Whole Foods Caves to Wingnuts, Will Not 'Celebrate or Promote' Ramadan
Faux hippy Wal-Mart and parking lot realness headquarters Whole Foods is happy to sell you 11 billion varieties of hummus, but don't get the wrong idea, wingnuts: Whole Foods is just as scared of Muslims as you! Really!
This story in the Houston Press has actually, against all odds, made us dislike Whole Foods even more than we already did.
You see, Whole Foods recently started selling a brand of Halal-certified frozen food by the name of Saffron Road. They wrote a post on the company blog last week entitled "What is This Halal About?" introducing the products. This innocuous post about fucking food apparently "generated some negative feedback from a small segment of vocal and angry consumers and bloggers," according to an internal Whole Foods email obtained by the Houston Press. And that negative feedback was too much for the company to handle:
"It is probably best that we don't specifically call out or 'promote' Ramadan," reads a portion of that email. "We should not highlight Ramadan in signage in our stores as that could be considered 'Celebrating or promoting' Ramadan."
Are you a racist xenophobe who dislikes anything at all for any arbitrary reason? Simply complain loudly on your blog, and Whole Foods will obsequiously cater to your every last prejudice! Fuck you, Muslims.
Never trust a faux hippy.
UPDATE: Whole Foods spokesperson Libba Letton sends the following explanation:
Whole Foods Market is NOT cancelling our current halal promotion, which is centered around the timeframe of Ramadan. We invite shoppers seeking out not just halal certified products, but products that also meet our high quality standards, to try Saffron Road and other regional offerings in our stores.
We never sent a communication from our headquarters requesting stores take down signs at all. We have 12 different operating regions and one region reacted by sending out directions to promote Halal and not specifically Ramadan after some online negative comments.
We're excited to be offering high quality halal products for our shoppers and we stand behind them and our promotion of them, just like we do with other seasonal and holiday products.
