(FORTUNE Magazine) – It looks like chicken: plump and plain and vaguely unpleasant. It feels like chicken and smells like chicken. And not surprisingly it tastes like chicken--which is to say, it tastes like whatever stuff you've slathered it with and cooked it in.

But it's more than chicken. This is chicken plus. This is chicken that comes with a brochure. "Our chicken is fed quality, grain-based feed that is free of animal byproducts," the brochure explains. Vegetarian chickens! "All chicken houses receive fresh bedding and disinfecting at each change of flocks." As a consequence the flocks are "hearty"--fun-loving, backslapping birds, the kind of chicken you'd like to invite over for a beer, watch a ball game with. Before you wring its neck, drain its blood, and eat it.

I've discovered these happy little fellows at my neighborhood's newest grocery store, an outlet of the Bread & Circus chain. Along with Fresh Fields and one or two other grocery chains, Bread & Circus represents the latest evolution of the food market. It is spacious and well lighted and as clean as an operating room. It specializes in organic produce, granola sold in bulk, environmentally sensitive household products, wheat germ and seaweed, mullet and groats, meats carved from animals that never tasted the forbidden fruit of antibiotics. It is the final, sad proof that baby-boomers have taken over the world.

I speak as a baby-boomer myself--a self-hating baby-boomer, but a boomer nonetheless. By now my generation's vanity is an old story. Evidence of its cultural hegemony is everywhere. We choke the FM airwaves with songs by the Monkees and obsess about the Kennedy assassinations. We continue to insist that Easy Rider was a good movie. Last year we even forced the Beatles out of retirement, which most of us now agree was a big mistake. Our parents told us we were the brightest, best-educated generation ever--a claim we disproved by believing it.

Whatever our IQ, we baby-boomers do sit upon the largest pile of disposable income the world has ever seen, and we have used it to remake the stolid American culture of our parents. The new, organic supermarket manifests the trend almost perfectly. It is a kind of anti-grocery store, an implicit repudiation of the old IGA that seemed to satisfy our parents. The grocery store of the 1960s was itself a marvel, a landmark of commerce: heaped with fruit and vegetables in all seasons, incorporating in a single place the wares of the butcher and baker, the fishmonger and pharmacist. The organic store of the Nineties is conventional enough in form and layout. Like the IGA of our youth, it overflows with stuff, still startling in its variety and abundance; but as you walk the aisles the message is unmistakable: The IGA had the wrong kind of stuff. Bad stuff. Evil stuff.

You want some cereal for your kid? You will look in vain for Cocoa Puffs. Settle, instead, for Rainforest Puffs ("Do you think you can make the world a better place to live in by eating the cereal in this box? Guess what, you can!"). You want Fritos? Oh, please. Try Blue Corn chips, "made from the blue corn that the Hopi ate for strength." The cream cheese comes from "cows treated humanely on small farms." The packaging may emulate the brightly colored boxes and tubs of the bourgeois stores of yesterday, but the stuff inside is marked "wholesome," "organic," "hormone free," designed for the palette of a superior person. You can feed and flatter yourself all at once.

The new supermarket is all the more startling given its unlikely origins. Remember the macrobiotic co-op of the Seventies, usually a makeshift storefront with barrels and bins half filled with organic rutabagas and sea sponges? The wan, bearded fellow behind the counter would slip in a flier for the local yoga class as he bagged your groceries. Communally owned and operated, a co-op was meant to be subversive of capitalism; it dealt in goods ignored by mainstream grocery stores. When you joined a co-op, the mundane act of shopping became a political statement.

A quarter century later, the co-ops are mostly gone. At the new stores the produce is fresher, firmer, of a higher quality generally, and the barrels now conform to health codes. Shopping for counterculture goods is no longer a political statement, apparently--at least as politics is usually understood. Instead it's a statement about one's taste, refinement, and elevation above the vulgarities of capitalism.

Or so one might think. But what appears at first blush to be a triumph of boomer vanity is in fact a surrender. The market has ground the self-regard of a generation into a profit-making opportunity. For some of us, shopping at the new supermarket can be disorienting, as we watch the artifacts of bohemian youth made sleek and glittering in the manner of the haute bourgeois. It's like hearing Jimi Hendrix's rock anthems repackaged as Muzak.

The irony is, so to speak, too delicious: The long-ago rebellion against capitalism survives only as proof of its invincibility.

--Andrew Ferguson