Not a day goes by that we are not fed by someone or something such as a business, food bank, or a corporation. Whether we give, produce, or provide food for ourselves or for others, it’s inevitable and intractable: we feed one another. In a book like this, one that looks at how you can do one or many things to improve your food communities, ask this very simple question: If all were equal, would people choose to have no access to healthy food?
In my view, that’s a quick and easy answer. No.
No one would choose to have limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables, quality protein and dairy, for themselves and their families. That’s an absurd notion. But pitifully, things are not equal. Generations are being raised on the sugar, salt, and fat of highly processed foods. Frankly, there’s a lot of bleak out there. Still, light shines through. And it does in the form of innovative food entrepreneurs. We need more of such people and businesses, such as local grocery stores, food desert grocers, and food recovery projects. Much about choice and access has to do with real-life living wages. By raising the minimum wage while supporting education at the same time, the gaps will come together, closer and closer. We can do this.
Grocery stores are fascinating. All kinds of them. From big-box to bodegas, and not just for the food but for how people walk through them and what they choose, for the music that’s playing or not playing, what condition the produce is in, what kind of meat is sold, what’s stacked up at the aisle ends, the lighting, the refrigeration, how they display the most sugary cereals and snacks in glow-in-the-dark packaging, right at kids’ eye level. Once you break supermarkets’ code — from their prime product placement on low shelves and end caps, to the coupons pushing processed foods — it becomes obvious who’s in charge of our food choices: it’s agribusinesses. This includes direct marketing to children, by using cartoon characters to hawk candylike cereals, sugar-filled yogurts, and Lunchables. For all of us hipsters, millennials, mamas, papas, baby boomers, and kids, there are marketing strategies and products designed to attract our dollars, too. Businesses have something they’re trying to sell you and your target market demographic.
The typical grocery store appears as though it has tremendous variety. Walking through aisles of well-packaged choices with items on sale, and maybe coupons in hand, is dizzying. It’s overwhelming even, with the fluorescent lighting and bright packaging. It seems as though you, the consumer, have choices, and if you’re clever, you can save money — double-couponing, rebates, and all. You can also save time by purchasing processed or ready-to-eat meals, snacks, and other convenience items so you have more time to do whatever else is more important.
But the reality is, grocery stores provide a lot less choice than it seems. About ten corporations own what we think are different and independent brands. For example, Coca-Cola owns Dasani and Vitaminwater. General Mills owns Lucky Charms and Green Giant. The other big eight are Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg’s, Mondelēz International, Mars, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever. And meat and poultry? According to Grace Communications Foundation, as of 2007, just four companies controlled more than 80 percent of the country’s beef processing, and three of these same companies (with an additional fourth) processed more than 60 percent of our pork. For chicken, the situation is not quite as extreme, but still the four main chicken companies process more than half of the country’s chickens.
Anyone who’s ever gone into the grocery store with a child knows who is in charge of what goes in your cart. Feed your kids before you go in. You’re less likely to have a battle in the cereal aisle.
For that matter, feed yourself before you go grocery shopping. You’ll buy better food and less sugar, salt, and fat.
Shop the borders of the grocery store. That’s where you’ll find whole foods. The processed and frozen foods tend to be placed in the middle.
Shift the shop. Instead of purchasing couponed convenience, find community and sustenance at a locally owned and independently operated grocer.
Grocery stores are community bedrock. They reflect us. Is your neighborhood store (if you have one) convenient and someplace where you want to shop? Does it pay and treat its employees fairly? Does it feel safe? What’s the quality of the fresh food like? Does it even offer fresh food? Is it a pleasurable shopping experience, or do you feel scammed every time you go there?
Introduce yourself or your organization to the owners or managers of your local grocery store. Let them know you want healthy whole foods. As in any other institution, from a school cafeteria to a hospital, change in the grocery industry can be difficult if not downright threatening. Demystify and clarify your intentions and purpose, diplomatically. “The customer is always right,” it's said. You are the customer.
Metcalfe’s Market (shopmetcalfes.com), which operates four stores in Wisconsin, has an innovative way of announcing local produce and products. It puts a food miles label on many of its goods. Produce, beverages, dairy, meats, fish, chicken, and small-batch items such as chocolate, condiments, crackers, and desserts get special signage that includes the town of origin and how far the product traveled to get to the store. It’s so simple and effective. And instead of promoting specific farmers and producers with portrait posters — which are beautiful and do put a face on the local farmer, grower, or producer but are expensive to print and maintain — these food miles signs give buyers easy and immediate information about where their food comes from and allow buyers, not someone else, to decide what is local.
Food miles labels illustrate the inextricable link between food and energy and provide a launching point for talking about why some foods travel more miles than others. Coffee, for one, is going to keep coming from far away. Distances are relative based on seasonality, consumer demand, distribution routes, and infrastructure or lack of it, as in access to slaughterhouses for small family farmers or commercial kitchens. Wouldn’t it be great to have food miles labeling in grocers around the country, celebrating and raising awareness of how far food is traveling from anywhere to anywhere else? It would shed light on personal decision making, spark discussion, and prompt action.
Nature abhors a vacuum. So do local food systems. Showing how far food has to travel may very well stimulate and encourage new farmers; new growers; new value-added producers such as cheese, ice cream, and beverage makers; and new business incubator kitchens to support them.
Fare & Square (fareandsquare.org), in Chester, Pennsylvania, is the first nonprofit supermarket in the United States. It provides consistent quality and access to health foods in a town that hadn’t had a grocer since 2001. In the first ten weeks of Fare & Square’s opening in 2012, its membership reached 47,000. With free membership enrollment, individuals and families receive special discounts, and a percentage of purchases is applied as a discount toward future buys. This is one way to incentivize healthy food purchases and engage regular customers.
The New Markets Tax Credit helped give this nonprofit grocery, which is a project of the traditional food bank Philabundance (philabundance.org), the credibility it needed to secure funders. What’s more, 45 jobs were created, and Fare & Square fills those positions with locals as much as it can. This is a small grocer model for other food deserts and the nonprofits that work in those communities.
Search the Healthy Food Access Portal (healthyfoodaccess.org). This online resource for food retailers, brought to you by The Food Trust, The Reinvestment Fund, and PolicyLink, was launched in 2013. A veritable wealth of good food and public health information resides here, including retail strategies, information about mobile markets (like the one in Worcester, Massachusetts), incentives, loans, policy efforts, grants, webinars on food hubs, and model programs across the country.
The New Markets Tax Credit, available through the Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund (cdfifund.gov) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is well suited to large projects such as “food desert” grocers in the 60,000- to 70,000-square-foot range. Smaller projects may find the application process cumbersome.
Look for other CDFI funds, like The Reinvestment Fund (trfund.com), which played a role in the development of the public/private project Fare & Square Market. The CDFI’s “Financing Healthy Food Options Resource Bank” is a wealth of web-based information, including training curriculums and webinars such as “Understanding the Grocery Industry,” “Underwriting Supermarkets and Grocery Stores,” and “Identifying Optimal Areas for Supermarket Development.”
The Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) is a federal financing initiative to spur community economic development projects in areas recognized as food deserts. The HFFI is supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Treasury, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and its goal is to increase access to underserved communities through funding local private/public partnerships and businesses focused on grocers, small retailers such as corner stores and bodegas, and farmers’ markets. Businesses, local tribes, nonprofits, universities, and community development corporations are a few of the kinds of organizations that may be eligible. For more information about grant opportunities, go to the Let’s Move website (letsmove.gov).
Founded in 2008 by CEO Jeff Brown of Brown’s Super Stores, UpLift Solutions (upliftsolutions.org) works on projects all over the country and all types of formats, including small and large stores, community cooperative-owned, nonprofit/food bank–owned, and Internet delivery services. According to Brown, he and his colleagues quickly learned that every situation really requires a different solution.
Regardless of geography, store format, or ownership structure, UpLift offers technical assistance that includes obtaining public and private support and financing and any other support needed, such as recruiting and training a management team.
Red Tomato (redtomato.org) was founded in 1996, when Michael Rozyne, one of the founders of the fair trade cooperative Equal Exchange, decided to apply the lessons learned working for fair trade of coffee to produce. This nonprofit works to connect regional farmers with the marketplace to bring fresh, sustainably grown produce into local grocery stores at wholesale prices. For me, I think of Red Tomato as a hybrid between a nonprofit (like La Semilla) that works to improve the PAD value chain and a smart, savvy business enterprise that knows there’s demand from the consumer for fresh, traceable, safe, and whole food and who figures out how to get it to them and pays the farmer a fair price for her food. Red Tomato has posted a great two-minute video on YouTube called “Local Food in Every Shopping Cart” that explains what they’re up to in language even a kid can understand.
Distributing food on a local level is like building a sand castle every day, all day. Like what most of our food system is based on, distribution becomes more cost-effective at a large scale, which is why it may be cheaper to ship sweet potatoes from California to South Carolina than to grow culturally appropriate, indigenous sweet potatoes and get them out to local and regional markets. Distributors are efficient at shipping hard green tomatoes, a product more road-durable than a Hostess Strawberry Sno Ball, from Florida across the country. But getting the food value chain to become efficient at shipping, say, vine-ripe tomatoes is another thing altogether. With rising fuel costs, economies of local and regional scale, technologies in mapping, and healthy food initiatives, a change in distribution is a necessity — and that’s a good thing. So as they say about Vegas, perhaps what grows in California should stay (mostly!) in California, and what grows in South Carolina should feed people locally.
FoodHub (food-hub.org) is a project of the nonprofit EcoTrust in Portland, Oregon. It’s both a marketplace and an interactive directory. As of this writing, it’s free to join. If you’re a buyer, seller, organization, nonprofit, government agency, food or agriculture trade association, or distributor, this is the place to find each other, do business, and make connections.
FoodHub is currently operating in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, and California, but its Local Food/Tech Landscape resource transcends state borders.
In preparing its report Creating a Regional Food Hub: Assessments and Recommendations for Dona Ana County, La Semilla Food Center in New Mexico found that distribution is usually “the most expensive component” of the processing, aggregation, and distribution triad (or PAD) for organizations and enterprises, especially for those working with highly perishable items; tomatoes, for example. Here are some of La Semilla’s suggestions.
— Excerpted from Creating a Regional Food Hub: Assessments and Recommendations for Dona Ana County, La Semilla Food Center (lasemillafoodcenter.org)
Jeff Brown is the president and CEO of Brown’s Super Stores, a chain of 11 stores operating as ShopRite supermarkets, 7 of which are in former food deserts in the Philadelphia area. Jeff also started the nonprofit UpLift Solutions to support grocery stores of all shapes and sizes in becoming financially sustainable in underserved communities around the country, be they rural or urban. He is a practical, innovative entrepreneur who offers the following sage business advice and encouragement for the innovative grocer.
Ideally, the best outcomes include a great, proven grocery entrepreneur with lots of experience in the retail supermarket business, maybe even multiple generations. Location is everything in retail stores. Food desert locations are best with dense population, at the intersection of two major roads, with traffic lights so you can get to the store from every direction, and, most importantly, fantastic access to public transportation. It’s pretty normal for 50 percent of the food desert population not to have cars, so they depend on public transportation. Supply chain is important: a low-cost wholesaler or cooperative will allow the store to have competitive pricing and marketing programs. Many people of the least means aspire to have a store that measures up to the standards of price, variety, quality, and appearance that you see in more affluent neighborhoods. Offering less is seen as disrespect to the community.
Because the level of diversity, widely varying family income, and the suspicion that society generally acts as if only more affluent people know what’s best, rich and personal community engagement is critical. In my work, from the beginning of evaluating a location/community, through design and construction, and on an ongoing basis after the store is open, an entrepreneur needs to deeply understand the community’s way of looking at things, what their challenges are, and not just food access. If a trusting relationship develops, there will be a lot to learn, including issues of formerly incarcerated people, violence, drugs, religious conflicts, and so forth.
I have found that all of these community challenges need to be considered in an entrepreneur’s plans. If a challenge is ignored, it will end up being a bigger problem. In our work, we have strategies to deal with graffiti, gun violence, predatory financial service, inadequate availability of health care, employment of the formerly incarcerated, job opportunities, religious conflict, and so forth. Besides the social and moral benefits of this work, it turns out to significantly accelerate the success of the store. If you have a personal relationship with community leaders, you will also learn about differences that require special products and/or services. For example, I have learned about and have authentic products for our Muslim/Jewish customers, western African, Jamaican, southern African American, and so on. Similar to the additional services, it significantly accelerates sales.
In my experience, almost no food desert stores can achieve financial success without some form of public investment. Every project should start with an expert sales study to project sales based on plans and competition. The next step is to produce financial projections based on the sales study, wholesaler, competitive pricing analysis, store format, and projected sales, gross profit and labor costs of each offered department and service. After you have a solid projection, you will have an idea of the financial gap, or shortfall, for the store to be financially sustainable. Then it’s time to work with local nonprofits, Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), and the public sector to obtain upfront assistance until the projection shows an industry average level of financial performance. It’s bad for everybody to open a store that will ultimately fail.
— Jeff Brown, CEO of Brown’s Super Stores (shoprite.com)
A few years back, the Greater Springfield Farmers’ Market teamed up with the national Discover You Can — Learn Make Share Program, sponsored by the makers of Ball products and the Farmers Market Coalition (FMC). The market holds regular canning workshops and education programs throughout the season, and the country, spreading the word about the ease of preserving your own food. This market even teamed up with a local art club to paint a mural as a backdrop for the canning workshops. Channeling an early-20th-century home kitchen, the mural depicts the time period when the Ball jar was first introduced. The workshops include everything from home pickling to salsa making. To find participating FMC markets nationwide, go to farmersmarketcoalition.org or freshpreserving.com.
It sounds so obvious, doesn’t it? Just go shopping. (Actually, it sounds like George Bush’s advice after 9/11 . . .) But farmers’ markets are like town centers and community happenings. They’re more than anonymous consumer purchasing power at mega-box stores. They are chances to meet face to face the people who grow the food you’re about to eat. They’re personal. So here’s some advice to shoppers, eaters, and all of us who go to farmers’ markets from my sister, Ann Bliss, who is a member of the Forsyth Community Food Consortium Advisory Council in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
At farmers’ markets and farm stands, look for the less-than-perfect produce, which is usually for sale at a lower price. They’re the same tomatoes and peas; they’re just not going to win the beauty pageant.
“We’ve had some success in passing policies that support farmers’ markets, but really the numbers are pretty small compared to the huge support that flows to big commodity crops. Policy makers are slowly catching up with the public on the benefits of supporting local agriculture, but we have a long way to go before the playing field is really leveled.”
— Maine congresswoman Chellie Pingree
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the official name for the food stamp program administered by the federal government. Farmers’ markets and local co-ops can accept food stamps, too. Go to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service, the authorizing agency. The information is also in Spanish.
— “SNAP (Food Stamps): Facts, Myths, and Realities,” Feeding America (feedingamerica.org)
Start with the USDA’s prescreening tool (www.snap-step1.usda.gov/fns) to find out if you qualify. The tool is also available in Spanish.
You may qualify for other benefits besides SNAP. To learn about those, go to Benefits.gov (benefits.gov/benefits).
"Burning It Down" by Steve Earle, from the recording The Low Highway
I’m thinkin’ bout burnin’ it down, boys
Thinkin’ bout burnin’ it down
Nothin’s ever gonna be the same in this town
I’m thinkin’ bout burnin’ the Walmart down.
On the surface, it’s a song about a guy who’s turned his car into a bomb, and he’s about to drive it into the wall of a Walmart, blow the thing sky high. But, really, there’s a choice you have to make . . . and that’s beneath the story line. Listen to it. It’s really about jobs versus bigger and cheaper flat-screen TVs; paying people a living wage so they can exist with dignity, or else slip into what is rapidly becoming a third-world country. It comes down to that. So many people we don’t see because they’re in these small towns, and they’re suffering because our economy is now flipping burgers and parking cars and making change, because the factory jobs and the small local businesses are falling away and that’s all that’s left.
— Steve Earle to Holly Gleason, Lone Star Music Magazine
Stores like Walmart have contributed to the demise of local, small family-run food businesses and the rise of food deserts in their absence. But there are a number of things we can do to help food deserts get water and shrink. One is working for a fair living wage. Raising the minimum wage will help people, particularly those living in food deserts, have money to spend on healthier food choices. Efforts to raise the minimum wage should go hand in hand with educational efforts (see Educate).
The following information is from Raise the Minimum Wage (raisetheminimumwage.com), a project of the National Employment Law Project.
Campaigns abound across the country; examples include Raise Michigan, Give Arkansas a Raise, and Alaskans for a Fair Minimum Wage.
As we do with tobacco, we should tax highly processed, sugar–salt–fat–laden foods and drinks that make people sick and use the money to subsidize positive initiatives in sustainable agriculture, good-food education, local/regional food hubs, and innovative businesses like food desert grocery stores.
The nonprofit Hunger Free Communities Network (hungerfreecommunities.org) offers the following description of what a hunger-free community looks like: a place where no one, no matter of what age or social standing, is worried about having enough money to buy healthy food.
— Excerpted with permission from hungerfreecommunities.org
In a YouTube video featuring Rachel Bristol of the Oregon Food Bank, it is striking how in 10 minutes one can learn the history of how food banking has dramatically changed in the last few decades. What started out as a way to keep good food out of the landfills and to provide emergency food for people who needed it in exigent circumstances has turned into something quite different. Today, food banks are expected to fulfill a family’s nutritional needs over an extended period of undetermined time.
That’s a dramatic shift. Food banks have become part of a high-stakes parallel distribution system that is expected to meet the day-to-day nutritional needs of families. Cuts in SNAP benefits threaten more people’s food security and bring more people to food banks. Federal policies (see #VoteFood and a low minimum wage) contribute to the recent changes and higher demands put onto food banks such as the Oregon Food Bank. Let’s take heed of history lessons of this venerable institution and take action so that more people can lead independent, healthy, active, citizen lives.
The Greenhouse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, collects food from local farmers, then does one better. To extend the life of this good food, its members preserve, can, pickle, and freeze it, capturing precious nutrients at their peak before redistributing their efforts to their community’s underserved citizens. This excerpt is from “How to Start a Food Recovery Program 101,” written by Ashlee Shelton, founder of the Greenhouse, for the skill-sharing website Homegrown.org (homegrown.org). Steal this recipe, and start your own food recovery program!
We’ve secured volunteers through all of the above channels, too. Typically volunteers can choose between shifts we lay out ahead of time. This system assures our volunteers that their time is valuable and lets them know in advance what tasks we need help with. We also lucked out in finding two top-notch graphic designers who work with us pro bono. People are amazingly generous, I tell you. Sometimes you just have to ask for help! Some examples of our volunteer tasks include:
You might notice a theme in these experiences: We didn’t start out as experts in any of the above-mentioned tasks. Not everyone in your group needs to be a food expert, a canning guru, or a marketing professional — but a willingness to reach out to folks who have those skills is key. We found that being honest about our gifts as well as our limitations allowed us to expand our volunteer base in a way that made the most sense.
— Excerpted with permission from “How to Start a Food Recovery Program 101,” by Ashlee Shelton
My sister helped found the wonderful Triad Buying Co-op (tbcoop.org), in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Its members can get healthy food in a system that shifts the paradigm away from grocery stores. Ann has always been thrifty—something we inherited from our parents, I suppose. Saving and reusing plastic bags, twist ties, the wax paper wrapped around sticks of butter, just like our grandmother and home ec teacher, Elva Coulter, used to teach her students in Iowa City. Ann has applied both her love of food and cooking and her law degree to creating and organizing this food co-op. What I know is how happy it makes her to be a member of a food co-op she loves. Here, she shares her knowledge for people interested in starting an online co-op of their own.
Using a web-based ordering system developed by one of its founding members, the Triad Buying Co-op provides shareholders with monthly delivery of high-quality, locally sourced natural foods and all the same brands and varie-ties of organic products typically available at specialized retail stores.
Do you worry about giving something up to shop with an online co-op? Retail therapy is woven into contemporary American life in ways most of us are unaware of. Grocery store advertising is meant to make you want to go there, to feel good about yourself as a smart shopper and a conscientious provider for those you love and care for. If shopping makes you feel good, you don’t have to give it up. It’s unlikely to go away as a legitimate use of our time and energy, as media, marketing, and the culture of consumption combine to deepen their hold on our American society. It takes time and applied decision making to shift away from the see it/want it/buy it pattern, to which we are all accustomed, and toward the online co-op buying alternative.
If, on the other hand, you come away from shopping trips feeling manipulated, even assaulted or in despair, then buying through a food cooperative might bring you hope.
A three-hour work shift realistically takes half a day to fulfill, if you count the other activities or commitments it displaces. Bulk buying assumes you have appropriate food storage capacities and equipment, as well as the cooking skills to use the products you buy in a timely way. Planning meals in advance, and sticking to that plan, can be tough at times. For many, the initial cash outlay to pay for a bulk order may be challenging — even if in the long run it saves money on specialty products needed to satisfy restricted diets.
This short quiz is designed to help potential members of the Triad Buying Co-op self-assess their reasons for joining and the likelihood of staying in long enough to find benefit. The survey helps you decide: Should I really spend $35 of my hard-earned money to join?
Scoring (just between you and the doorpost):
10 points or less: Maybe that $35 is better spent on a nice dinner out.
10 to 20: We might be a fit for you. Why not talk to one of our member mentors first?
20+: You look a lot like some of our happiest members.
All members of the co-op are shareholders of the “Triad Buying Co-operative, Inc.” (TBC). All members work a co-op job that the board either creates or recognizes, unless they have agreed to pay an increased mark-up (known as the “bump”) on their purchases. All the work needed to set up, execute, and complete the monthly delivery cycle is done by members. All management, accounting, and other organizational work is done entirely within the co-op, by its members. One member serves as the co-op’s executive director. She is paid on a contract basis for the hours that those responsibilities require over and above the minimum 3-hour-per-month commitment that is the standard for all other co-op jobs.
Great prices on foods and products that represent commitments to conscience, personal preference, or health needs may be the first reason a member joins. But the opportunity to become an active and engaged member of a food community is what long-term members identify as their most important benefit. “Shareholder” is the legal term that describes the relationship between the incorporated business entity and its owners. “Membership” is the sense of participation, contribution, and engagement that keeps the co-op alive and thriving.
Each member makes their individual food choices online from the TBC ordering website. The site is built from two catalogs: locally sourced goods (primarily produce, meat, and eggs from local and regional growers, but also prepared foods from restaurants, bakers, and other providers who have met our approval) and the United Foods web catalog (nationally recognized brands of organic and “natural” food products you’d see in a store). Members may also buy from the Frontier Natural Products Co-op through the monthly TBC aggregate order. The co-op buys at wholesale prices, and passes that price on to members. At check out, members pay an additional “bump” on their total purchase. Bump percentages are determined by the board each year based on budget projections.
A member who selects and orders a United Foods product on the TBC website — for example, two jars of a particular brand of pasta sauce out of a case flat of six — shares that flat by making the remaining four jars available to other members to add to their own order on the website. Or, a member can buy an entire case if they want to.
The computer program that ties the member selections together from both catalog sources into a single member order and tracks subscriptions took the place of the monthly gathering around someone’s kitchen table, using a paper catalog to aggregate purchases and place the combined order. But the feeling of “sharing” knowledge and good food choices is almost the same, since all members still see what other members have chosen when a flat of spaghetti sauce is up for grabs. TBC’s computer program is available to others, but the local buying component in the software would have to be adapted and customized.
On pickup day, it’s pretty common that members visit while they help each other juggle kids and cartons and ice chests back into their cars. You hear them ask each other: What is that like? How do you fix it? Do your kids eat it? Along with all the other simple, civil exchanges that make us a cooperative community: How’s your mom? Did the job come through? When did you join? We are each other’s greeters, baggers, nutrition advisors, and recipe exchange, all in one.
Buying food as part of a co-op turned out to be a wonderful way to feel individually enabled to make positive economic and environmental change and to create access to whole, healthy foods in an economically sustainable way.
When TBC grew from a few families who met once a month to pool their orders, it needed a larger food preparation area and more floor space for distribution. A local church agreed to let the co-op use its kitchen and meeting area in exchange for cleaning services and the shared use of TBC’s upright freezer. On delivery day, TBC workers came in early to arrange the church’s folding chairs into three rows, alphabetized according to the member’s name, stuck on the back of each chair with a magnetized tag. That chair was the landing place for all the items ordered by the member whose name it wore. As items were weighed or counted in the church kitchen, like blocks of feta or bags of almonds, other workers distributed products to each member’s chair. Pickup days were a glorious, bustling 48-hour phenomenon, with everybody working to get everything ready for pickup, which opened and closed once a month on Thursday afternoon. When delivery was over the tags came off; the chairs were cleaned, folded, and put back in storage. Cleanup workers vacuumed, scoured the kitchen, and generally put the church back into the Church by making sure it was presentable for Sunday services. The last one out took care of taking flattened boxes and other materials to the recycle station, turned out the lights, and locked the door.
Co-op delivery operations today retain the same vibe. Instead of chairs, we used our new space to build long open counters with taped-out “slots” — a space for each member’s order that month. Just as before, many food goods are taken home in plain paper bags, cloth drawstring sacks, or clear plastic bags. Each is weighed or counted out and labeled by members during their work shift. Produce is often delivered in the boxes it came in. For cold food items (meats, cheeses, and frozen goods), members now take the printout of their order to a separate room where porters gather these products from our collection of used and donated freezers and refrigerators. And while they wait, there’s lots of conversing, catching up, and introductions between new and seasoned members.
Food from the co-op has my name on it. What could be better than that?
The desire for, and commitment to, our food community extends to our vendors and suppliers. When growers come in to deliver their monthly order of eggs, meat, or seasonal produce, they are greeted personally. When a grower needs extra hands at harvest, the co-op sends an e-mail invitation to members to come out and help. And they do.
The co-op is a corporation. That “Inc.” at the end of its name represents a choice of business entity that ensures the co-op complies with all external regulatory requirements. It also provided an architecture for internal participation in co-op governance, ensured accountability to the membership from those who hold office, and gave legal protection for those individuals willing to take leadership responsibility. More important, by incorporating, the co-op bound itself publicly to its mission and the co-operative business model.
After incorporation, the board’s first act was to produce a written set of bylaws delineating the board’s power to make policy, commit the co-op’s resources, and control the co-op’s operations. The bylaws also detailed share-owner’s rights, including the right to vote. The bylaws reiterate the co-op’s mission and built out an internal organizational structure to be consistent with that mission. Members can read the bylaws anytime, as they are posted on the member’s section of the TBC website.
The co-op is insured. It files the forms needed to comply with tax reporting requirements. It collects and pays state sales taxes on the goods members purchase. It pays income tax at corporate rates. Because the co-op’s business operations did not fall within any of the definitions of a “charitable organization” recognized by the Internal Revenue Code, it could not qualify for tax-exempt status.
TBC made two commitments when it decided to limit eligibility for co-op membership. The first remains unchanged from the moment the co-op started: “The Co-op shall not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, religion, color, national origin or ancestry, age, physical appearance, sexual orientation, handicap/disability, marital status, familial status, occupation, source of income or political belief.” The second requirement was to build an approval process for membership. At the time the bylaws were written, membership required every member to work. TBC’s business model is designed to reduce each individual member’s purchase price for food by relying exclusively on the membership at large as its labor force. Therefore, every potential member completed an application that included information about their skill set, their availability for shift hours, and any physical limitations, such as lifting or carrying. Sometimes the membership committee of the board invented a new job in order to capitalize on the applicant’s skills. Sometimes that new applicant was willing to take on a job someone else wanted out of, or couldn’t do anymore. The co-op reinvented its labor pool and staffing schedule as often as needed, the better to meet our mission and accept new members.
New jobs and new capacities were added as the base of time, talent, and labor that comprised our membership grew deeper and more diverse. As public interest in food sourcing and safety grew, so did interest in TBC. As dietary and health awareness expanded, so did the need for exactly the kind of high-quality food products that TBC offered, and at affordable prices. Those advantages were available to you, if you could work a co-op job.
The co-op had grown and thrived since it incorporated. It sponsored a new, producers-only farmers’ market for the downtown area, making the co-op more “public” than ever. It moved from the church kitchen into its own suite of rooms in a converted factory building, located in a central area of the city. It expanded its delivery schedule, its inventory, and its member services. Its core group of active leaders also increased, with each new contributor bringing ideas for programs and initiatives that would further the TBC mission.
At the same time, the co-op’s need for revenue to meet fixed expenses, such as rent and insurance premiums, also hardened. Growth became desirable, possible, and necessary. Deep discussions began at board meetings and among members: What about people who couldn’t join because they couldn’t work, but needed access to these kinds of foods? Was it fair to allow a member to “buy” out of the work requirement by paying a higher bump? What about the value of work in simple monetary terms, and the value of work hours in building relationship between members? The work requirement excluded many people from membership. Individuals with disabilities as well as people with incompatible employment hours or other conflicting demands on their time could not join.
TBC shareholders voted almost unanimously to change the bylaws to create alternative membership categories. Membership has surged, from that kitchen-table-sized group of first founders, to the 93 current shareholder families that now channel over $125,000 worth of food through the co-op distributive model each year.
— Excerpted with permission from Ann Bliss
The young man was mugged, dragged down an alley, and left for dead. He spent 24 hours in Bellevue Hospital in New York City as John Doe before his family tracked him down. He’d already had emergency brain surgery for multiple skull fractures. Michael (not his real name) was a chef, coming home late after a night shift, getting out of the subway in Brooklyn, when he was hit on his head and robbed. All the assailant took were a cell phone and the meager contents of Michael’s wallet, about $40. Someone found him, called an ambulance, and saved his life. He was a healthy 23-year-old who was fine one minute, and his life as he knew it was gone the next.
His friends, a mother-and-daughter team, cooked every day to feed him as he lay recovering in the neurointensive care unit. They made smoothies out of fresh organic vegetables from the greengrocer. Eventually he could eat again. They roasted clean, farm-raised, and humanely slaughtered chicken. Organic meat. Flavors, spices, and herbs tasted good to him. Nearly every day for the first couple of months his friends cooked in their small city apartment and took the meals to the hospital; then they’d all eat together in his hospital room. “The worst thing,” one of the friends remembers, “was using the microwave on the hospital floor. To reheat what we’d made. You know how microwaves make food smell really good? Well, we’d have to walk down the hall, past all the other patients, with this amazing-smelling food. It made me feel awful.”
She went on: “It strikes me as beautiful and ironic that together we united in this marathon endeavor to put everything that had slipped, bruised, and been assaulted back in its station through kindness, humanity, and love — via food. This is what I have some kind of control over, and it feeds me.”
This story has a happy ending: Michael has healed and is back working in the restaurant business in the New York area.
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
— Hippocrates
What if the Internal Revenue Service, farmers, and hospitals all got together to make institutional food better?For hospitals to maintain their nonprofit status, they must provide information to the IRS that they support public health and do provide a community service. Institutional food service is being scrutinized. The IRS is requiring hospitals to complete a survey, the “Community Health Needs Assessment,” in order to keep their nonprofit status. And here is the crack “where the light comes through,” as Leonard Cohen sings. It is the potency of the intersection between public health, fresh healthy food, and local farmers, joining together to impact diets, health, economies, and food systems.The New England Farmers Union (newenglandfarmersunion.org) recommends these steps to connect local farmers to hospital cafeterias and kitchens:
Med students are run ragged: long days, high stress, lack of sleep, and probably not great food. You can see all of this in one episode of House. But why wouldn’t good food cooking be a part of a med student’s education? Seems obvious, doesn’t it? Dr. Benjamin Sachs, the dean of Tulane Medical School, says, “Nutrition isn’t often taught in medical schools, and if it is, it’s glossed over. Unless you can explain to your patients about nutrition in the sense of culinary science, you’re not going to get anywhere. But if you truly understand what goes into cooking and how ingredients change with temperature — what’s good, what’s bad — it’s a wonderful goal.” And with such an addition to their education those run-ragged medical students would have something delicious to eat, and something more to pass on to their future patients: recipe cards.
— John Pope, “Tulane University Medical Students to Don Chef Jackets,” nola.com
The idea that you’d voluntarily go to the hospital to enjoy a good meal of, say, a wood-fired pizza or a crisp salad bar is just catching on. Creating an atmosphere in which people can eat good food together is a whole other way hospitals can help caregivers and support communities. In Bolivia, North Carolina, the Novant Health Brunswick Medical Center is doing just that. “You wouldn’t know it’s hospital food,” says Pauline Benton, a regular diner at the hospital cafeteria.Novant Health recognized that by switching up its food service to provide improved fresher, healthier meals, it could attract more paying customers, especially in the area around the hospital, which reportedly has not much more to offer than fast-food joints.
— Jason Gonzales, “Cafeteria Breaking Hospital Food Stereotype,” StarNews Online
“We believe that food is nurturing.”
— Zach Erickson, Warrenton, Virginia, Fauquier Health’s director of nutrition services, quoted in Julie Rovner, “Hospital Food So Fresh, Even the Healthy Come to Dine,” The Salt, National Public Radio, May 2012.
In the case of the injured chef, his friends were in the fortunate position to be able to buy, cook, and deliver whole, fresh foods to aid in his recovery. But not all patients are so lucky. Not all hospitals are located near good food. And not all friends and family members can manage this type of day-to-day care.
So why not do what we do in schools? What Kate Adamick of Cook for America® does? If we can have Lunch Teachers® in schools educating kids on how to eat well, why can’t we do the same in hospitals? Let’s support “Lunch Doctors” — cafeteria directors and staff who purchase from local and regional farmers, cook it, and serve it to provide sustenance and healing for patients. “Lunch Doctor” has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?
Here’s how to start changing your local hospital’s food, courtesy of Health Care Without Harm.
Similarly, health systems and GPOs can require distributors to fit the unique needs of a facility’s healthy food program. For example, electronic distributor catalogs might be tailored to screen out products such as highly processed foods and meats raised with nontherapeutic antibiotics. Alternatively, they might be designed to allow a facility to search for desired criteria such as local, seasonal, organic, fair trade, or other certifications. Purchasing tools are available on the Health Care Without Harm website (noharm-uscanada.org).
— Excerpted with permission from “Healthy Food in Health Care: A Menu of Options.”
Look for the pdf “Hospital Farm Direct Purchasing: A Guide to Ensuring Safe & Sustainable Food” at FoodHub (food-hub.org). This guide was developed by the Oregon Healthy Food in Health Care Project of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility (oregonpsr.org). It is a two-part document and questionnaire: Part One for the hospital, and Part Two for farmers about on-farm food safety. Yeah!
According to a 2002 study at the University of Arizona, in the United States each day there are 49,296,540 pounds of food wasted at full-service restaurants and 85,063,390 pounds of food wasted at fast-food restaurants. Those numbers are so mind-boggling they just make your eyes cross and your teeth itch, they’re so disturbing.
The Food Waste Reduction Alliance (foodwastealliance.org) has published a 25-page educational guide to increase awareness about the relationship of food waste at restaurants and food insecurity, “Best Practices and Emerging Solutions Toolkit.” This guide has three goals in mind: reduce the amount of wasted food, increase the amount of nutritious food getting to those who need it, and recycle unavoidable food waste to divert it from landfills. The tool kit includes examples and links to get started, such as “Perform a Waste Stream Audit” and “Inventory Food and Track Waste.”
“60 percent say reducing food waste at restaurants and grocery stores is the best way to increase food availability in the U.S.”
— Sustainable America Food/Fuel Public Poll, March 2013
(sustainableamerica.org/downloads/presentations/SustainableAmericaFinalDeck.pdf)
A few students from the Thomas Starr King Middle School in LA got themselves a refrigerator. That was the key piece of equipment they needed to ensure that unused food, such as fruit and dairy, from their school cafeteria could be collected and distributed safely to food banks via collaborators such as the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank and the First Southern Baptist Church in Hollywood. It’s also how they named their organization: 37°F is the ideal temperature of a refrigerator. Their fridge was acquired through a grant from the home improvement retailer Lowe’s. This all started with three kids (McKenna Greenleaf Faulk, Fabian Samayoa, and Erick Sanchez) and a challenge from their environmental studies teacher. The assignment was to identify a community need that impacted the environment, and the students chose food insecurity. McKenna was quoted in the local press as saying, “Even though we are starting off small in our community, we are hoping it will spread out all over the country.”
