Date: Wed, 6 May 1998 01:26:04 -0400 (EDT) From: eve jochnowitz ------------------------------------------------------------------ FORAGING ON THE URBAN FRONTIER: FOOD, HEALTH, COMMUNITY AND THE MORAL ORDER AT THE PARK SLOPE FOOD COOP Eve Jochnowitz Introduction: Edible Activism For twenty-five years, the Park Slope Food Coop1 has served as a center for work, shopping, learning, and community for members, most of whom live in the Park Slope and nearby South Brooklyn and Carroll Gardens neighborhoods. The neighborhoods have been changing rapidly in the past twenty-five years from quiet mostly Catholic working class enclaves first to eclectic, largely gay havens for artists and students, and finally to a fashionable outpost of Manhattan where many prosperous young professionals have chosen to rear children (Jacobs 1997, 85). The Coop provides high quality organic produce and other food products at relatively low prices to working members. When it opened, the Coop occupied an upper story in half its current building and conducted business only on evenings and weekends. It has since 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. Anyone will tell you, however, that the Coop is more than just a store. Because of the cooperative manner in which the business is run, and because of the foods and products that it selects to stock, the Coop is very much an expression of the beliefs and values of its founders and current members. I will argue that food itself is essential to the definition of community and to the makeup of the ideologies of the Coop's constituents. Eating systems are the first customs remarked 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 analogous to the gastral piety of many Jewish communities. 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. This paper will work from the outside in to analyze the Park Slope Food Coop from the points of reference of the food cooperative movement in the United States, the neighborhood of Park Slope and environs, the physical site of the store itself, and lastly one food item available at the Coop, the Tofu Turkey. I The Coop Movement: Honest Food, Honest Business Food issues were crucial to the loose amalgamation of people who in the sixties and seventies came to be called the "youth movement." While the energies of the youth movement were centered primarily on opposition to the United States' involvement in the war in Vietnam (1964-1973), such issues as vegetarianism, health, concern for the environment, labor and social justice also informed the struggle as well as interest in Eastern religions and philosophies and recreational drugs.2 Vegetarianism, while never embraced by a majority of the counter-culture, became a defining food practice of the movement, along with concern for the environmental and social impact of food production, macrobiotics and other Eastern or putatively Eastern food beliefs, tofu, tempeh, miso, whole grain products and whole foods in general, and seasonal and locally grown produce. 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. Cooperative food stores fall somewhere in-between. Food cooperatives have grown and thrived, while other counter-cultural institutions have faded away, mainly in the last twenty-five years since the United States ended involvement in the war in Vietnam. While they serve the diverse food needs of different communities, food cooperatives have largely been vectors for information and education about what Warren Belasco calls the countercuisine, a system of foodways based on counter-cultural values including organic, local, seasonal produce grown by ethically responsible producers (1989, 4). It's really changed the way I eat. I would never eat all this stuff. I tend to eat whatever's around. I like working checkout because you get to see what other people are eating. Working checkout helps me plan purchases. That's how I learned about Japanese ginger salad dressing; it's really incredible; it's so beautiful in its gorgeous bottle. Tom never saw a portobello mushroom before we moved here. Now he buys one whenever he sees one. They just sit in the refrigerator and rot, but we also learned about these new green bags. You can buy these bags and just keep your vegetables until doomsday (personal interview, Marion Jacobson). Belasco's taxonomy divides members of the counter-culture health food movement that blossomed in the sixties and seventies 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 values of the counterculture. Nuts are consumers whose ideology is driven by ethical, political, and health concerns (Professor Belasco is a freak; I am a nut). The food choices connected with the countercuisine, even when they are simply preferences for foods that taste batter, are never without political content. In his essay "Operation margarine," Roland Barthes makes the point that every concession to lousiness, especially with regard to food, is a concession to tyranny. Barthes links the of populist backlash against honest dislikes with the totalitarian impulse. The backlash, he does not use this word, is a form of homeopathy: What does it matter, after all, that margarine is just fat, when it goes further than butter and costs less? What does it matter after all, if Order is a little brutal and a little blind, when it allows us to live cheaply? Here we are, in our turn, rid of a prejudice which cost us dearly, too dearly, which cost us too much in scruples, in revolt, in fights and in solitude (Barthes 1991, 75). For Barthes and for members of the counter-culture, all food preferences are political positions. As food shopping and restaurant cooperatives sprouted in cities, a new genre of vegetarian cookbooks, many of them written by members of the cooperative movement, brought the countercuisine into people's homes. Following Diet for a small planet (1971), The vegetarian epicure (1972), Laurel's kitchen (1976), Tassajara cooking (1972), The political palate (1973) and The Moosewood cookbook (1977) all sought to demystify the preparation of vegetables as main course foods and to introduce the newly available soy products such as tofu in a non-threatening way. In addition to recipes, the books offered mildly worded polemics on the health and ethical benefits of a vegetarian diet and an introductions to how the collective enterprise worked. All the books sold mainly as softcovers and all had brown and beige colored covers to indicate the natural wholesomeness of the material within. A detailed reading of the cookbooks of the seventies is beyond the scope of this paper but I will note that all the cookbooks mentioned above remain in print twenty-five years later, while non-vegetarian underground cookbooks such as The Grubbag (1971) and My life as a restaurant are largely forgotten. The introduction to The Moosewood cookbook, the most influential of the cookbooks to emerge from the cooperative movement explained the business of the Moosewood collective: After the grand opening in January 1973, more friends of the original seven people joined. Moosewood is now a collectively-owned and worker-managed business with 15 members, who participate in every aspect of running the restaurant from deciding policy to planning the menus to changing the light bulbs. There is no singular owner and no "boss." Any profit that accumulates is distributed among the workers or recycled back into the restaurant. . . . Moosewood is the only place in town where you can follow up an herbed soybean casserole with a rich dense authentically-chocolate fudge brownie. . . . There is no specific dogma attached to Moosewood cuisine. . . . Perhaps most of Moosewood's customers are not strict vegetarians (or vegetarians at all), but they are drawn to the restaurant for the experience of a meal cooked with skill and care (Katzen 1977, viii). The introduction highlights many of the food practices that shopping and restaurant cooperatives of the era shared. While the restaurant does not serve meat, the item which would most upset some members, it does offer desserts made with butter and white sugar to make the point that one can embrace the values of responsible eating without surrendering all the familiar and cherished pleasures of the table. The Park Slope Food Coop has had to change its food policies many times over twenty-five years to serve the membership and keep up with current food practices. "When we first opened we had everything--we had bacon. That didn't work out very well" (Ellen Weinstat). For most of its existence the Coop did not sell meat of any kind. When members voted to stock poultry and fish, and desserts made with white sugar, the Coop began to stock the items. "We are a store. We stock what people buy," explains coordinator Ursula Ruedenberg, "If the members vote to stock red meat, we'll stock red meat." While the food preferences of the countercuisine have made significant inroads with many consumers, surveys conducted by nutritionists reveal that coop members have a stronger preference to seasonal and local produce and are generally better informed about plant foods than non-members (Wilkins 1996, 329). Changing social pressures change the foods that are despised and avoided (Mennell 1985, 302). Sometimes, as was the case with whole grain breads, items that fall off the bottom of the social scale subsequently reappear at the top (303). Food cooperatives walk the line between adhering to their beliefs and stocking what the members want. That actually does get at a contradiction between an institution with very clear and specific values and one that is supposed to be inclusive and democratic. What if a democratic majority does not want to buy organic foods anymore? Then you have two of the most cherished ideals clashing with one another. Communes that decide to become less radical and more in tune are the ones that whither and die. For an institution to survive and prosper it must strike a balance between not going nutso with its ideals and not offending anybody. It turns a lot of good people off who don't like to be dictated to, people do get selected out. They are preachy and dogmatic but that is an inevitable product of a community where people are striving to live rightly (personal interview, Tom Hilliard). Some friction inevitably results. A Coop member complained in a letter to the Linewaiters' Gazette (August 1, 1996) that a checkout worker had refused to touch a chicken that she wanted to buy. The checkout worker responded in the following issue to apologize for causing offence, and added "I simply ask that humans who eat animals spare me any extended time and proximity with the pitiable victims' bodies" (August 15, 1996, 9). This exchange points up the intensity and intimacy cooperative members bring to their work and shopping. The two members were in disagreement about the eating of chicken, but their dispute, made public to all in the pages of the Coop's newspaper, is about their feeling of connection and community within the Coop and the importance of food as a defining element of community. I've heard about people harassed about what they buy. I make disapproving comments myself because they carry too many prepared and pre-packaged foods that I can't afford, so I find myself making snide remarks. I really don't think we need to buy so many chips and cookies. There is not as much of a discount on those yuppie foods (Marion Jacobson). The fiercest disputes are frequently between people who are closest in their beliefs. Cooperatives blur the boundaries between work and home (Cox 1994, 49). It is unlikely that either of the members quoted above would criticize the food choices of shoppers in commercial stores. Food is serious business, and a source of merriment (see, for instance, Bisson, Ruedenberg): SHOP THE COOP WAY AND SAVE! THESE FINE PEOPLES ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU The Whole Wheat Food Coop The WWFC Coordinating Council has approved the following statement for publication. The Council voted on the statement line by line, and where the vote was not unanimous the minority opinion appears in brackets. WHOLE WHEAT FLOUR Ground on our own millstone 12c lb [8c] ORANGES 6c ea. MILK 39c 1/2 gal, 82c gal.[what's the markup for--the pleasure of your company? 78c] CARROTS 15c lb. [The carrots are not too crisp because the big honchos in this so-called organization don't know how to call an electrician to fix the cooler which has not worked for six weeks now. In fact it's like a steam pit in there. If the "coordinators" would come around once in a while they might find out about these things. The oranges are shrivelled up, also the lettuce, and the carrots are like rubber. Organic or not, I wouldn't feed it to apes. Diane.] HOME-MADE YOGHURT delicious 75c qt.[Anyone who can in good conscience sell this stuff for 75c should be forced to eat it.] ACORN SQUASH 30c ea.[I will not accept more than 21c per squash and I am giving away the bread and milk free until this group shows a little more sensitivity to the women who do about two-thirds of the work. That's no lie either. I am at the store 1-4 PM Mondays and 5-8 Thursdays--the tall woman with reddish hair and glasses. come to me for bargains. Marcia.] SHARP CHEDDAR 80c lb.[stuff it in your ear, hippie ripoff artist! We're busting out of this pukehole!] Support [the boycott of] your neighborhood coop! PEOPLE'S CANDY COLLECTIVE Last august, five of us pulled out of the Whole Wheat Coop to form the Collective. Hopefully this article will try to explain what we're doing and where we go from here. At Whole Wheat we were making sesame seed cakes and oat balls. We enjoyed our work, but we wanted to branch out into wholesome chocolate and nut bars. This proved to be traumatic for the coop hierarchy, which was into macrobiotic and organic gardening, the whole elitist grocery bag. They took the position that candy was bad for the people, it ruins their teeth, spoils their appetite, etc. Finally, we split. Our purpose was to set up a candy store where the decision making would be shared by the whole community. . . . PEOPLE'S MEATS Most of us accept strict vegetarianism as the best way, but many find it difficult to change their eating habits. People's Meats is an interim solution. All our meat comes from animals who were unable to care for themselves any longer. Hoping to phase out the operation, we do not advertise hours, prices or location. We do not deliver (Keillor 1983, 76). II Park Slope Brownstones and brick rowhouses in need of care and repair have attracted waves of newcomers to Park Slope, a geographically challenging part of Brooklyn west of Prospect Park and south of Atlantic Avenue. The steep incline from which the area takes its name makes it difficult to maneuver a baby carriage or shopping cart, but makes the landscape picturesque.3 The houses and churches in Park Slope are newer, smaller, and less elegant than those of Brooklyn Heights to the west. Park Slope was not built to be the affluent neighborhood it is becoming, but in this case, topography is not destiny.4 The do-it-yourself ethos of people attracted to Park Slope makes a cooperative buying and shopping enterprise particularly viable. Neighbors who are willing, and even eager, to rebuild their own bathrooms are willing to unload and unpack crates of soymilk and kelp. Many layers of nostalgia, almost a cottage industry in Brooklyn, inform the reactions of residents to the boomlet in Park Slope, which some call "the death of a small neighborhood" (Yardley 1998, B1). Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has noted that heritage allows the dead to live on in transvalued form (1995, 369). In the case of Park Slope, Brooklyn, the problem that heritage is being made to address is not failure, but a surfeit of success. The Coop is both a sign of the change in the neighborhood and a reaction to it. For Annie Hauck-Lawson, who has been a member for six years, the Coop is a link to a home she had to leave. I've lived my whole life in Park Slope but now live in Windsor Terrace, because I can no longer afford the neighborhood I grew up in. In all honesty the cost of housing is really bringing in a different level of people and those people I don't think would join the Coop because they have enough money to shop where they want. I still love Park Slope (Personal interview, Annie Hauck-Lawson ) . The Park Slope Food Coop opened in 1973 on the upper floor of 782 Union Street. In 1979, it doubled in size when it expanded to the lower floor. In 1988, the Coop began negotiations to buy 780 Union Street and in 1991 it doubled in size again when it finally expanded into number 780. In 1991 the Coop acquired shopping carts and baskets for the first time; shoppers had previously carried or pushed their groceries in cardboard cartons. Not all shoppers found this an improvement: Dear Editors, I will get my gripes about the new space out first; I feel that I am in a supermarket now. . . . I hate the carts; can't we trade them in for smaller ones? . . . It feels like "their" store now. . . . My second point is not so mundane. I see the Coop as becoming a very straight, heterosexually-oriented environment. And this not in a nice way. Lesbians and gays . . . are being ignored in favor of family oriented policies like big shopping carts and pre-packaged cheese (???). All these "gourmet" items; there is a recession going on; people are out of work, yet our shelves taunt and exclude people by the very attitude of jarred olive paste, and the new convenience of canned soda! How convenient for the kids, and for mom too! I suggest that We take out a few moments when the dust settles from the next renovations, and look into Our hearts, and find the wisdom to change the Coop from this suburban, John Sununu nightmare it seems to be heading for. . . . Sorry if I'm angry, but I am. (Mark Kuebel. Letter to the editor Linewaiters' Gazette July 11, 1991. All punctuation and capitalization are in the original) Many letters to the editor of the Linewaiters' Gazette spoke to the same issues as Kuebel, particularly the oversized carts and the loss of the cut-toorder cheese counter, and most of these letters were more moderately worded, but I have chosen this letter to quote because it addresses many of the issues facing a rearticulated patchwork community. Food consumption alone can create a community (Bell et al 1997, 109) and Park Slope may well be a community, but it is largely a community of people who moved there from somewhere else, and therefore must constantly define and redefine what it is that they share, other than space. The writer of this letter objects to the shopping carts not only because they are too large and unwieldy for such a small store (as they still are) but because to him they symbolize the influx into Park Slope of the very people he moved there to avoid, families with small children. That the writer is "taunt[ed] . . . by the very attitude of jarred olive paste" indicates the relevance of food items to his sense of community and sense of self. His letter is also typical of the frontier-style cussedness of many Slopers. Michele Finley of Garfield place told the New York Times that she would not remove the noisy wind chimes that were keeping her new neighbors awake, even after repeated polite requests, because the desperate neighbors had as a last resort tried to offer a small gift of cash or wine for their removal. "'That's insulting' fumed Ms. Finley. 'This is arrogance beyond belief'" (Yardley, B4). III The Store Part A: The Process All members of the Park Slope Food Coop work in the store and eighty percent of the work, including legal and accounting services, is done by unpaid members. A small paid staff, all of whom are members as well, does the coordinating of the business. Most of the members work as parts of squads that involve the everyday running of a food market: Receiving, food handling, stocking, pricing, checkout, cashier, office work, and cleanup. Members on these squads work two and three-quarters hours every four weeks. Other squads have less regular needs, such as orientation, accounting, legal, newspaper, event-planning, compost committee, and construction. Chef and cooking teacher Susan Baldassano teaches cooking classes at the Coop particularly geared to helping members learn about the Coop's products. Culinary ethnographer Annie Hauck-Lawson was working a childcare shift one day when she noticed that the toys were terribly grubby. She called the office and suggested adding a toy-cleaning shift, and is now the regular toy-cleaner. Members who miss their workslots have four weeks to 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" (Susan Baldassano). Every adult member of every member household must join and work. All prospective coop members attend an orientation meeting as the first step to joining. I am told over the phone that the meeting will begin at 7:30 Wednesday evening and that I should try to come early, because the door will be locked promptly at 7:30. I cannot help recalling that many of the mission soupkitchens at which I worked in the city lock their doors once services have started, so that clients who do not attend the whole service cannot show up for supper. Some prospective members never get past this stage, which one called "A Stalinist cell." In the meeting room, we help ourselves to printed orientation packets and some refreshments. The packages of the cookies and chips are included on the table so that we may read the ingredients of whatever we choose to eat. At the beginning of the meeting the speaker tells anyone who cannot stay for two hours to leave now, and adds that we should all cooperate at the end of the meeting by stacking our chairs. I am beginning to feel very claustrophobic in the locked room and very annoyed with the speaker. Why can't he just ask us to stack the chairs? The speaker emphasizes that the store is a community in cooperation with the entire Park Slope community and in cooperation with the planet. The Coop donates edible but unsaleable food to a local soupkitchen, and composts all non-edible food. All packing materials are reused or recycled. The membership elects a board of directors, who make general store policies, and major issues, such as expansion of the store, are decided by referendum. Members recently voted to expand the Coop into the building next door and are currently considering adopting a mission statement. The people that ended up running it to a large degree are pragmatic, not purists. We sell what people buy. We do sell chicken and fish. Some people would like to sell meat. The Coop has consciousness about what it is selling both environmentally and health wise. The one area where it has retained moral high ground is the work requirement. Other cooperatives allow people to choose to pay higher prices instead of working. This Coop is unique because they decided not to do that; there are no tiers, everybody has to work. That really is the basis of the Coop's philosophy, not whether they sell sugar or not. It creates a very interesting situation socially. Everyone works; everyone is an owner. That makes it a philosophically sound organization (Personal interview, PSFC). The rest of the orientation meeting includes an explanation of a map of the store with the correct directions of the one way aisles, and a tour of the store. visitors who attend the meeting may shop at the store in exchange for their time. The rules, particularly the one-way aisles seem harsh, but after I have shopped in the narrow store a few times, I am ready to advocate one-way aisles for my local stores as well, Coordinator Ellen Weinstat explains: The aisles are narrow; it's the only way to function. You are not going to get kicked out if you go the wrong way. Our rules and procedures have come out of practical experience; we don't just make things up to annoy people. For orientation we locked the door at 7:30. The thought is for people right off the bat to understand that we are serious. The first experience with the Coop communicates that you come when you are supposed to come. Coop members generally approve of the way the board and coordinators run the organization and a majority never attend the general meetings, but love to discuss policy. "People here are always thinking about the implications of everything," explains one shopper, "That's really nifty. I find that stam people [unmarked people] think about less and less." Ultimately, it is just this, thinking about the food, talking about the food, and for good or ill, painstakingly investigating the implications of everything that drive the processes of the Coop. In some cases, such as the 1997 discussions about expanding the site (see Rohde 1997a and b and Ryan 1997a and b) the intensity of identification of Coop members can lead to bitter arguments and very bad feelings. It is because the Coop's business is food that participants take these conflicts personally. Even members who are not vegetarians or strict adherents to organics identify strongly with the purpose of providing foods of impeccable quality. IV The Store Part B: The Site The Park Slope Food Coop is the only retail establishment on the south side of Union Street between 6th and 7th Avenues, where it shares the block with mostly industrial and warehouse sites, but it is only half a block away from 7th avenue, Park Slope's main commercial drag, where a large Key Food, the Coop's main competitor, a Rite Aid, and a new Barnes and Noble Superstore rub shoulders boutiques and coffee shops. A pedestrian walking down Union street would notice the red and green neon sign hanging at the second story level (Park Slope FOOD COOP est. 1973) but would have no way of guessing that a foodstore was hidden behind the steel gates that are always pulled down. The Coop does not have a plate glass display windows like most food stores, rendering it invisible from the outside and somewhat cave-like within. Upon entering, a shopper may proceed directly upstairs to the second floor where offices, a meeting room, the childcare room and the Coop's archives reside. Anyone may enter the upstairs area. Shoppers who wish to enter the store area on the main floor must show Park Slope Food Coop identification and wait for it to be verified by a quick computer check. The front desk will permit entry to the store if the shopper is up to date with work and payment requirements (see map). Following the yellow arrows on the floor that indicate which way the one-way aisles run, a shopper heads first to the produce aisle, the heart of the store and the place to get the best bargains. The produce aisle is usually a bit crowded since this is where shoppers tend to linger the longest. Coop members ask each other what some of the more unfamiliar items are, and discuss how best to prepare them. Common vegetable and fruits lie alongside baby bok choi, two kinds of blood oranges (tart and tarter), and two kinds of artichokes, the cheaper of which are thirty-nine cents apiece. Opposite the vegetables are the salad dressings and beverages. The remaining aisles have the other food products and utensils, dairy products, cookbooks and some small appliances. The last two aisles also serve as the waiting area for shoppers with full carts. The wait can be a bit longer than generally accepted at a grocery store because all the check-out staff are amateurs and because it is a two step process. First, you go to a check-out counter where a worker will check your identification, add up your purchases, and give you a receipt with your total bill, an inventory of the bags you are carrying and the secret password of the day. A sign posted near the check-out station asks that you open your bags for inspection so that the staff will not have to ask. After you have packed you purchases into your bags, you may go to the cashier to present your bill and pay for them. The long slow check-out lines are a self feeding process. Because the shopping experience can be trying, many shoppers maximize their purchases in order to make less frequent trips to the Coop, but because so many shoppers have full carts, the line moves slowly. It is by no means an ideal shopping environment. It's grown tremendously. when we opened the building was half as large things were very primitive; we didn't have shopping carts. We used to have a cheese counter. The produce used to be moved downstairs to the basement ever night. Now we have a real produce cooler. It's evolved from being kind of a club to being a real food store, and there is not really anything lost. There's always nostalgia; there's always a lot of talk about that, but I perceive Americans and especially Slopers as becoming more conscious, not less. I do not see newcomers as corrupt. More and more people are willing to put up with the hassle and less than ideal shopping environment for good produce at the right price. You can really integrate it into your daily life (Personal interview, PSFC). The site functions within its constituent communities as a store, a workplace, a meeting place and as a place of mediation between members, their systems of belief, and their sustenance. It is also, to an extent, a "good third place," to borrow a term coined by Ray Oldenburg (1989). 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. The Coop is reachable by foot for most members, a place they can drop in at with or without advance planning, where they may or may not run into friends and acquaintances. The Coop organizes dinners, concerts, internet workshops, readings, classes, and this very weekend a gala celebration of its twenty-fifth anniversary, but it is the casual everyday contact rather than the organized activities that create community (Oldenburg 1989,289). V The Tofu Turkey For the last two years the Park Slope Food Coop has been the only New York location for the Fresh Tofu Tofu Thanksgiving turkeys. The Tofu Turkey has been more popular every year it has been available. One member reported that she almost lost hers when she left it unattended. The Tofu Turkey is particularly interesting because of its appeal to vegetarians, its centrality to the family and community-centered holiday of Thanksgiving, and the unusual commercial issues surrounding its production and sale. The Tofu Turkey, made by the Fresh Tofu company of Pennsylvania, is a two-dimensional sheet of marinated tofu about three inches thick die-cut into the shape of a turkey. Decorations, such as feathers and a face for the turkey are hand scored on the tofu. Fresh Tofu makes the Tofu Turkey only at Thanksgiving, and Gary Abramowitz, the founder and owner, made the first Tofu Turkey for himself in 1990. The way the turkey started was I've been a vegetarian since 1970, and obviously at thanksgiving the vegetarian suffers. I realized I had these very large pieces of tofu I could do with what I wanted. In 1990 I made one for myself, the next year I made some for friend and a few favorite stores. Then in 1992 I began to market them. It's very low key, no advertising, just letting stores know they're available. Then the Wall Street Journal did an article this year the day before thanksgiving and the crowd went crazy. We had calls from Israel, Moscow. Unlike other vegetarian attempts at turkey-mimesis such as the Tufurkey and the Great Unturkey, the Tofu Turkey does not imitate a cooked turkey, it merely refers to the index of turkeyhood. The Tofurkey and the Great Unturkey are meant to take the place of the roasted Thanksgiving turkey and provide a mimetically correct reproduction of the traditional table. No prepared food could really succeed fully at this, and there is also a disadvantage in succeeding too well. Many vegetarians might be offended or simply disgusted by non-turkey that too closely approximates the real thing: It is a piece of tofu marinated in soy sauce, cut out with cookie cutter in shape of turkey with a smile on his face feathers on his tail. He kinda puffs up the feathers when he bakes; it's just very cute, you know. I think there's something gross about a piece of dead meat. but this is a live smiling turkey. It's a cartoon character. It looks like those turkeys everybody drew with their hands. It is completely inoffensive if you are a vegetarian; in fact it makes you smug. He just got it right (Personal interview, PSFC). Because the Tofu Turkey is not frozen, as are the Tofurkey and the Great Unturkey, all the Turkeys must be made within the three weeks before Thanksgiving, disrupting the production at Fresh Tofu which also makes other tofu products year-round. "It's just turkeymania around here." Informants who have eaten the Tofu Turkey report that it was tasty, substantial and satisfying, and that they were very happy to be able to get it at the Coop. Some dissenters feel that while good, the Tofu Turkey is an odd item to have put the PSFC on the map. "It's the same as our baked tofu. It's just made in a turkey. I don't know why it's such a big media event." VI Conclusion To be self sustaining, a cuisine needs more than ideas about food; it also needs the food itself (Belasco, 68). Shoppers at the Park Slope Food Coop may be looking to save the earth or looking for human connections, but they are first of all looking for good food at good prices. Most of the Coop's members could never afford to eat organic produce regularly if they could not buy it at close to wholesale prices. Some members become deeply involved in the conversation about running the store. Others just "Wanna do my thing and get out of there," but all must work a two and three-quarters hour shift every four weeks for their shopping privileges. The shared hours of shopping an working connect members in a patchwork community of sorts. Many of the Coop's members are especially attracted by what they see as the Coop's left liberal ethos, and the Coop does indeed base many of its choices on environmental and labor concerns. While it does, the Coop has attracted many Hasidic and Haredi members from the nearby neighborhoods of Flatbush, Borough Park, and Midwood, and has adapted to including these communities by selling all hametz (leaven) belonging to the Coop during the week of Passover. The various members of the Coop are connected to one another by their willingness to put certain conveniences aside for the sake of the moral order of food. Notes 1. In Park Slope, The word Coop, pronounced as two syllables, is always spelled without the hyphen, and with an uppercase initial. 2. Oddly, the youth movement never discovered feminism. While members of the counterculture may have been ahead of their older allies in their interest in politicizing food, they were well behind the mainstream left with respect to women's issues. 3. The picturesque is found any time the ground is uneven (Barthes 1972, 74). 4. The Brooklyn Heights area buildings date from the 1860s to 1880s. Most Park Slope structures are from the turn of the century. Warm thanks to Gary Abramowitz, Susan Baldassano, Annie Hauck- Lawson, Tom Hilliard, Joe Holtz, Marion Jacobson, Barbara and Avishay Mazor, Ursula Ruedenberg, Jeffrey Salant, Jeffrey Shandler, and Ellen Weinstat. Reference List Barthes, Roland. 1972 [1957]. Mythologies. Translated by Jonathan Cape. New York: The Noonday Press, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Belasco, Warren J. 1989. Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry, 1966-1988. New York: Pantheon. Bell, David, and Gill Valentine. 1997. Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat. London: Routledge, 1997. Bisson, Terry. 1996. "Hawk debate heats up" Linewaiters' Gazette Q 4 Feb. 15. Small appliance debate: A device with singularity that sends garbage to black hole. We ship water from France, why not send dirty snow to another universe? The disappearance of several cars and pets has been blamed on the device, though coordinator Joe Holtz is sceptical. "Pets and cars disappear all the time," he points out. "And it wouldn't be the coop if people didn't complain." Following the publication of this article, several members who did not realize it was satire came to the next general meeting to protest carrying this dangerous appliance. Cox, Craig. 1994. Storefront revolution: Food coops and the counterculture. Perspectives on the sixties, ed, Barbara L. Tischler. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. An interesting study of two cooperatives in St. Paul Minnesota. The coops where Cox worked and did the research for this book failed, and the overall theme of the book is one of lost dreams and bitter reality. Fine, Gary Alan. 1996. Kitchens: The culture of restaurant work. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Holtz, Joseph. 1996. Some thoughts on our work requirement. Linewaiters' Gazette Volume Q , 3. Feb. 1. How the Park Slope Food Coop works: A membership manual. 1998. New York: Park Slope Food Coop. Katzen, Mollie. 1977. The Mososewood cookbook. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press. This cookbook produced by a cooperative restaurant collective was one of the cookbooks that shook the world in the seventies and eighties. The vegetarian recipes innocently and exuberantly flowing with butter and cream informed the cooking of a generation of vegetarians. Many of the people I met in high school and college learned to cook from this book, and it has very special place in my heart, even though I almost never prepare the recipes anymore. Keillor, Garrison. 1983. The people's shopper. In Happy to be here. New York: Penguin. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1995. Theorizing heritage. Ethnomusicology 39, no. 3 (Fall): 367- 379. Mennell, Stephen. 1996 [1985]. All manners of food: Eating and taste in England and France from the middle ages to the present. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Park Slope Food Coop Web Page http://www.people-link.com/users/foodcoop Rohde, David. 1997a. Food coop bitter to the core. New York Times, January 26, sec. 13:8 ________. 1997b. Compromise recipe at feuding food coop. New York Times, February 2, sec 13:10. Rosenthal, Lara. 1997. New Thanksgiving dinner: Gravy, but turkeys not invited. Wall Street Journal November 26, Section B:1. Ruedenberg, Ursula. 1996. More on Hawk (2). Letter to editor LWG Q 8 April 11. Reports that recalcitrant customer pulled out hawk and "accidentally" pointed it at her. Scary enough being a weekend squad leader as it is. Ryan, Bill. 1997a. Bitterness persists despite civility of special meeting. LWG R 4:1 ________. 1997b. Who planted gun in Times article about Coop? LWG R 4:2. Yardley, Jim. 1998. Park Slope, reshaped by money: As rents rise, some fear for neighborhood's soul. New York Times March 15. Jochnowitz 1