My opinion of Whole Foods keeps changing.

On my first visit to the new store, I was so stunned by the high prices I didn't notice much else. The meat department caught my attention, though. Signs claimed all the animals they sell are fed vegetarian diets and treated humanely, and the prices seemed better than Raley's. Since I haven't reached the point of giving up meat yet, the humane thing is appealing to me.

So I tried the Whole Foods ground beef that was on sale. When they weigh out the meat for you, they wrap it up in old-fashioned butcher paper, which seems to work better in the freezer and microwave. I tried one package while it was fresh and was surprised to notice a pleasant smell when I opened it. How long had it been since  that happened? I had another surprise: I drained off the grease as I always do and let it harden before I threw it away. It cooled off into white, creamy fat—not the gray watery stuff with a thin skin over it that I've been getting for years. It (the meat, not the fat!) tasted good, too.

So I decided to buy all our meat at Whole Foods from now on.

Wednesday I bought six chicken drumsticks out of the display case. When I opened the package Thursday, I was assaulted by the stench you might smell when you've had raw chicken scraps in your garbage can for a few days. I'd recently thrown out a whole package of Trader Joe's drumsticks for the same reason, so I was reluctant to do it again. I'd had a similar experience with TJ's Australian ground beef, and it's expensive to keep throwing away meat.

I noticed one of the drumsticks looked brown and bravely sniffed each one to verify only the one with brown skin smelled bad. (Why hadn't the man at the meat counter noticed it?) I threw that one away, rinsed off the others, and grilled them. Neither I nor Mr. Ann died or even got sick, but I'm still mad at Whole Foods about it.

Now we hear Whole Foods ground beef is being recalled because of E. coli. Don't worry about it, I heard a local TV station quote someone from the local store this evening—we don't get our beef from Nebraska Beef, source of the problem. But they might and not know it, says this Washington Post article:

The meat Whole Foods recalled came from Coleman Natural Foods, which unbeknownst to Whole Foods had processed it at Nebraska Beef, an Omaha meatpacker with a history of food-safety and other violations.

Just great. I wonder how humanely Nebraska Beef treats cattle.

What's a conscientious consumer to do? Even with one rotten-smelling drumstick out of six and the revelation that the good-smelling ground beef with the real fat might have come from a meatpacker with a history of food safety and other violations, Whole Foods still seems to be the best place to buy meat and poultry at the moment. Is that sick, or what?