Tag Archives: whole foods

WHY I BUY GROCERIES ONLINE FROM WHOLE FOODS BUT NOT FROM SAFEWAY.

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There is a serious defect in the Safeway app. It is something you should think about if you decide to order groceries using the Safeway app yourself. When you order groceries from Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh, if an item is out of stock, you get a text message telling you that the item is out of stock and asking you to approve or reject a suggested substitution. Safeway does not have that feature. As a result, Safeway pickers use their own judgment when making substitutions if an item is out of stock. I have ordered groceries twice using the Safeway’s app, and on both occasions, I got substitutions that were so awful that I threw them out as soon as they arrived. Last week, I ordered a half gallon of half & half to make panna cotta. Safeway was out of half & half, so without asking for my approval, the picker substituted fat-free half & half. Fat-free half & half (see photo below) is a horrible product. Nobody should buy or consume this stuff. I think people who buy fat-free half & half do so because they assume that it is a low-calorie alternative to real half & half, which it isn’t. Fat-free half & half is not a diet food. To compensate for its lack of flavor and creaminess, fat-free half & half is loaded with corn syrup and sugar. You are not going to lose weight putting this stuff in your coffee instead of the real thing. In order to make fat-free half & half look thick, like real half & half, it also contains carrageenan, a thickener made from Irish moss. Carrageenan is not good for you. It is banned in some countries. Fat-free half & half also contains artificial flavoring and preservatives. As soon as I saw what Safeway delivered, down the drain it went. I will not order anything again from the Safeway app until they fix this problem. As I said last month, I am a fussy food buyer.

WHOLE FOODS.

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Now that Amazon owns Whole Foods, I hope – and sincerely hope – that they will get rid of the snake oil section at Whole Foods stores. It’s is a pretty big section of their stores. Have you ever read the labels of the health and beauty products at Whole Foods? You should! They sell products that sound like they can treat all sorts of medical problems, but don’t actually say that they do anything at all; products like ‘herbal liver cleanser’, ‘herbal colon cleaner’, & ‘kidney tonic.’ Products like these remind me of the traveling snake oil salesmen of the 19th Century. Whole Foods sells a lot of medicine of dubious efficacy, like homeopathic headache remedies, but they don’t sell aspirin, Tylenol, or Advil. Why? Store employees will tell you that they don’t sell these products because they aren’t ‘natural.’ The fact that they work is irrelevant. Never forget this – ‘natural’ does not mean ‘good for you.’ Arsenic, cyanide, and rattlesnake venom are all natural products. They are all found in nature, but that doesn’t mean that they are ‘good for you.’ They also sell a lot of gluten-free toiletries at Whole Foods, such as their own store brand of gluten-free baby shampoo. Now OK, the baby shampoo they sell at Safeway and Giant supermarkets doesn’t say ‘gluten-free’ on the label, but so what? You aren’t planning to feed shampoo to your baby, are you? I never buy anything at Whole Foods health section, but I do sometimes look at the people buying stuff there and wonder: “What is that person thinking?” Most of the customers buying these products look intelligent and well-educated. Today, I overheard a customer at Whole Foods ask a store employee: “Do you sell gluten-free eye shadow?” Yes, it turned out that they did have gluten-free eye shadow.