On the Freezer Doors at the Food Co-op: Man Makes Use of Plants and Animals

We sometimes talk about the Theater of Food in food co-ops, and in the kitchens of small cafés. The show must go on, through all kinds of weather, political crises, personal dilemmas. There is always a lot happening behind the scenes, as in any theater. In the morning, the vegetables are put out on display like gigantic live sculptures, and the meat and deli cases are restocked. The grocery shelves are fronted and faced; the morning muffins start baking before the sun comes up. Phone calls are made to source local and organic products: tofu, grass-fed meats, wild seafood, morels, watercress, organic dairy. (Wo)Man Makes Use of Plants and Animals, indeed.

I love food co-ops because they provide jobs with benefits to talented people who enrich their communities in multiple ways. They are independent-minded souls. Many also excel as musicians, writers, mothers and fathers, midwives, artists, community volunteers, green builders, students, teachers, healers, tattoo-artists, massage therapists, master gardeners, local growers, videographers, dancers, business entrepreneurs. They are very community-minded and tend to be active in local politics. Nerds, geeks, back-to-the-landers, hipsters – they resist such delimiting designations (or embrace them ironically), tending to run the individuality gamut. Most like people and thrive on teamwork. They make good stagehands, extras, soloists, stand-up comedians, set painters, wine tasters, and go-to-guys and gals. Lots of them are really good cooks. They've discovered natural foods and as a result they don't spend a lot money on junk food or pharmaceuticals. They span a wide age range, too, making this an inter-generational drama.

These vintage schoolbook images decorate the freezer walk-in doors at the Bloomingfoods Near West Side location. Just a little glimpse of the set design (and the wit) backstage.

David Foster Wallace: A Soul-Sucking Trip to the Supermarket

My copy of The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006, edited by Dave Eggers, arrived yesterday. It's perhaps the last copy of this book available right now on the Internet, snatched up by readers for its final piece, David Foster Wallace's Kenyon College Commencement Speech of 2005, written about earlier here at elenabella.

It's a fine collection that gives a word picture snapshot of the times, including Best Fake Headlines from The Onion ("Case of Glitter Lung on the Rise among Elementary School Art Teachers") and Best New Words and Phrases (downlow, dramedy, geocaching, greige, podcast, spendy, and twofer make the 2006 list).

Coming from a national co-op grocery marketing conference last week, where we talk a lot about the quality of experience offered to our shoppers, I was quite amazed to see that the heart of Wallace's speech is the story of an alienating trip to a super-lit sensory-deadening supermarket. Here is how he describes the numbing effects of everyday adult life:

By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home -- you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job -- and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.

Throughout the speech, Wallace is examining our notions of freedom, and our tendency to see ourselves at the center of the universe ("the freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation"). He's urging more imaginative awareness:

...the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted: you get to conciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. [ ...] The real important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

Without realizing it, Wallace is talking about the kind of culture co-op grocery stores work to create – with real connections to member-owners, customers, staff, and suppliers – and the conscious effort it takes to build and sustain quality interactions. I wish he'd been a customer at one of our stores, with a humanizing, restorative experience, a cashier who could talk to him about his writing (or at least ask "how's it going?"), a familiar place to energize and revive his day.

Never underestimate the far-reaching effects of a visit to the grocery store, whether it's a good trip or bad.

The Wall Street Journal reprinted most of the speech in full; you can find it at this link. They leave off the final couple of sentences, which I've restored below:

It is unimaginably hard to do this – to live consciously, adultly, day in and day out. Which means yet another cliché is true: your education really is the job of a lifetime, and it commences – now. I wish you way more than luck.

Road Trip to Food Co-ops in Lexington and Asheville

Ahhh...home again after an adventure. We took a little road trip behind the bus filled with Sounds of South choir kids, who were performing in Gatlinburg, Tennessee last Friday. Sav has collected a few hundred photos of the kids on the bus, in the town, and in the Smoky Mountains. Here is just one of some of the gang.

Andreas and I made our own meandering way, with a first stop in Lexington, Kentucky, where we had lunch at Good Foods Market and Café. We had a chance to visit my friend Anne Hopkins, the general manager, and Danielle Dove, the new marketing manager.

It's great to have a network of co-ops across the country, mixed in there with the Subways, Short Stops, Cracker Barrels and such. For a map and a list go to NCGA.coop. There's more to come: visit Food Coop 500 to learn how to start a food co-op in your community. There isn't one yet in Gatlinburg, only a very crowded and chaotic Food City.

We drove through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to Asheville, North Carolina on Saturday to visit the sweet brick French Broad Food Co-op there, across the street from Laurey's, where the philosophy is "Don't Postpone Joy." It's right across from The Orange Peel, a Social and Pleasure Club, too: a nice scene there in Asheville, Cornelius Vanderbilt country.

In the rain on Sunday we circled back to Good Foods, where the café was hopping and the food was was fantastic. Kale, berry pudding, fresh butternut squash ravioli, lima beans with delicious herb seasoning...you can't find these things at the big boxes or chains.

All along the road (alongside the shops selling "Genuine Antique Reproductions") the redbuds and dogwoods were in bloom. It was the perfect moment for a trip to the Smokys – except for that endless bottleneck at the car show in Pigeon Forge!

Mad Men

I'm usually more of a book than a screen person, but I fell in love with the AMC series Mad Men. Now the 2nd season has ended...and a bit of melancholy sets in. What will I do without my weekly Sunday night fix – of the enigmatic Don Draper and the rest of those vivid characters at Sterling Cooper?

What is it about this show? The slower pace, the gorgeous male lead, the exquisite production values, the news reels from the 60s, the inside jokes, the focus on the creative process in an increasingly commercial world, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction...it is all so immensely satisfying. I'll have to fill my time before the next season studying all of the extras available at the website: the fashion files, commentaries, interviews, and such. Maybe I'll learn how to make a few cocktails, too. (I'm still in the dark about those gimlets.)

It was fun to see Jon Hamm on Saturday Night Live this week too, or (in fact) to see the sketches at the SNL website. (Click here to see the parody of a Mad Men pitch). Writing that, I am just now "getting" an inside joke from earlier in the series, when Betty says to Don (in her pitch to him about her desire to go back to modelling): "There will still be ham." And of course Don tells Bobby, his son, that his own (abusive, long dead) father liked to eat "ham" ...and a kind of candy that smelled like violets.

Food co-ops took a hit this week on SNL, though, in the "Ralph Nadar" appearance on Weekend Update. Ouch! So much for contradicting outdated perceptions of food co-ops in the national media.

What I Bought at the Truckload Sale

I finally stopped by the Bloomingfoods Truckload Sale, which has been extended through the weekend in recognition of Co-op Month. First I helped front and face boxes and case stacks, and tried my hand at a box knife for the first time in years. Then I shopped.

Wow, such great bargains. I like to keep a pretty well-stocked larder, so this was my chance. Let's see if I can remember what I bought:

• There was a great assortment of BioNaturae pasta from Italy, and I love those, so I got a case of spaghetti. I may need to go back for spirals and bows. These are organic pastas mixed with natural spring water and pressed with antique bronze dies. Their packaging looks like it was created by kids in a Waldorf School, with lots of soft colored pencils. This pasta does have a great texture, and it originates from small organic farms in Tuscany: those have to be a good thing, right? There were other very low priced pastas at the sale, but I went with BioNat.

• We go through a lot of pasta sauce, so I got a case of organic Marinara Sauce.

• Tree of Life organic ketchup and mustard: just when we'd run out! I timed this pretty well with last spring's sale.

• CitraSuds laundry detergent: maybe enough to last through the end of the year. And a case of 7th Generation toilet paper. I still remember the first time I used CitraSolv: we had moved to Bloomingfon into a tiny filthy house, new baby in tow. I was so grateful to be able to clean it with something non-toxic that smelled wonderful and seemed to instantly dissolve the grime. And now years later, I kind of like those icons on the CitraSolv home page.

• Enough Nature's Gate herbal shampoo and conditioner to last at least until spring. I still haven't found a sodium laureth sulfite-free shampoo that I like. This one is not SLS-free, and like most shampoos, there are a lot of laureths and sodiums in the ingredient list, alongside those herbes aromatiques. I really like the Nature's Gate herbal conditioner – the smell makes me swoon. (But later: I think they have changed the formula and added the dreaded unspecified "fragrance": damn!)

• A whole case of Emergen-C, our family secret to staying healthy in the winter.

• Ciao Bella sorbet: blood orange! And Ciao Bella pistachio. We rarely purchase frozen treats since getting an ice cream maker, but these are so delicious. They have nice packaging and a pretty cool website, too.

• Enough 100% recycled aluminum foil to last until spring, the kind with that funny name: If You Care. (Great product, lame website.)

• Lots of Organic Valley cheese in assorted flavors, and some OV cultured butter. I'm an Organic Valley fan, especially after touring the butter factory in southwest Wisconsin and watching the butter squeeze out of the stainless steel tubing into its little wrappers and packages. Come to think of it, I'll have to write about that experience some time. Organic Valley is a producer co-op: it's worth a visit to go to their site, their headquarters in LaFarge, Wisconsin, and to their butter factories!

• Traderspoint plain yogurt in a glass bottle. This yogurt won a national award for being the best in the country, and it's from Indiana, so I feel a twinge of regional pride. It is so delicious, and the glass packaging is beautiful, too. I intend to use this as a starter to finally try to get into the habit of making my own yogurt.

• Fischer Farms (local, natural) beef patties. And some natural ham rashers like the kind I used to eat in Ireland.

• Ling Ling vegetarian potstickers, TOL frozen organic blueberries, and organic frozen corn.

• 25# bag of Lundberg short grain brown rice, to make rice and cheese, a family favorite. Risotto made simple: cook rice, grate cheddar cheese on top, mix and eat!

• 25# bag of unbleached organic white all-purpose flour. Again, I just ran out.

• 4 big bags of seed starter organic soil enhancer: such a good deal I couldn't pass them up.

• Organic raisins, fig bars, apple cider vinegar, and other assorted tempting treats.

• Big bags of organic onions ($2), 2 butternut squash, a 5# bag of organic potatoes, and bags of organic Honeycrisp and Ambrosia apples.

If you don't have a food co-op in your community, you might just want to run right out and start one. (Visit Food Co-op 500 for How-To information.) I'm very proud of the fact that we assemble such good bargains at Bloomingfoods. Here's a nice article from my favorite trade journal, Cooperative Grocer, about our truckload sales. There's a lot of good information in that magazine, by the way, about the current state of the world and the future of food.

I passed on the chips, beverages, cider, cereal, and many other fantastic offerings...but I'll be going back tomorrow to pick up a gorgeous local pumpkin for only $3!