I’ve been overwhelmed by your response to the thing I wrote about the catastrophically catastrophic threat that books pose to the delicately balanced balance of the global world. In case you missed it, I laid bare the horror of unrestrained international publishing, which is responsible for more eco-destruction than all the Chinese power stations built last Thursday. The literate do nothing except consume: crowds of shoppers in Waterstone’s, the cynically titled Amazon – consuming, consuming, consuming. And while we just sit there reading, books are destroying the world.

Some of you have written – on paper – to point out that you’re already starting cooperatives to recycle the dread tomes. The real answer to the dark, satanic book mountain is, of course, to eat them. I’ve been sent a lot of marvellously healthy recipes for books. I’m thinking of compiling a book-recipe recipe book.

From Megan in Pontypridd comes this: “Take one book (250 pages is enough for four people). Peel off the hard cover (don’t ever eat covers – they’re full of chemicals). Soak the pages in warm milk, then mash to dropping consistency. Add 2oz flour, 1 tsp baking powder, 4oz grated suet, a pinch of salt, two eggs, 4oz Fairtrade brown sugar and a handful of sultanas. Spoon into a buttered 2-pint pudding basin, cover and steam for 2 hours. Serve with warm jam.” Megan says her commune loves it. “We particularly like to add a couple of pages of Dylan Thomas. It gives a lovely local flavour.”

Many of you pointed out that eating books was simply treating the symptoms and not the cause. Some suggested starting animal-liberation-style campaigns against bookshops: picketing, burning, intimidating the families of antiquarian bibliophiles – that sort of thing. But the most inventive suggestion was that all wannabe authors should have to qualify to be allowed to write a book. There should be a reality show, like The X Factor, on which writerscompete and cry. The judges would be noted authors such as Jordan and Jose Mourinho.The public would text in their votes, and in the end we’d get a book that would be a guaranteed bestseller. But only one – all the other proposals would disappear into obscurity. There you have it: a properly green answer. Democracy, freedom of speech and care for the planet all in one go.

This week’s restaurant is the grazing floor of Whole Foods Market, the organic department store you’ve been hearing so much about recently. The largesse of this born-again, healthy, feel-my-freshness emporium exposes one of those great rifts between Americans and us. Americans like quantity. The sight of towering displays of fresh food, a carnage of meat, oceans of fish, a sugary cornucopia of buns and breads, and vast wheels of cheeses, fills them with a sense of wellbeing and comfort. The land of unending plenty is what their ancestors went to. That’s why Americans like plates the size of their laps and portions bigger than a neocon’s hubris. Extravagance is their birthright.

We, on the other hand, when confronted with an unfeasible pile of skinned chicken breasts or a decomposing Babel of pilchards, immediately want to know who’s going to eat it all, and what are they going to do with the leftovers? Every one of the dozen people I’ve spoken to who’ve been to this shop worried about the waste. It can’t be given to tramps. Our history of food is scarred by shortages and rationing. We still feel guilty about not finishing our plates. Walking round this perishable glut, I had the distinct, uncomfortable sense that a voice would come over the Tannoy telling me I couldn’t leave until I’d finished all the greens.

The restaurant floor is also very American. That is, it has no coherent design but looks as though it has been constructed in a weekend by competing gangs of shopfitters. The Blonde and I went in the middle of the morning and took an American friend for balance. The dining area isn’t comfortable and it isn’t pretty, but there is a lot of it. Dotted at random round the edges are counters selling sushi, pizza, smoothies, waffles, ice cream and sweet stuff.

I started with a cup of coffee and a muffin. The coffee was made by someone I heard refer to herself as “coffee overseer of the greater New York area”. What she gave me was the universal coffee-flavoured effluvium that you get from Starbucks: thick and unfocused. The muffin was similarly malco, a sweaty bun that was sweet but stupid.

On to the pizza, a hot strip of paste with brightly acetic tomato and splats of congealing mozzarella. If it had come on a paper plate, I really couldn’t have told where one stopped and the other started. This would have been enjoyable only to those people who eat for exercise or companionship.

Next, a sludgy smoothie. The sprightly girl who peered from behind the wheatgrass like a jolly gofer may well have been the vegetable Obergruppenführer for Cincinatti. She told us they’d run out of carrots. As I had just seen Bugs Bunny’s wedding reception downstairs, I thought that was rather lazy.

The Blonde chose the juices, and I got a jug of some thick, vegetative, fruity gruel called Eternal Life Through Suffering or Happy Goat or something. It was as vile as these things invariably are. The imperishable rule of all food whose first reason for existence isn’t pleasure will always be: “A penance in the mouth and a punishment for the colon.”

Finally, there was the sushi, apparently made by the same person who’d done the tables and chairs. Dull fish with coarse flavours – and, worse, rice that was claggy and sullen, like cold rice pudding.

Altogether, the experience here is of eating in a railway concourse in the company of bored, neurotic, overweight people who’ve just had babies they don’t like. Nothing is any better than what you might expect to find in the chilled cabinet of a Tesco petrol station. And, for all the signs extolling right-on principles and faceless, overfamiliar camaraderie, the service is annoyingly slow, the checkout process tortuous, the preparation of the food remedial.

There are framed pictures of green pioneers, just in case you were slow of understanding: barking Mr Kellogg and the woman who started Peta. They look like employees of the month.

In an unused bit of floor, there is a sign that tells us their carbon footprint has been offset by the purchase of windmill futures. It’s stuck on a display of oversized wooden kiddies’ whirligigs, which are made to spin lazily by a discreetly plugged-in electric fan. It is a suitably hypocritical and cynical symbol for the whole place. The best thing that can be said about Whole Foods is that it has put a green stake through any rational belief that organics are anything more than a marketing opportunity for multinational supermarkets.

Whole Foods Market

The Barkers Building, 63–97 Kensington High Street, W8; 020 7368 4500
Mon-Sat, 8am-10pm; Sun, 12-6pm, restaurant from 10am

Five stars: Whole in one; Four stars: Whole lotta love; Three stars: The whole hog; Two stars: Whollier than thou; One star: Whole in the ground

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