Whole Foods Markets, Inc. (NASDAQ: WFMI), once the grocery darling of the investing market, took a serious wrong turn somewhere in the M&A market in 2007. Ever since the ill-fated acquisition of Wild Oats, WFMI has taken a dive, plunging from highs in the $60s (2006) and $50s (until late 2007) to as low as $8.68 this past December. So it was with great joy that investors heralded news of the company's fiscal third quarter results last night, exceeding analyst expectations, with earnings per share of $0.25, or $35.0 million, and sales up 2% over the year-ago quarter, to $1.9 billion. Same-store sales declined compared to the year-earlier quarter, but reversed their declining trend, down 2.5% from Q3 2008 but up from Q2 2009.

Pretend we're still living in the 1960s for a minute, and imagine someone warning of a monopoly on organic and natural food. Everyone around laughing and pointing... Now cut to 2007 and the headline in the Wall Street Journal: "The FTC plans to file a lawsuit to block Whole Foods' $365 million purchase of Wild Oats over antitrust concerns..."

From steel to sustainably-farmed wheatgrass, this is how far we've come in our ability to monopolize something. Way to go U.S. of A.!

For the record, I think the Whole Foods Market Inc (NASDAQ: WFMI) acquisition of Wild Oats Markets (NASDAQ: OATS) is a good thing. There is a plentiful supply of organic and natural produce and other products available at both small local cooperatives and farmer's markets and large supermarket chains -- in my opinion, tofu makers are not going to be outrageously squeezed. They're providing their products to enough outlets that it's hard for me to believe Whole Foods (even were it an evil monopolistic type of corporation) would create any pricing pressure. The FTC's blockage is on concerns of anticompetitive forces; will local chains like New Seasons and little scrappy cooperatives end up getting squeezed out? I can't imagine. If anything, the entrance of bigger fish like Wal-Mart Stores, Inc (NYSE: WMT), Safeway Inc. (NYSE: SWY) and Kroger (NYSE: KR) are far more likely to create problems for organic and natural food suppliers than the kinder, gentler (and much, much smaller) Whole Foods.

But that's just my opinion, and investors have sent the stock down quite a bit on the news, $1.54 or 3.6% to $40.15. As for me, I'm putting in a 'buy' order right now.

I'm a libraphile (is that the word?) and I began filling my children's shelves with books years before I had even purchased my first pregnancy test. By far my favorite image in any book is the overleaf of Blueberries for Sal, a bucolic and all-blue illustration of Sal and her mother. They are canning blueberries in a 40s-era kitchen, complete with hand-cranked egg beater, polka-dot curtains, and a cast-iron wood cooking stove. Every time I gaze at that picture I believe for a second that I will go downstairs and preserve something in one of the old-fashioned Ball jars I found at a garage sale.

Alas, it never quite happens that way, but just reading the book makes me feel connected to the farm-wife ideal. Much like a wander through today's grocery store aisles. As Kim Severson mentions in today's New York Times, she feels smug when she puts a bag of Cascadian Farm organic French fries in her grocery cart (she calls is "greenwashing" and the marketers call it "an authentic narrative"): "a gentle image of a field or a farm ... suggest[s] an ample harvest gathered by an honest, hard-working family." And in creating these images for us, in selling us the hard-working farm family, marketers know that just for a minute we've left our wired, fossil-fuel-guzzling lives for a hand-hewn pine kitchen table in that log house in Maine.

In short, we're being sold our ideal lifestyle in a box, bag or can.

Whole Foods Market, Inc. (NASDAQ:WFMI) was reinstated as outperform on 11-10-06. This stock is very attractive to me based on the things I've read about it. If the analyst's assertions are true, and WFMI's stock lost value based on a simple change in management focus from business operations to maintaining share price, then what should be happening in timely fashion will be a moderated climb back up to WFMI's fair market value. Salim Haji, an excellent writer over at The Motley Fool, offers the opinion that this stock has an intrinsic value in the $50 to $60 range.

With additional consideration of the fact that WFMI is undertaking a strategic stock buy back program, if I was looking for some fun places to play with some funds, this would be one of them. It is my opinion that this stock deserves some close attention right now. I think it is headed back up. One other thing I take into consideration about this situation is the possibility that Wal-Mart is going to fall flat on its corporate face with its "organic" food roll out. If that happens, (and I think it will), then Whole Foods Market will add even a bit more sparkle to my eye!

You can learn more about organic foods at About Organics.

Investing in organics has been a hot trend in the past few years. Demand for organic products is so high that some companies, like Stonyfield Farms, can't find enough organic milk to deliver on its organic yogurt orders. Organic farmers are doing well and news that even Wal-Mart would offer organic produce has inspired headlines that queried, will organics soon be everywhere?

In a word, no. And what's more, it's looking like betting on organics is bad for you, financially. Whole Foods Market, Inc. (NASDAQ:WFMI), long the darling of healthy-minded investors, isn't growing fast enough. The stock is down 27% since last week. This, coupled with news that Wal-Mart might be struggling with its organics goals, has us all wondering if we should just embrace pesticides after all.

As Alyce Lomax points out and we've mentioned a number of times here on BloggingStocks, the true irony about all this is that truly faithful organics fans are almost angrily opposed to large, industrial farms. So that, by embracing this positive, healthy movement -- by making organic Rice Krispies, of all things -- in the blindly optimistic American way, which is by standardizing, industrializing, making really really big ... American businesses are perverting everything that is organic. [The Onion made hilarious fun of this trend in a satire here.] It's just not "sustainable" if it's done in tons for the Kellogg Company (NYSE:K). As BusinessWeek says so eloquently, it's "the organic paradox: The movement's adherents have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, but success has imperiled their ideals."

Not only have ideals been imperiled, but also: profit. See here's the thing.

The TV commercials for the new line of organic cereals from Kellogg Company (NYSE:K) bring tears to my eyes. They're shot in a subdued color palette, evocative of the early 20th century, when every mama fed her children healthy, farm-fresh grains at a hand-hewn oak table in the family kitchen. Kellogg is trying to connect its products with the yearning to return to local, sustainable, homemade.

But Kellogg is nothing but not local. And the way big business is getting into organic food is, everyone seems to agree, perverting the very thing organics are meant to do. Not only that: if everyone had organic food, it wouldn't be organic any more. BusinessWeek calls it "The Organics Myth." And the reality is that you just can't mass-produce locality.

When Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE:WMT) announced they'd be offering organic food this spring, everyone seemed to throw up their collective hands and say, well, there goes the organic farm! Lots of industry analysts wondered if the push into low-cost organics would only mean that smaller farmers got squeezed, more, and suppliers like Wal-Mart would end up knocking on the doors of the big commercial farm organizations for organic produce. (Or offering organics that wasn't "really" organic after all.)

But at the heart the argument seems ridiculous. No, we can't revert to an agrarian society. But the demand for organics so outstrips supply that (for instance) Stonyfield Farms has to vastly reduce the percentage of organic products it offers. (Meantime, more entrepreneurs are flooding into the healthy foods business. Check out all the franchise opportunities available). But why can't more commercial farms just adopt organic practices? Why is this so hard?

I think the answer can't be: buy organic Rice Krispies. The answer has to be something more complex, and it starts with educating consumers to eat differently, to buy produce in season from (real) local, organic farmers, instead of insisting on oranges and asparagus year-round. To be more flexible, to roll with the punches.

No, not everyone can have organic fresh green peas year round. But everyone can have some organics, some of the time, and I think that's what we should all be working toward.

Organics are in the news. Over the weekend, consumers were paying attention to whether major organic milk producers are really honoring the spirit of organic foods, and last week, media outlets were buzzing about how just about every mainstream grocery store is launching its own organic foods line, from Safeway to SuperValu. Organics are getting cheaper, and the move by huge retailers to expand organic offerings may mean that the demand for pesticide-free goods will change the way farmers in the U.S., and elsewhere, operate.

Nowhere is the presence of organic products more incongruous than on Wal-Mart shelves. Wal-Mart is doubling the amount of organic produce in its grocery shelves for its shoppers "convenience" (and, one would imagine, to allow the retailer the ability to charge more -- and pocket higher margins as a result). The chain is also offering organic cotton clothing and organic baby formula. And while a few customers are surely happy, it seems, the larger response is... oh, no.

I feel your pain, oh ye people who are committed to organics. And I have to ask: is Wal-Mart, by trying to do good, actually doing bad?