What We Love Wednesdays: Whole Foods (An innermost thoughts rant, brought to you by Laura)

We are unashamedly in love with Whole Foods. Visiting numerous times with my parents in Boise, I was shocked to find out there are two locations in London! (Old news, I’ve been told, but new news to us!)

Us enjoying a WF lunch in Boise, and the much less impressive London entrance on the right. Cheese thrown in for effect.

So naturally, the brand-loyal foodies we are, we are going to take our besties Sarah & Lauren there for lunch when they come down to London this weekend. We’ll take them to the High Street Kensington location, which is apparently the biggest in the whole world! (woah.)

I find that every single time I go to lunch at WF I go through what can only be described as a full-on emotional journey. For those of you who have yet to experience the ready foods section at WF, it’s an entire floor of the most delicious foods ever, with a great variety – you pick up a plastic tub and put whatever you’d like in it. Simple enough, right?

Not for me (and I daresay everyone else!) – lunch at WF goes like this in my head.

Every. Single. Time.

‘OHmygod this is the best place on earth. I actually feel like crying, that’s how much I love it. I think this’d be what heaven was like, if there was one.’

(source)

I grab a tub and walk around the entire floor with it, trying to figure out my next move.

‘Oooh I want yellow Thai curry, ooh butternut squash stew sounds nice, oh my god Chinese food! Italian meatballs? YUM!’

All of a sudden my joy turns to panic.

‘I can’t just pick one! I want all of it, what do I get? Do I get rice with the curry, what goes with squash? Am I just wasting room in my tub if I go for filler foods? What if it all mixes together?!?! This isn’t heaven, this is hell – American consumer hell – too many choices, I am not good at choices - I CAN’T HANDLE THE PRESSURE!!!!’

I’ve lost it at this point, and decide to get a bit of everything I wanted, but no filler foods like rices or potatoes. It’s all in nice lines in the tub until I drop a meatball in there, at which point it kind of all mixes together to make a kind of Italian butternut squash curry.

I’ve shoved as much as I can physically fit into the tub in an effort to outsmart WF by getting more for the price of the tub.

….and then I remember that it’s measured by weight, not size of box.

‘DAMN YOU, WHOLE FOODS!!!!!’

I weigh my lunch on the scale which helpfully tells you how much of your hard earned wages you’ll be giving them today. £9?!?!?

(source)

Panicked, I look around me to see if anyone will notice if I put some of my food back. But as it’s all a bit mixed, I decide it’d be much too embarrassing to attempt, and if they’re smart enough to overwhelm me with choice, they’ll no doubt have security cameras everywhere. In my fragile state, I couldn’t deal with having to explain why there are green sauced mini corns in the yellow curry in the WF holding cell (I’m just assuming that exists at this point).

So I sulk over to the checkout counter, but the person at the till is so nice, and seemingly excited for me to enjoy my amazing lunch, that I feel a bit better about my food purchases. I know they’ll be delicious, after all, and perhaps I deserve to treat myself?

By the time I sit down to eat, I’m back to loving Whole Foods again – and by the second bite, I’m loving my odd mix of foods so much, I resolve to come back again next week.

Whole Foods, you’ve done it again.

Have you been through this roller coaster of delicious choice emotions, or am I just crazy and indecisive?