For the last eight days, a grassroots boycott of natural grocery store chain Whole Foods (WFMI) has been gaining steam following a contentious op-ed written by CEO John Mackey.

In the op-ed, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal and suggests ways he believes health reform could be achieved without adding to the deficit, Mackey stated that health care is not an intrinsic right, and that the current plan for health care reform has problems.

“A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That’s because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America,” Mackey wrote in the piece.

In response, a Facebook group called, “Boycott Whole Foods,” was founded, and today it has almost 23,000 members who have pledged to stop shopping there. Whole Foods spokesperson Libba Letton said “there’s no telling,” whether or not the company’s bottom line will be impacted by the boycott.

The op-ed, which appeared on Aug. 12, angered Mark Rosenthal, a 39-year-old playwright in Massachusetts, who subsequently started the Facebook group in protest. In the last week, a Twitter feed and a Flickr group have been started in order to spread word of the protest.

Rosenthal said it wasn’t just the health-care portion of the op-ed that upset him. It was Mackey’s suggestion that “if you’re sick, it’s your fault,” that really got him fired up.

In the op-ed, Mackey states, “Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat. We should be able to live largely disease-free lives until we are well into our 90s and even past 100 years of age.”

Rosenthal said this was a “ridiculous” thing to say on many levels.

“For anyone who has ever had a friend or family member get sick and you watched them die even with a good diet and exercise, it’s really insulting. I don’t know that [Mackey] considered the consequences of this statement,” Rosenthal said.

Rosenthal said one of the goals of starting the grassroots boycott is to adversely impact Whole Foods’ bottom line over time.

Starting on Friday, there are plans in the works for protests at Whole Foods in Austin, Texas, Boston, Washington, D.C., and New York City. Volunteers will be handing out leaflets and educating Whole Foods shoppers on what Rosenthal said is an “outrage” to shoppers in favor of healthcare reform.

“Mackey has the right to say whatever he wants, but we have the right to spend our dollars wherever we want,” Rosenthal said, adding that since founding the boycott group, he has received thinly veiled death threats via online message boards for his stance. 

Customers meeting with protesters at Whole Foods locations will be supplied with a leaflet that explains the situation, according to Letton.

“We can’t speak about placing the op-ed because that was [Mackey’s] personal decision. But we hope people realize that one single opinion piece is far from the sum total of what we’ve known for 30 years. We hope this doesn’t overshadow the good that 50,000 team members are doing across the nation every day,” Letton said.

Letton said that feedback sent to Whole Foods online and over the phone had been “mixed,” but that in the last 48 hours, it had turned towards the positive.

“In the last couple of days we are hearing from people saying, ‘I haven’t shopped there before but I’m looking forward to coming in.’”