Local Shopper Nearly Dies At Health Food Store. Details At Eleven.

Holeeee shit.

Take a medium-sized town. Sprinkle a couple of universities in it, then imbue it with a thriving art and music scene. Populate it with hippies young and old, the sort who know who Aldo Leopold was and work summers at Sprout Farm. And, like, live in ferrocement domes. Dude.

Then put it thirty miles away over dangerous highways from the nearest Whole Foods Market.

You can then imagine what my time today at the health food store was like.

Worse, the HFS was having its annual customer-wonderfulness weekend, with 15 to 50 percent off everything in the store. I thought Wal-Mart was bad the day before Christmas; this was miles beyond that.

I got out of there with the blocks of Callebaut I'd gone for, a bottle of vitamins, some Pellegrino, and my sanity. Just barely. A few steps out of the store, I turned wide-eyed and speechless to a man wearing a Vietnam Veterans cap. "My wife was acting like we shoulda got here at four a.m. and stood on line" he said. "Maybe we shoulda."