Date: Wed, 6 May 1998 01:24:43 -0400 (EDT) From: eve jochnowitz ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Foraging on the Urban Frontier Food, Health, Commerce, and the Moral Order at the Park Slope Food Coop Conference presentation Eve Jochnowitz May 3, 1998 Collard greens, baby bok choi, two kinds of organic blood oranges, and artichokes for 39 cents apiece. For twenty-five years, the Park Slope Food Coop1 has served its neighborhood as a center for work, shopping, learning and community. The coop provides members with high quality organic produce and other foods at low prices. It has grown to a seven million dollar business and an institution in local lore. In its layout, the Coop very much resembles any other small supermarket, with aisles of foodstuffs and food accessories in packages and in bulk. But anyone will tell the Coop is much more than just a store. Because of the co-operative manner in which the business is run, and because of the foods that it selects to stock, the Coop is an expression of the beliefs and values of its members. I will argue that food itself is essential to the definition of community and to the ideologies of the coop's constituents. Eating systems are the first customs noted and the last dropped. If you can do nothing else for faith, for nation or for your political ideals, you can at least eat. In this way, the edible activism of the members of the Park Slope Food Coop is a form of gastral piety. Foodways may be one part of a large and complicated set of cultural performances, or they may be the only thing left, but the mundane activities of shopping, cooking, eating and drinking tell insiders and outsiders who we are. The food coop movement grew out of the counter-cultural youth movement of the sixties and seventies, a movement which embraced vegetarianism, along with , macrobiotics and other Eastern or putatively Eastern food beliefs, tofu, tempeh, miso, whole grain products and whole foods in general, local, seasonal produce and concern for the environmental and social impact of food production. Some of the food practices of the time such as "food combining" have fallen quite out of vogue, while others, like a preference for local and seasonal foods, have gained favor with the mainstream. Food coops have grown and thrived, while other counter-cultural institutions have faded away. They are vectors for information and education about what Warren Belasco calls the countercuisine, a system of foodways based on counter-cultural values . Belasco's taxonomy divides members of the counter-culture health food movement into two categories, freaks and nuts, neither of these neutral terms. Freaks are those whose ideology is driven primarily by drugs and the artistic and aesthetic aspects of the counterculture. Nuts are consumers whose ideology is driven by ethical, political and health concerns (Dr Belasco is a freak; I am a nut). For most of its existence the Coop did not sell meat of any kind. When members voted to stock poultry, fish, and sugar, the Coop began to stock the items. "We are a store. We stock what people buy," explains co-ordinator Ursula Ruedneberg, "If the members vote to stock red meat, we'll stock red meat." Some friction inevitably results. A Coop member complained in a letter to the Linewaiters' Gazette that a checkout worker had refused to touch a chicken that she wanted to buy. Another wrote that he was 'taunted by the very attitude of jarred olive paste.' The urgency of these letters indicates importance of food as a defining element of community. All members of the Park Slope Food Coop work in the store and abide by the one-way aisles. Most of the members work as parts of squads that involve the everyday running of a food market: Receiving, food handling, pricing, checkout, and cashier. Members on these squads work three hours every month. Other squads have less regular needs, such as accounting, legal, newspaper, compost committee, and construction. Chef and cooking teacher Susan Baldassano teaches cooking classes particularly geared to helping members learn about the Coop's products. Members who miss their workslots must complete a double make-up slot or have their shopping privileges suspended. "They are generally pretty lenient about letting you make up the work, but I always just worked my slots, because you know, I went to Catholic School" The store is a "good third place," It is a place that helps some of its members get through the day. Some members say coming to the Coop is "Better than therapy." Even those who "Just wanna do my thing and get outta there," say that it is more fun than shopping in a supermarket. It is the casual everyday contact rather than the organized activities that create community , and allow the site to function as a store, and as a place of mediation between members, their systems of belief, and their sustenance.