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Whole Foods founder, John Mackey

The department store is dead, long live the ethical mega-outlet! Once, grocery shopping was a necessity; then it became recreation. Now it’s morphed into something much more complex and daunting: a statement activity that tells us which peer group we belong to and broadcasts our values for others to admire or deprecate. As the Barkers building on Kensington High Street is reincarnated as Whole Foods Market, it’s a potent symbol of food’s new role as a status symbol. Gone are the days when conscientious consumption was the minority activity of a handful of sandal-wearing cranks. Even better than being merely mainstream or even fashionable, ethical eating is now an aspirational thing to do – and that’s going to keep the tills ringing at Whole Foods.

‘Everything that Whole Foods stands for, and that our concept is about, seems to coincide very well with the direction that the UK consumer has been moving in the last few years,’ says David Doctorow, head of operations at Whole Foods Market. It’s an extremely slick NASDAQ-listed American company which has has already conquered the States by buying up smaller organic outlets, and now plans to march across Europe in the same way (it already owns Fresh & Wild).
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Doctorow downplays any notion that having a Kensington flagship simply means that his company is targeting posh people. ‘Educational level is a more important demographic for us than affluence,’ he says. ‘Because people who understand the importance of the quality of food you put in your body are more likely to shop with us than someone who has a high income but doesn’t understand the value of that.’

Whole Foods Market's latest Bowery, NYC, store - a taste of what Londoners can expect

The genius of Whole Foods – apart from this willingness to flatter its customers – is that it pulls together the various strands of ethical consumption and repackages them as an accessible, desirable lifestyle choice. Two hundred years ago, when left-leaning thinkers looked around the polluted urban landscape of the Industrial Revolution and began to argue that people should purify themselves through diet, they formed the Vegetarian Society to promote the simple idea that meat was the enemy. By the Edwardian era, a parallel motivation for vegetariansim had arisen, which hooked itself on to concepts of non-violence (Mahatma Gandhi was a member of the London Vegetarian Society) and other self-consciously progressive ideas – and it thrived.

Matthew Kay from Manna in Primrose Hill (one of London’s oldest surviving vegetarian restaurants, founded in 1967) has researched the movement’s history and discovered that as early as 1897 there were no fewer than 32 vegetarian restaurants in London. A 100-year-old map from the Vegetarian Society shows several eateries, including one, The Garden, that appears to be a chain.

‘The image of the sandal-wearing, nut-cutlet-eating vegetarian became popular in cartoons in Punch in the 1930s and ’40s,’ says Kay, ‘and it was people like George Bernard Shaw who were being cartooned. That image has nothing to do with the later ’60s and ’70s hippy influence.’

While the vegetarian movement is proud to hold up radical thinkers like Shelley, Rousseau, Shaw and Tolstoy as totems of their tribe, other carrot-juicers went over to the the dark side. ‘Yes, there was a link with self-improvement and teetotalism,’ says Kay, ‘but on the other hand there was a link with the right, with Hitler, Wagner, the body beautiful, naturism, that whole side – the will to power, dominating the body as well as the world.’

While the first body fascists were striving for one kind of purity in the 1930s, another group was emphasising food provenance: the Soil Association. Unlike the urban and socialist vegetarian movement, organics were the preoccupation of landowners like Lady Eve Balfour, who in 1943 wrote a seminal book on the subject called ‘The Living Soil’. Her theories dovetailed with vogueish anti-modern ideas about tradition and authenticity, from the arts and crafts movement to Cecil Sharp’s folk revivalism, but the organic movement was distinctively upper crust. ‘Which is still the case if you look at Prince Charles and his adherence to it,’ adds Kay.

It was 1960s counterculture which fused grow-your-own organics with vegetarianism, drawing on Eastern traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism to connect meatlessness with spiritual cleanliness. By then, London’s vegetarians had seen their dining options shrink to three: Manna, Cranks (branches across London), and Food For Thought on Neal Street. With its historic links to the fruit and veg trade, the Covent Garden area seemed a natural location for a meat-free outlet, and Neal’s Yard continues the tradition of offering lunch options with a side order of good karma. During the hippy era, though, the fare was unexciting by modern standards. A 1967 Manna menu Kay has unearthed boasts such exotic items as avocado (a luxury at six shillings), fondue and yoghurt. ‘It was a bit of a sackcloth option in the ’60s,’ he laughs. ‘You were eating it because it was doing you so much good. There’s an element of that now in organic food too; people will eat anything if it’s organic.’

And increasingly, that includes meat, once anathema to the hardcore ethical eater but now perfectly acceptable to many, as long as it ticks all the other boxes. According to Chris Olivant of the Vegetarian Society, which has seen its membership stagnate in the last decade, people’s definition of ‘untainted’ food has shifted since vegetarianism’s most recent heyday in the 1990s, when new-age ideas coincided with BSE-inspired meat paranoia. ‘There are more options now; buying locally, buying organic, that sort of thing,’ he says. ‘At the same time, some people are cutting vegetarian foods from their diet because they’re not sure how fairly they’re traded. Soya is a case in point. People are worried it might be GM, there are health issues around eating too much soya at certain ages, and soya is grown in rainforests and so forth, plus there’s the air miles. But you can virtually pick any food in the world and decide not to eat it.’

Sourcing a guilt-free shopping basket is now a mind-boggling balancing act -– one of the reasons that serious buyers find ethical one-upmanship such a fun game. Whole Foods Market – which, by all accounts, treats its employees well, buys windfarms and donates to charity, as well as selling organic and Fairtrade products – aims to level that playing field. In theory, anyone going through their checkouts can take home a pristine conscience along with their quinoa. Yet even it has faced criticism in America for not being quite blameless enough, with critics pouncing on local provenance as the chain’s achilles heel.

Whole Foods Market says that it’s tackling this head-on. ‘We do have a hierarchy of decision-making with regard to purchasing,’ says Doctorow. ‘Our number-one choice would always be a locally produced organic product. It’s difficult to say whether the next choice would be organically produced somewhere else or locally produced non-organic. A couple of years ago, it would have clearly been organic from somewhere else but our customers’ consciousness around locally produced products has grown a lot in the last few years, so I would say those two are equal.’

At the moment, the health-food industry in London seems happy with the coming of Whole Foods Market. Jane Noraika of Food For Thought is typical of the ‘bring it on’ attitude that the new Barkers store is generating among established outlets. ‘My fear is that the big companies tend to squeeze out small ones,’ she says, ‘but I don’t think that will happen here. I think the more good food is out there, the more educated we’ll become about what to put in our bodies, the more there’ll be good labelling and good, clean information.’

Whole Foods Market opens June 6. The Barkers building, 63 Kensington High St, W8 5SE (0207 368 4500) High Street Kensington tube.