Look, if homeopathic remedies make you feel better, take them. 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. If non-organic crumbs bother you, avoid them. And there’s much to praise in Whole Foods’ commitment to sustainability and healthful foods.
Still: a significant portion of what Whole Foods sells is based on simple pseudoscience. And sometimes that can spill over into outright anti-science (think What Doctors Don’t Tell You, or Whole Foods’ overblown GMO campaign, which could merit its own article). If scientific accuracy in the public sphere is your jam, is there really that much of a difference between Creation Museum founder Ken Ham, who seems to have made a career marketing pseudoscience about the origins of the world, and John Mackey, a founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, who seems to have made a career, in part, out of marketing pseudoscience about health?
From a must-read Daily Beast article titled “Whole Foods: America’s Temple of Pseudo-Science,” which contrasts the left’s embrace of pseudo-science in the form of dubious claims about foods (from homeopathic “remedies” to GMOs). I really wish I had been the one to write this, and bonus points for referencing the Whole Foods store that was the one grocery store within walking distance from our house when we lived in North Carolina.
Besides the left’s own love affair with pseudo-science in the form of bogus health claims, I never understood why the same left — usually so quick to decry the Tea Party, the Koch Brothers, and rag on “libertardians” — loves Whole Foods so much, given its CEO’s professed love of Ayn Rand and Austrian economists and his comparing Obamacare to fascism, no less.