Co-ops

[FISHMANPET]

I'm just gonna come out and say it, I hate co-ops. Or at least, Coops in the form in the Minneapolis. I wish the Marxists had won the coop wars of the 70s. The few times I've been to Seward coop it's just come off as a monument to upper middle class excess.

This doesn't really have much to do with this proposal, other than that I wish it was someone other than a bunch of health food hippies opening in a food desert.

[Nick]

I'm just gonna come out and say it, I hate co-ops. Or at least, Coops in the form in the Minneapolis. I wish the Marxists had won the coop wars of the 70s. The few times I've been to Seward coop it's just come off as a monument to upper middle class excess.

Can you be more specific?

[FISHMANPET]

It gives the vibe that the people that shop there have so much money they can waste it spending twice as much on food as a normal human being, all while feeling smug and superior about how they're saving the planet.

(This is gonna turn in to a rant about farmers markets and the local food movement too, so watch out)

I hate the notion that coops, local food, or farmers markets are "green." It involves trucking miniscule amounts of food around under the notion that the closer something is, the greener it is. Meanwhile we've actually gotten pretty good at moving goods around via train with very little C02 emissions.

Also the parking lot at Seward is filled with Priuses, but priuses don't really lower pollution, they just put it other places (with the added side effect of making you feel smug and superior about how you're saving the planet by using less gas).

It's green theater, the way that TSA is security theater. It's doesn't actually help the environment, it just makes you feel better.

[Nick]

I hate the notion that coops, local food, or farmers markets are "green." It involves trucking miniscule amounts of food around under the notion that the closer something is, the greener it is. Meanwhile we've actually gotten pretty good at moving goods around via train with very little C02 emissions.

Also the parking lot at Seward is filled with Priuses, but priuses don't really lower pollution, they just put it other places (with the added side effect of making you feel smug and superior about how you're saving the planet by using less gas).

It's green theater, the way that TSA is security theater. It's doesn't actually help the environment, it just makes you feel better.

Some of this is almost certainly correct, although I don't think that much food is being shipped by train other than grains/similar stuff and the raw materials to make processed food. In my own experience, in the past couple years of shopping at the Wedge, I've basically just started getting produce/meat/etc instead of boxed whatever and I don't find it to be egregiously more expensive than I'd be spending elsewhere, though you can sure spend $9.99 on an Annie's frozen pizza if you wanted to.

That said, I would bet that quite a bit of the price differential between a Minneapolis co-op, and, say, Cub or Target is probably tied up in things that are a good idea, like paying their workers a living wage with benefits, using sustainable farming practices, and generally not selling food that's going to take ten years off your life. Anecdote: That weekend there was that crazy storm in South Minneapolis and the Wedge was closed for a weekend, I did my week's grocery shopping at the Downtown Target and totally forgot how much food people eat that ends in the letter "z". Snackerz, biterzzz, wyngz....

I'm admittedly kind of a smug asshole about shopping at the Wedge, but it beats talking up local/small businesses all day and then doing 75% of your shopping at Target. When talking to other middle class people, I kind of put "co-ops are too expensive" in the same category as "I'm just so busy but can watch all of Season 1 of House of Cards in a weekend" in that, really, you're not that poor/busy, you're making a choice with how you're spending your money and time.

[FISHMANPET]

I don't see coops as any kind of solution the problems of pollution, poverty, or hunger, which are very real and very serious.

You can get actual ingrdients at a real grocery store too, not just at coops, they don't have a monopoly on non-processed foods. Look at it this way, if every grocery store in the Twin Cities was a copy of The Wedge, would we all be better off?

And produce is shipped by train, lookup the Ice Cold Express.

[Nick]

And produce is shipped by train, lookup the Ice Cold Express.

Well, I mean, it's probably not dropped off the train at the store, is it? Getting off a train in Midway and being driven to Eagan isn't a ton better than being driven from Northfield to Minneapolis. And neither of these things mentions how the food is being grown, either.

I don't see coops as any kind of solution the problems of pollution, poverty, or hunger, which are very real and very serious.

You can get actual ingrdients at a real grocery store too, not just at coops, they don't have a monopoly on non-processed foods. Look at it this way, if every grocery store in the Twin Cities was a copy of The Wedge, would we all be better off?

And produce is shipped by train, lookup the Ice Cold Express.

Well, I dunno about "solution" but I'd have to imagine having the meat locally-sourced (pretentious phrase) has got to be worth it by itself. As for poverty, think of it this way: If every store in the Twin Cities was a copy of the Wedge, how many people in the Twin Cities wouldn't be making $8/hr for 29 hours a week with no benefits? Easily thousands. That doesn't even count the people at the other end of the food chain. Americans spend something like ten percent of their money on food. I just have trouble imagining that for most people, it's that much more of a burden. And for the people whom it would be a burden for, how many of them are working in shitty, non-unionized retail jobs where they're paid $8/hr? Isn't it kind of a cycle? How much of our social services funding goes towards the employees of big box stores?

And just to be clear, I'm baaaaarely arguing, I just think it's something for people to think about. I've never bought quinoa.

[FISHMANPET]

I have a strong desire to internet argue about this but I don't have any facts at my fingers . And this is gonna be a long meandering stream of consciousness post.

I don't have much of a problem with semi local food. It's probably better that my beef comes from somewhere in the state than it coming from another country. Another figure I can state but not cite is that most of GHG are from transportation, so if I'm thinking about how we can reduce GHG, i'm going to first and foremost look at reducing transportation costs. So how does local food help me there? Well, from a naive point of view, the closer it is the easier it is to transport. But if my cow comes from Fridley on a truck, is that actually going to produce less emissions than a cow in South Dakota on a train (I have no idea if there is beef cattle in any of these places)? Insomuch as the local food movement is about reduction pollution, it's too focused on distance and not actual emissions.

Thinking of farmers markets in the same vein, every Wednesday during the summer I would walk through the Farmers Market on the U campus. I'd see all these farmer's vehicles parked on Church St. They're mostly big box trucks or old vans. They're far from full on their way from the farm to the farmers market. So is it green to drive a truck into the city that gets 5-10 MPG and is only 10% full, when I could have a distributor stop at all these farms and bring the product into the city on a single truck. I think it'd be great to get more access to local produce in the grocery store, and that would help get healthy produce into the shopping carts of everybody, especially the poor that don't have as many options, but I don't think a farmer's market is the way to do it. There's also the problem of specialization. A farmer is better at farming than he/she is at distributing and selling food. So let's leave distribution up to distributors and selling to grocers, and leave the farmers to work their land. Distributors and grocery stores don't have to be vampires sucking the profit away from farmers, they can provide a service to the farmers more cheaply than the farmers can do it themselves.

[Nick]

WRT to meat, in my mind I meant locally-sourced but also free range/etc/etc all those hippie things.

And it's not not worth it to point out that a lot of Farmers Markets are, like you said, basically green theater. Oranges at the Nicollet Mall Farmers Market? I dunno about that...

...we will continue this conversation at the next happy hour.

[mattaudio]

Let's make sure our next happy hour spot has organic, free-range, fair trade, non-GMO everything ok? Farm to table please. Is that too much to ask?

[FISHMANPET]

I shop at Aldi, the more preservatives the better!

[alleycat]

I shop at Aldi, the more preservatives the better!

Have shopped at the co-ops for the past six years on a lower middle class budget. I'd second what Nick stated about focusing on produce, meat (can be pricey), dairy and add bulk items. Processed foods are more expensive at Seward while bulk items are definitely a better deal and usually local/organic. I bring my own jars and buy what I need.

I recently joined Costco of all places for things like organic canned tomatoes cheaper than coops or Cub. Add in my membership at the McKinley CSA and we've found a way to be frugal and environmentally conscious. I bike to pick up my share every week. What we put into our bodies is probably the most important expense other than shelter. I don't think it's something you should skimp on, but it's a fallacy that it's actually more expensive.

[David Greene]

Have shopped at the co-ops for the past six years on a lower middle class budget. I'd second what Nick stated about focusing on produce, meat (can be pricey), dairy and add bulk items. Processed foods are more expensive at Seward while bulk items are definitely a better deal and usually local/organic. I bring my own jars and buy what I need.

That's been my experience at the Wedge too. We buy very little packaged food from there but buy a lot of produce and bulk items. We do buy canned goods like tomatoes but I don't know if they actually cost significantly more than at Rainbow. We buy them at the Wedge if we're already there because it's convenient, not because we think we're saving the planet by doing so.

[LakeCharles]

I buy stuff from the bulk sections all the time. They are cheaper than Rainbow or Cub and have a much broader selection than Aldi. But then I guess buying bulk rolled oats is the epitome of "upper middle class excess." Especially if they were organic rolled oats or, god forbid, grown near us.

*I've been reading the board for about a year but this is my first post. I tried to be as snarky as I could, you'll have to let me know if it was an appropriate amount.*

[MNdible]

Appropriately dosing snark is an acquired skill. Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it.

[woofner]

Just doing some quick message board math, buying locally would seem to be more "green" than buying non-local, assuming local goods are hauled by truck but non-local by train. The numbers are tough to find (seemingly because the Bush-era STB stopped collecting stats), but the internet consensus seems to be that hauling by train is a bit under 3x more efficient per ton-mile than hauling by (semi) truck:

http://bhtooefr.org/blog/2012/03/19/why ... transport/

But assuming your local arugula was grown by patchouli-guzzling hippies near Viroqua and your non-local arugula was grown by an NRA-dues-paying libertarian near Fresno, the non-local is a good 10x further away. The train would have to be 10x more fuel efficient than the truck to make up for this, and I think I'm being generous with how far the "local" stuff is and how close the "non-local". On top of this, there may be an issue with the relative emissions of the two engines (although again this is a bit out of date, though god the avg loco in service must have been built in 1962):

http://www.factcheck.org/2008/07/fuel-e ... ht-trains/

There are of course a zillion other factors, so I encourage anyone to poke holes in this reasoning, but to me, it seems likely that most non-local goods will be coming from far enough away to overwhelm the greater fuel efficiency of trains. Not a reason not to develop a local freight rail network, but perhaps a reason why buying local is "green"er.

Personally I prefer shopping at co-ops because they are by far superior at labeling their products, and I prefer to buy local goods for economic reasons. Again I encourage poking holes in this reasoning. Also I can't stand the cavernous spaces inside big box grocery stores, I'd rather stand in a five-deep line for tiny misshapen $1000 organic tomatoes.

[RailBaronYarr]

Just to throw another issue into the fire, it's not all about transportation distance/efficiency. If a corporate farm in Africa can grow strawberries with very little extra energy expended for irrigation, fertilizers, pest repellent, growth hormones that require energy to produce, etc etc because they have better year-round weather patterns for growing the stuff, that all factors in as well. IMO, this is why some higher-level, global emissions tax (mostly CO2 but others as well) help eliminate that. If it's possible to track it to charge the tax, the very same number (from seed to shelf or whatever) could be posted on produce. "Food Miles" are completely meaningless (discussed above), but some other metric, that's also built into the price to level the playing field at the checkout, is much more relevant.

I also agree that smaller co-ops/etc paying their workers better wages is very admirable, but probably separated from the food quality/location argument. I'd shop at a place that paid its workers a living wage because I want to support that, not necessarily because I want food grown by hippie vegans.

[talindsay]

All of fishmanpet's comments are probably correct.

I shop at the Seward Co-op because the meat tastes good, the vegetables taste good, it's halfway between my office and my house (one mile to each from the front door of the Co-op), and I don't have to stand in line to check out. Am I saving the world? I don't know and I don't care. Can I afford to buy my food there? Yes. I pay a little more for the good-tasting food and for the convenience. It also saves me time and money driving. Do I buy boxed cereal or processed food there? Not a chance. I buy that stuff infrequently when I have to be at a big store anyway.

Before they moved Seward was a patchouli-scented center of checkout people who refused to touch the food in your cart because it was against their religious beliefs - seriously, there was a checkout person there in the early 2000s who refused to touch the food, it was extremely awkward. But now it's just a small, organic regular grocery store located in a part of the city that can afford to pay for a store with dedicated butchers (even most Lunds don't have that anymore).

[thatchio]

If you shop at a co-op like how you shop at Cub, then you do probably spend more than you need to. When we switched from Cub to the co-op, we quickly learned that you eat less meat, more fresh and seasonal veggies/fruits, and make more meals from scratch rather than boxes or mixes. Our food bill probably went up about 20% but we're eating far healthier, far tastier, and far more sustainable foods than before. It's certainly not for everyone and if you want to eat large sums of meat at dinner, then it will cost a lot more. And for those of us with food allergies, the products at the co-op are better labeled and the specialty products (vegan butter for example) is almost always cheaper than a discount grocer.

[mattaudio]

I'm right there with Thatcher, but we don't shop at the co-ops as much as we want to. We make nearly 0% of our meals from boxes/mixes. That stuff's nasty.
We've settled into a nice little routine where we go to a bunch of places:
-Costco (organic meat & fish, canned goods, and produce that lasts a long time)
-Aldi (very specific things we can tolerate, which is about 5% of the store)
-Whole Foods / Co-op / FmrMkts (the rest, especially produce and bulk. wife goes to Whole Foods but I have a feeling the co-ops might be cheaper for this stuff)
-Local runs on occasion to Bergen's or Kowalski's in the neighborhood.

South Minneapolis definitely needs a Co-Op. 38th & Clinton will definitely help, but there will still be a huge area that to my knowledge will lack a co-op east of Lake Harriet south of 38th.

[kiliff75]

It will certainly be nice to have a co-op in South, we alternate between Seward and Target (66th st) for groceries for the same general reasons as mattaudio, with emergency runs to Bergen's to supplement. This new co-op will be a lot closer to our house and on the way home from work, making it much more convenient. We can probably bike there fairly easily when it's nicer out.