fruits, flakes and nuts

I wish Whole Foods sold whole and non-whole foods. This is because often I want non-whole foods. Like sugar-free jelly. I mean, it's equally as bad for you as the full-sugar, organic, sweetened-with-the-honey-from-non-abused-free-range-bees-kind is. You just choose your poison: a fuckload of sugar, or nutra-sweet. This doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. But the nutra-sweet in sugar-free jam is "non-whole."

I imagine walking into Whole Foods, saying, “I’m thrilled with this all-natural smooth organic non-genetically-modified nut butter, but can you show me where this is?” and I pull the jar of sugar-free Smuckers I brought from home out of my purse as a visual aid. “You eat…that?” I imagine the skinny, well-coiffed, lightly-pierced stock guy saying, cringing, leaning back away from me as if I’m about to transform into a puddle of ooze. “Yeah,” I say, glancing down at the jar, and then he snatches it out of my hand like a grenade, dashes it against an adjacent wood-frame stand for yoga mats, breaking off the top, and brandishes the broken-glass end of the sad little jam jar at me wildly. “It’s not WHOLE!!!!” he screeches maniacally, and I scream and run out, all of the employees chasing after me like medieval villagers.