Whole Foods recalled all fresh ground beef sold between June 2 and Aug. 6 at its stores in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, Massachusetts, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the District of Columbia, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.
Whole Foods realizes there was a system breakdown and it taking means to ensure this will not happen again. Read the NY Times article.
This is troubling. I expect more out of Whole Foods. Their private label 365 brand canned food is lined with BPA, their 365 brand body care line contains dioxanes (a carcinogen) and they do not mention this on their packaging and have no plans to make a change. On the latter, they are involved in a law suit in California, where its required to have proper package labeling for products containing dioxanes.
So disappointing, Whole Foods. I am seriously rethinking my loyalty now. I want to be able to go to a store where I do not have to worry about pesticides, dioxanes, e-coli, etc. Even now, I still need to research and read product labels before picking anything up off the shelves no matter where I shop. I did feel safer with WF’s produce and meat, but that system has an obvious breakdown. Sure no one is perfect, but WF has certainly had it’s fair share of negatives in the very recent past. I hope they clean up their act and live up to consumer expectations.
Natural families and lifestyle 
I realized a while back that Whole Foods was not a worry-free shopping experience when they continued to sell polycarbonate water bottles (containing BPA) even after all the news about BPA came out.
As for their produce, I once asked their produce manager about it and he explained to me that their conventionally grown produce is just that, conventially grown, and is no lower in pesticides than the conventially grown produce at any other grocery store.
Like you, I noticed that their personal care products not only contain dioxanes, but many also contain phalates.
Unfortunately, we must read the labels even at Whole Foods.
I shop at Whole Foods fairly often. The other day, I was buying some cheese (just the pre-packaged block kind) and ask the guy working there what the difference was between 2 packages of the same variety of cheese. There was a $3 price difference. He told me that one was organic, the other was not. Well, apparently I am a moron…because I thought that everything at Whole Foods was organic! But he explained that “most” of the meat/poultry/seafood is organic…not all. That some but not all of the produce is organic. So basically, you aren’t much better off buying produce from there than you are buying it at Publix or at a farmer’s market! How disappointing! Especially considering how much more WF is compared to the others!
Avery, yes, WF does carry conventional, locally grown and organic. At least in my local WF they are very good in the produce section about labeling which are which, and a bonus is they also label where the produce came from. Now, in the rest of the store, it is a little more difficult to distinguish, requiring label reading, which is time consuming. I understand they are trying to cater to a wider audience, but I think they need to do a better job of clearly labeling the shelves themselves, not just lableling on the product, which as you note, is not always an easy spot.
There is a little mom and pop store down the street from my house that is pretty much all organic, though they do have some “natural” items.
I think it is hard to find a place that truly is all organic. And as frustrating as it is for consumers who want all organic, it’s all we have to work with for now.