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Produce at the Park Slope, Brooklyn, Food Co-op

When Members Run Afoul of the Park Slope Food Coop, recently in the Times, brought back memories.

A Brooklyn resident -- -- suspended from the co-op, kicked out of the garden of cheap produce -- bemoans the "No Work, No Eat" rigidity of her local food coop, community spirit having given way to Strict Rules as its member-workers grew to 15,000.

The standard penalty for missing one co-op shift is two makeup shifts, and those two shifts must be served before your next regular shift, four weeks down the line. That's where it gets tricky. Now you've got to work three shifts, and (except for a 10-day grace period) you can't even shop for your beloved organic arugula until you've made up the time. My graduate degree is in poetry, but I quickly became adept at this kind of math: At the depths of my delinquency, I owed perhaps seven shifts, or nearly 20 hours of work.

She takes pains to point out she's not an anomaly:

Like any place that wears its ideals on its sleeve, the co-op evokes rage, adoration and all the emotions in between. In 2006, the food Web site chow.com published "Won't Work for Food," an essay by a onetime co-op member who described the place as "something between an earthy-crunchy health food haven and a Soviet-style re-education camp." Three years later, passionate comments about the piece are still being posted.

I started a food co-op at India Imports in the early 1970s. Volunteers pitched in to haul back 30-lb. lidded pails of peanut butter from the Virginia and Spanish Peanut Co. (it's still at 260 Dexter St,) and member-workers vigorously paddled it to distribute the oil before doling it to small containers. A local milkman and Boston's pioneering Erewhon Trading Co., purveyor of Tamari Soy Sauce (actually shoyu, since it contained soy and wheat), granola, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, rice, grains, beans and flour, delivered. Clutching our resale number, we went to the Wholesale Produce Market on Promenade Street (Buddy Cianci lives in a condo on that spot now) before daybreak to buy fruits and vegetables at wholesale prices. Ordering, fetching, bagging, billing, bookkeeping, cleaning and checkout duties were rotated.

It worked well, for awhile. Then the original core group was doing most of the work, the selection wasn't broad enough or deliveries frequent enough, and sometimes the latecomers found nothing left (pilferage?). Later that year, we went off to Africa to start their Gambian factory, and the effort collapsed.

It's interesting to read how these tiny food-coops evolved, even if this one seems to have taken a wrong turn. If there are too many workers, how about a shift every five weeks, or a roster of willing workers you could pay to take your shift? With unemployment rampant, these shifts would quickly fill.

The local Farmer's Markets are for a few hours a week in each location, and fairly expensive. If a permanent co-op in one of the city's many empty storefronts were to contract for more food which could be sold at lower prices and keep store hours (every day from 3 to 9 p.m., say), we'd be on our way to great produce like Park Slope's here, too.

 Tags  food co-op

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