Whole Foods founder John Mackey built a retail powerhouse peddling food as sensual, succulent succor. His stores preach organic virtue and profit from culinary vice. Rosie the organic range chicken enjoyed the good life before ending up beheaded, plucked, swathed in plastic and artfully arranged on a bed of ice at the Whole Foods Market inGlendale, California. Rosie spent life in a custom ranch house in California's wine country and exercised in an airy, sunlit building on an earthen floor covered with clean hulls of rice. She nibbled on golden corn and flew the coop in an outdoor yard. And unlike poultry sold at most grocery stores, this bird never used antibiotics or growth hormones.
That, at least, is the reassuring tale told in the brochure (printed on recycled paper, of course)available for discerning shoppers at the track-lit, pristine poultry cooler in Whole Foods stores. The real point: Rosie is priced at a princely $3.29 a pound, more than twice the cost of your regular bird. Just about every food has a story behind it at this small but remarkably profitable chain, known for luminous, loving displays of succulent and savory foodstuffs and prices so obscenely high they prompt gasps of disbelief. Every Whole Foods store is a bountiful temple of wholesome eco-righteousness, a refuge from fears (valid or not) of synthetic pesticides, growth hormones and genetically modified Frankenfoods.
http://www.forbes.com/global/2005/0207/050.html
