You could, it seemed, get anything you wanted - local cider (from Lansdale, 11 miles away) and grass-fed beef from Georgia, organic and conventional, even your season of choice: More winter? A side of spring with that?
If you entered through Door No. 1, nearest to the adjacent mall, a magic carpet awaited. Banks of pink orchids in clay pots. Cinematic cascades of blue hydrangea. A wall - yes, a vertical wall – of golden beets and dandelion greens, purple-top turnips and red kale.
At the egg case, the eggs were not only cage-free, they were carton-free, arranged one-by-one in rows on springy bedding (as they might be in the coop), a stack of small wire baskets at the ready to assist in your faux-farmstead collecting.
So this, children, is where eggs really come from, absent the squawk and feathers, the stench, and the mindless pecking.
They come from a food-topia in Plymouth Meeting.
That was Door No. 1, gateway not only to the fresh foods (and the burger - add $1 for bacon - and pizza and sushi stations) around the perimeter, but also to an interior stocked with the usual suspects - frozen pizza and aisle-ender pillars of tortilla chips, herbal soaps and herby soups, pasta sauce and pet supplies.
But there was a Door No. 2, 50 feet away. And if you hooked an immediate left after entering it, an entirely different reality loomed: the Cold Point Pub.
Let us revise that. It was a different reality for suburban Philadelphia - a 28-seat tavern tucked in the bosom of a 45,000-square-foot supermarket, offering a modest menu, wine by the glass, beer by the pint, and local craft beers (Victory, Yards, Sly Fox, etc.) and imported beers in six-packs to go.
At other Whole Foods - in Los Angeles' Fairfax neighborhood, say, or in D.C. - beer and wine are sold as staples, treated no more exotically than the olive bar.
