Green With Envy

Take it easy on the lettuce, lady," the guy in the white coat blasts across the store. "If the lettuce was any good, I wouldn't have to pick through it," the lady shouts back, not even bothering to turn around much less stop picking. But that was then. All forgotten now. All forgiven. London is thrilled with its new Whole Foods. Paris is jealous, not just of the new U.K. branch but of the stores in New York, too. It's a wonderful feeling to having London "copy" us, especially since London is now the coolest city in the world (don't take my word for it; I read it in New York magazine). It's a thrill to have Paris jealous.

New York didn't always have it so good. There was Balducci's, Fairway, and Zabar's, but they weren't supermarkets, which were small (especially in high-rent Manhattan), ill-stocked, and dangerous. Yes, dangerous. Fights would regularly break out at my local Food Emporium, if not actual slug fests at least screaming matches that brought violence to the fore. The culprit was often a little old lady, who either refused to move her cart while endlessly staring at the cans of soup or deliberately bumped your cart to get you to move (yes, deliberately). Or it was a Wall Street type who wasn't used to sharing crowded aisles with ordinary mortals. And then there was the thug caught in the Express Lane with more than 10 items. More screaming, more accusations. How I used to envy the suburban supermarket near my mother's house in St. Louis with the Tripple E aisles, especially the one between the frozen-food cases that had a median strip down the middle. I dubbed it Nueve de Julio, the boulevard in Buenos Aires that's said to be the widest in the world. None of the four Whole Foods in New York has a Nueve de Julio, but the store in the Time-Warner Center and the new one on the Lower East Side are so spacious they might as well be the Pampas with shelves. There is only one line—a single, solitary thread feeding something like 24 registers. For New Yorkers who remember the bad old days, shopping is now more like a yoga class. It's all great… unless you've been to the Whole Foods in Austin. Or to its competitor, the incredible Central Market up the pike, with more varieties of peppers than I could count. Now that's jealous.