Its author, Cara Reedy, chose to offer a first-person response:

You should try collard greens. That's all Whole Foods was trying to say when it tweeted a picture of collard greens with peanuts and a link to recipes. But Black Twitter didn't take kindly to this. Whole Food's Twitter feed was quickly flooded with lots of memes and plenty of side eye. I was annoyed too, because like other African Americans, I'm tired of people "discovering" things that have been a part of black culture for hundreds of years.

Reedy quoted another Whole Foods critic:

"For other people collards are a trend––for us they are a tradition," said food writer and historian Michael Twitty. "We aren't against cultural sharing, it's the appropriation without credit that we object to." [Update: I later discovered that Twitty wrote one of the few nuanced articles on this controversy at his blog. You’d never have known his actual position on the matter from how the author of the CNN article quoted him.]

That struck me as peculiar. A grocery store urging people to eat a vegetable is not “appropriation.” And there is no norm whereby identity groups are “credited” for a veggie that they consume. Indeed, many would’ve been offended had Whole Foods Tweeted, “If you're not cooking with collard greens like black people do, you need to be.” Yet this wasn’t just an idiosyncratic opinion piece. CNN was far from alone.

The Root dedicated an article to the Whole Foods Tweet:

There have been reports and rumors that collard greens would be the next item to be gentrified and Columbused by the mainstream—that is, folks would be told that it’s a green that people aren’t using as much and ought to start using, completely ignoring its legacy in African-American Southern soul food, and how it’s a staple in black households nationwide. Whole Foods caught itself proving that hunch right by tweeting that people who aren’t cooking with collard greens ought to start, and then directing people to a link telling people to cook collard greens with peanuts. Or at least that’s what the photo it used implied. Yep, peanuts. Never in the history of Negrodom, in the history of the black Diaspora, in the history of these United Households of Black America, has anyone espoused the cooking of collard greens with peanuts. And if anyone did, he or she certainly didn’t suggest that it was “how to cook collards.” And again, if someone did, they didn’t put the peanuts in the main collard green cooking pot. Oh no; they scooped up their share of collard greens, put it on a plate and sprinkled their own peanuts onto their share. (Everybody’s got somebody in their family who’s allergic to peanuts.)

Here’s the coverage at Eater:

Clearly bourgeois grocer Whole Foods learned nothing from the recent #GuacGate: The company caused some serious Twitter outrage yesterday when it tweeted a photo of collard greens inexplicably garnished with peanuts, giving people still traumatized by the New York Times' recent peas-in-guacamole suggestion a major feeling of deja vu.

The Daily Dot declared:

Well, seems white people are far from finished ruining other cultures’ foods. Whole Foods, which you may remember as the supermarket chain that tried to sell $6 “asparagus water,” invited social media scorn once again by tweeting a recipe for collard greens. How did it get the soul food staple wrong? With a liberal sprinkling of peanuts and cranberries.

At Huffington Post, Erika Hardison wrote the harshest of the takedowns:

The Whole Foods Twitter account thought its consumers and fellow foodies would appreciate their version of collard greens; collard greens, cranberries with peanuts and garlic. As you can imagine this tweet went viral in minutes as Black Twitter reacted with the funniest reactions possible. Can you imagine eating collard greens with garlic, cranberries and peanuts? Kale yes, but collard greens? Hell no. It's obvious the handlers behind the Whole Foods Twitter have never tasted such a monstrosity because the mere thought of garlic drenched collard greens decorated with peanuts and cranberries makes my melanin pale. The idea of this uber-gentrified collard green recipe from a grocery store that sells $6 loaves of bread is so ridiculous that it is funny. Whole Foods should try their recipes in their offices first before presenting their Pinterest-inspired eccentric tastebuds on the rest of the world. Their remix of a soul food staple is a horrible fail to people who eat collard greens and people who actually enjoy food.

Like other sites, Mic did a roundup of critical Tweets, summing them up by declaring, “Black Twitter isn’t happy.” Mashable titled its story, “Whole Foods inexplicably wants you to put peanuts in your collard greens,” and noted the company’s followup:

That implies the original Tweet was culinarily clueless, even culturally insensitive. Neither type of error is compatible with long-term success as a Whole Foods employee. I’ll bet that marketing staffer had a bad day. And it must have been especially frustrating to be taunted and mocked by contemptuous journalists if the he or she actually knew something about the past and present of collard greens.