Whole Foods, Union Square, Manhattan *

WHAT a disappointment. My buddy had told me how much fun he had loading up a tray and going upstairs to sit at the window and look out at the Union Square Park action while he ate his fresh food. My own experience, though, was nothing like that. Maybe it was partly because I was there at a very busy time, but it appeared to me to maybe be a place that's busy ALL the time. It's a big grocery store, complete with long check-out lines, where, after you've visited several of those "all you can load" food troughs you stand in line for a while, finally check out, and FINALLY take your loaded tray upstairs and fight for a place at communal tables. The utensils are all plastic, of course, which makes for a little difficulty with a salad. (I despise plastic utensils -- a pet peeve, I admit, but a sensible one.) The food itself looked "limp" to me -- as if it'd been in the trough for a while -- and nothing I ate tasted very good. Bottom line: The food in those troughs just looked a little too breathed on, coughed toward .... for me. And then to have to walk all over the store with it, and stand in line with it ... and then I wound up paying twelve bucks for a skimpy salad. No thanks. The place seems to me to be more of a fad than anything. There were lots of teenagers in there, probably thinking that they're contributing to the salvation of the universe by eating at a place called "Whole Foods."