems to be the Geiko caveman:

    http://blog.spartanrace.com/the-paleo-diet/

  4. If the Paleo diet helps you eat fewer TV dinners, that’s great—even if the Paleo diet is probably premised more on The Flintstones than it is on any actual evidence about human evolutionary history.

    He uses this link as a source: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/07/23/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/

    Both the article and the SA use the typical stereotype of cavemen eating gigantic hunks of mammoth ribs. They never bothered to actually look into the Paleo Diet, which consists of a lot of vegetables.

    Smarmy ignorance seems to be de rigeur in journalism these days.

    1. I could care less about what our moron tree dwelling ancestors ate man. Plus not all monkeys that live on trees are vegetarian.

      1. Our genetic makeup is based on the diet of our early ancestors. It covers a time span of two million years. It matters very much what they ate.

          1. So you read a blog from someone who says the diet is horsecrap. I can find a dozen people who will tell us the Annukaki created us in some orbital spaceship.

            You really need to do some research on a topic before you disparage it. Try this site: http://www.marksdailyapple.com There is plenty of science to back me up.

            Like I said, smarmy ignorance.

        2. The fact that we are optimised to make the most of paleo food doesn’t mean paleo food is optimal for us. *We* were optimised, not the food.

          1. Exactly. The idea that a natural diet has to be optimal is a religious assumption, not a scientific fact.

            To turn it into a testable scientific hypothesis, we would need a group of test subjects eating *real* paleo diets — not caveman-themed gourmet sea bass with mango salsa.

            We know that the hypothesis fails for some other species. The useful lifespan of horses has increased significantly in reason years, due to improvements in diet. “Senior Feed” probably added two years to my boy’s life.

          2. How does that thinking apply to New Guinea? And if you mean someone from New Guinea who’s gone paleo, should you run away very quickly?

      2. “I could care less about what our moron tree dwelling ancestors ate man. ”

        I don’t think there is any evidence that shows our ancestors were more moronic than we are today.

  5. Mackey is also a climate denialist, so it’s not surprising that he’s happy to engage in other wars on science.

  6. To turn it into a testable scientific hypothesis, we would need a group of test subjects eating *real* paleo diets — not caveman-themed gourmet sea bass with mango salsa.

    Um, that is what people do. They’re called scientists. And the evidence points to great deficiencies in the standard American diet.

    Your snark tells me you do not understand the subject, nor do you care to understand it. You’re just an idiot who thinks he’s right because he’s right.

    4. Those recipe books are not written by scientists, and no credible scientist would tell you they represent what cavemen actually ate.

      The real caveman’s diet was more like that of a hobo eating out of a dumpster rather than the rich yuppies who shop at Whole Foods. Cavemen scavenged, ate whatever they could find, which was often spoiled and generally pretty unappetizing by modern standards. Sometimes, they couldn’t find anything for days or even weeks at a time.

      You couldn’t cook most of those elaborate “paleo cookbook” dishes without a modern kitchen, even if you had the ingredients. Which cavemen didn’t. There were no spices, no and no recipe. Cooking techniques were little more than throwing food into the fire. Forget “sous vide paleo cooking.”

      If you want to eat the latest yuppie diet, go ahead, but don’t kid yourself that it’s anything your caveman ancestors would recognize.

      1. Edward

        Maybe your ancestors ate reprocessed animal dung and rotten vegetables, but my
        ancestors were living well thousands of years ago.

        1. Do you know what time period the paleolithic is? I kinda doubt you know much about anything that happened over the last couple thousand years either.

      2. Again, I point out that you do not know what you are talking about. You are conflating separate issues. In fact, you are seriously limiting yourself because of your anti-hipster/yuppie/hippie/whatever temper tantrum.

        You are taking a diet that has been around much longer than that douche website you sent me to. Just because some hipster jumps on to an idea, doesn’t mean the idea is bad. If you liked BMWs, would you not buy one because they were suddenly trendy, whole-food-kind-of-shopper cars?

        The point of the paleo diet is to emulate as best as we can the foods that our ancestors ate before agriculture. Who gives a rat’s rear end if we take berries and meat and assemble them into a froux-froux dish? The point is that there are certain genes that are best expressed with certain foods. This is because our bodies adapted to these foods. Yes, those foods were meat, berries, fruits and vegetables. We’ve been cooking for probably a hundred thousand years or more, so that might include tubers, too. Is it wrong to make recipes that taste good even though they have these ingredients? Of course not.

        So quit using a stupid cookbook as your argument to science. When you can answer why there is an epidemic of type 2 diabetes, and why many people who give up grains, gluten, sometimes casein and sugar are suddenly off their diabetes medication, and why cholesterol turns out not to be the cause of heart disease, then we can talk. Until then, enjoy whining about yuppies at Whole Foods.

      4. I would analogize the concept to a bunch of African bushmen who manage to open a Hostess factory and abandon their hunter-gatherer diet that they’ve had for tens of thousands of years, mainly because the factory can churn out convenience food in virtually unlimited quantities. As their post-Hostess society matures, their concept of nutrition would involve balancing the amount of Twinkies with the amount of chocolate cup cakes and Zingers. Then one day a village elder points out that maybe their health problems could be fixed by going back to their pre-Hostess diet.

  8. Well, that’s one way to summarize an article that concludes “But while issues of science-and-society are always tied up, in some ways, with politics, they’re not bound to any particular part of the spectrum. ” But not the best way.

    As a data point, the area my local Whole Foods serves is overwhelmingly Republican, but it still finds it worthwhile to stock the same snake oil products the article complains about.

    But I still shop there from time to time. because a lot of the other stuff is pretty tasty.

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