with our economy fucked, ordinary americans will be spending less money on what are considered "luxury items." according to various news reports, this has already started. this means that a lot of people will be spending less on or skipping items like cadillac escalades, expensive cups of coffee from starbucks, macbook pros, "stressed" denim-wear - overpriced clothes made to look like they've never been washed, and a host of other items.

this new financial reality presents a major problem for the organic food industry.

years ago, i made my conscious decision to eat food that wasn't fit for sentient life forms - fish and human gene containing due to genetic modification, zapped with radiation, earth sapping, pesticide laden, growth hormoned, synthetic fertilized food was out. simple, organic food - food that isn't composed of things that some corporation decided i should be eating in the name of higher profit margins, at the expense of my health. now, organic food is not cheap. the united states government doesn't subsidize organic farmers like it does mega-farms and farmers who subscribe to the archer daniels midland monopoly. these subsidies artificially deflate the price of the frankenfoods at your local supermarket and make the price of organic food much higher, percentage-wise. so, i end up paying sometimes, twice as much for my groceries as i would if i ate crap.

around the time that i made this decision, i started seeing headlines that others were making the same decision. organic food's market share has risen steadily over the past decade or so, so much so that major name brands, like kraft and heinz and others have their own organic products.

this is great news. but there is a price.

organic food has come in vogue in large part due to whole foods' successful co-opting and conversion of the industry from a decentralized, lefty, hippie led movement to corporate, land rover driving, soccer mom friendly affair in many communities across the country. their dominance has driven many of the independent stores out of business. literally the month after the whole foods on union square opened, my favorite organic food store in the world, with the most amazing organic produce dept. i've ever seen went out of business. this was a huge market, massive, the size of a manhattan supermarket, bankrupted by whole foods. it happened in san diego(where i'm from) too, they opened up, directly across the street from one of the largest and oldest health food stores in the city and sure enough, it's a goner. now, i'm not bitter. well a little, but not enough to cloud my judgement. facts are facts and the fact is, whole foods is a publicly traded company, which means that the business is beholden to it's shareholders - shareholders who demand profits. if organic food goes out of vogue because regular folks can't afford it anymore, whole foods will have no other choice but to cease stocking it. and suddenly, a lot of communities' loose access to organic food.

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