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It is often that I frequent my local Whole Foods market here in San Francisco. I love the food selection and the quality of the meat and produce. I love looking at Vegans make wrinkly faces as they walk by the meat counter and whisper to each other so that everyone can hear, "Man, we should have gone to the co-op." Yes, yes you should have.       But it's not just the fresh items that I like. It's also the canned and boxed things. It's the wall of granolas and the fact that Whole Foods has made me a granola muncher again after revolting against the coconut beet root grain whatever that my parents had me eat as a child. The aisles for grains are fantastic and worth spending time in, for everything is a tasty, healthy choice for the most part.       So, it was with great unhappiness that I found freakin' Cheerios there the other day. Now, these aren't Fruit Loops or anything, but they are 1) Made by the massive conglomerate, General Mills and 2) Able to be gotten anywhere, including my corner liquor store and 3) Not really all that healthy. So, why is Whole Foods carrying boxes of these cereals? Have they suddenly gone organic without any fanfare? No, I doubt that. So, it makes me wonder if this is a new tactic by Whole Foods to slowly sneak in these big brands to try and fool those lulled in to a false sense of health just because they shop there?       Yes, there are the yuppie soccer moms on the cellphones who just toss anything in to their cart and run to the checkout. But, from casual observance, it seems to me that Whole Foods customers are picky people who go there because it's better and because they read labels and look at ingredients. If they decide to start selling crap from the quasi-healthy national brands (albeit some health food brands are getting more national) then it won't be a shock if Whole Foods suddenly reports their first quarterly loss and in a holiday quarter nonetheless.

Biodynamic agriculture is nothing new (in fact, it's based on really old principles) but I've only really heard about it since the start of this year. A very excited and blustery Slovenian by the name of Aleš Kristančič, who owns the Movia Winery started talking about it at a wine dinner I was at. His winery practices it and he made a great deal about how others are coming to him to learn how to do it.       It got me wondering as to what it was. At first I guessed it was just a different name for 'organic' food growing. But, this was only part of it as it takes organic and goes beyond it to create a completely enclosed system for producing whatever it is that you want to produce.       For instance, a local wine producer in Sonoma, Benziger, grows all of their wines biodynamically. They're to the point where they even have Demeter certification, which as I understand it is that biodynamic equivalent of being certified organic, albeit a much trickier thing to accomplish. I'm not sure if it plays in to it, but they certainly make very fine wines up there.       Beyond these wine examples, I received an email today from Numi Tea stating that some part of their teas were now offered as biodynamic certified. I definitely smell something of a buzzword with this because as Evil Blue (Walmart) starts selling organic items, it will cheapen the whole term and maybe at some point negate it. Because biodynamic requires so much more work, thus decreasing the bottom line, I could never see a major retailer like them touching it. And this, is quite fine by me.