I wonder sometimes if I’m more read than I realize. I have posted on a fair number of sites over the years, so who knows? One of my hobbyhorse issues is the Church of Whole Foods. The hallmark of Baby Boomer marketing in the late empire is turning products into religions. Steve Jobs, the quintessential boomer in many ways, made owning an Apple product s sign of the elect. His revival shows were nothing more than his conformation that the assembled were chosen from eternity to be with the oneness of Apple. There’s a reason why their mobile products sold well, while their back office stuff was a dud. The whole point of being a Mac-Snob was to show the world you were chosen.

That’s what makes this article surprising to me. The Daily Beast reader is the poseur you see at Whole Foods buying sustainably grown organic bananas for fifty bucks a pound. (ironically, sustainably means a billion deaths from starvation if enforced everywhere) Maybe that’s why the author largely misses the religious angle and instead stumbles around the science-y stuff.

If you want to write about spiritually-motivated pseudoscience in America, you head to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. It’s like a Law of Journalism. The museum has inspired hundreds of book chapters and articles (some of them, admittedly, mine) since it opened up in 2007. The place is like media magnet. And our nation’s liberal, coastal journalists are so many piles of iron fillings.

But you don’t have to schlep all the way to Kentucky in order to visit America’s greatest shrine to pseudoscience. In fact, that shrine is a 15-minute trip away from most American urbanites.

I’m talking, of course, about Whole Foods Market. From the probiotics aisle to the vaguely ridiculous Organic Integrity outreach effort (more on that later), Whole Foods has all the ingredients necessary to give Richard Dawkins nightmares. And if you want a sense of how weird, and how fraught, the relationship between science, politics, and commerce is in our modern world, then there’s really no better place to go. Because anti-science isn’t just a religious, conservative phenomenon—and the way in which it crosses cultural lines can tell us a lot about why places like the Creation Museum inspire so much rage, while places like Whole Foods don’t.

My own local Whole Foods is just a block away from the campus of Duke University. Like almost everything else near downtown Durham, N.C., it’s visited by a predominantly liberal clientele that skews academic, with more science PhDs per capita than a Mensa convention.

Still, there’s a lot in your average Whole Foods that’s resolutely pseudoscientific. The homeopathy section has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver. The book section—yep, Whole Foods sells books—boasts many M.D.’s among its authors, along with titles like The Coconut Oil Miracle and Herbal Medicine, Healing, and Cancer, which was written by a theologian and based on what the author calls the Eclectic Triphasic Medical System.

You can buy chocolate with “a meld of rich goji berries and ashwagandha root to strengthen your immune system,” and bottles of ChlorOxygen chlorophyll concentrate, which “builds better blood.” There’s cereal with the kind of ingredients that are “made in a kitchen—not in a lab,” and tea designed to heal the human heart.

Nearby are eight full shelves of probiotics—live bacteria intended to improve general health. I invited a biologist friend who studies human gut bacteria to come take a look with me. She read the healing claims printed on a handful of bottles and frowned. “This is bullshit,” she said, and went off to buy some vegetables. Later, while purchasing a bag of chickpeas, I browsed among the magazine racks. There was Paleo Living, and, not far away, the latest issue of What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Pseudoscience bubbles over into anti-science. A sample headline: “Stay sharp till the end: the secret cause of Alzheimer’s.” A sample opening sentence: “We like to think that medicine works.”

I’ll cut to the chase. Organic food is a boondoggle. I’ve worked with a few food companies in my life. They let people think they are not using fertilizers and chemicals, but they are using all that stuff. It is just different stuff than is used on the other crops, often grown right next to the organic stuff. Once it hits the system, no one really knows what is and what is not organic. It gets mixed up all the time. The reason is their are no standards and there is no real difference between an organic banana and regular banana. Retailers tend to put the best looking stuff in the organic rack anyway because it fools the customers into paying extra.

But, the customers are not there to get good food. They are there for salvation. The food is just a part of the sacrament. Whole Foods is not selling produce, they are selling grace. Everything about the operation is pure, hard hearted capitalism, but it is aimed at rich people who need to feel like they have purpose beyond making money. In the 60’s, New Age gurus made money off of guilty rich people peddling grace though made up eastern religions. Today, corporations like Apple and Whole Foods are doing the same thing on an industrial scale.

The food cults are one thing, but the fake medicine side of this is where you really see the old fashioned religion. If you refuse medical treatment because you believe in God or you believe in dandelion tea or you believe in leprechauns, what’s the difference? In both cases you’re relying on magic. Dierdre Imus shrieking about  vaccinations is well past anything the Catholic Church conjured, as far as the crazy scale. That’s the thing with all of these sub-cults of the CML, they like to dress up their magic with scientific jargon, or at least jargon that sounds like science, so they can believe it is science and not religion. Who says you can’t lie to yourself?

I got a good dose of the food cults some time back at a party. no matter what came out of the kitchen, the guests asked a dozen questions about the contents. Some were afraid of chemicals. Others were afraid of gluten. Some were afraid of meat. An anthropologist seeing this in the jungle would get rich publishing the work. The fact that I have regularly lied to gluten freaks about the contents proves it is all in their head.

But, the religion business has always been big business.

This post has already been linked to 1044 times!