Co-op Fight!

Ha ha, no, just kidding. I love both my coops. But I thought it would be fun to do a comparison of them. They're not in any way in competition with each other since they are in different cities.

Park Slope Food Coop

Location: Brooklyn, New York
Year Founded: 1973
Number of Members: I believe I remember hearing that there are 16,000 active members.
Slogan: "Good food at low prices for working members through cooperation since 1973."
Payments accepted: cash and debit only
Do you have to work?: Yes
Open to non-members?: No
Prices: Low (they estimate 20-40% less than you'd pay elsewhere)
Special items: Cheap sushi, cheap and plentiful cheeses, lots of local produce, beer
Bulk: Most of it is pre-packaged by member workers on the "food processing" squad. No bulk liquids.
Bags: No bags offered at checkout; members bring their own or re-use boxes that have been used as packaging for the store's goods
Floor space: Highly competitive
Vibe: Intense, serious, political

Wheatsville Coop

Location: Austin, Texas

Year Founded: 1976
Number of Members: unknown
Slogan: N/A
Payments accepted: all
Do you have to work?: No, but apparently when it was first founded working was a requirement
Open to non-members?: Yes
Prices: Similar to a gourmet grocery store
Special items: Beer and wine, deli counter
Bulk: DIY, including bulk oils, syrups, soaps and shampoos
Bags: BYO, use a cardboard box, or get a paper or plastic bag at checkout
Floor space: Plentiful
Vibe: Concerned but laid-back

Finally reading Kitchen Confidential...

So I'm finally reading Kitchen Confidential. Bourdain's braggadocio never really appealed to me, but I have to admit his first book is really amusing. As he says in the introduction, it's a book for the cooks. If you've ever worked in the food service industry, you'll probably snicker knowingly at a lot of his descriptions.

What I don't understand is why he is so intent on bad mouthing vegetarians. It must be mostly a publicity stunt. Anyway I think he's lost the debate. Listen to his conversation with Jonathan Safran-Foer (author of Eating Animals) and see what you think.

Food on Screen: Food Beware

The food documentary is not an exclusively US phenomenon - Europe has ventured into the genre with films like Our Daily Bread and the recent French documentary Food Beware.



Despite the terrible English title, this film is worth watching. It's about a small town in the South of France where the mayor decided that all school children and invalids - who are fed through a central municipal kitchen - should eat organic food. This decision was spurred by increasing scientific evidence that pesticides used in the region (which is heavily agricultural and wine-producing) have been responsible for health problems in children and adults.

The cross-cultural difference is what I found particularly interesting about the film. It's really astounding to see French school children sitting at lunch tables, enthusiastically tasting and describing the new foods they are being offered. That, and the class picnic at the base of the Pont du Gard, were enough to bring a tear to my eye.

It's a nicely made film, and set in a beautiful region. Available on Netflix!

30 Rock Apple Rescue

I recently started volunteering with City Harvest, a great organization that "rescues" food from all over the city and then redistributes it to soup kitchens, low-income greenmarkets, and others in need. This past week I was part of a team that rescued thousands of apples from Rockefeller Center, where an education conference was taking place (using apples as decor).





Not only did we bag lots of apples, but I got to see the bowels of Rockefeller Center, and I can truthfully say that the industrial kitchens down there smell a lot better than most industrial kitchens I've seen.

Food on Screen: Fresh

Thanks to my St. David's peeps for putting together a wonderful screening and potluck for the new food documentary Fresh. It was really inspiring to see such a big crowd gathered, and hear about the success that local farmers are having with CSAs. The two organizations who came to the screening were Johnson's Backyard Garden and Farmhouse Delivery, both of which have blogs and post recipes.

Check out clips from the movie here. (Embedding was doing funky things to my blog's formatting)

One thing I learned from the film is that produce sold in supermarkets today has 40% less nutrition than in the 1950s - due to agricultural practices. Yet another reason to buy organic and local if possible.

Food on Screen: Grown in Detroit

Leave it to the Dutch to fund a documentary that Americans across the country should watch. I don't know if or when this film will arrive stateside, but I was lucky to catch it at the Austin Film Festival, where it won the prize for best documentary.

In a nutshell, GROWN IN DETROIT is about urban farming in, well, Detroit, where there are a lot of unused and vacant lots, high unemployment and poverty. Specifically, the film is about a program for teenage moms that not only provides day care/education for their kids, but also teaches the girls agricultural skills - with the hope that they will both feed the city and their families, and make some money doing it.

The school, one of only two in the US that has a similar program, is called Catherine Ferguson Academy. It's pretty amazing stuff (though might fall under the category of common sense...). The directors, a young Dutch couple, were at the screening I attended, and unfortunately it seems that the school has lost funding and had to fire half their staff last year. This will obviously affect the quality of the program. But on the bright side, the number of gardens in Detroit is mushrooming - from 300 to 800 in a little over a year.

Catch this documentary if you have the chance. The sight of an urban environment, usually so far from nature, being transformed not only into a green place, but one that can sustain food (and bees! the bees love it in Detroit!) makes you feel hope where it might seem none is possible.

Cooking in hotels (and schools)

The excellent public radio cooking show, The Splendid Table, featured this guy a couple of weeks ago. Being hungry in a hotel room - and not wanting to pay for room service - is something I can definitely relate to. Though I'd be wary of using the kettle for tea water after making tortellini!

The same show featured an excellent interview with the head of lunch programs in St. Paul, MN, about getting healthy food in public schools. (Scroll down about half the page.)

Food, Inc.

Made the trek to see FOOD, INC. this past weekend, and was pleasantly surprised to find the theater about half full on a Sunday afternoon. Granted, it was 105 outside, making the cool of the theater even that much more appealing. But given the comments, boos, and applause over the course of the film, it's safe to say the audience was an enthusiastic one.

Having been an early and avid reader of both Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma, I wasn't too surprised at a lot of the information in the film. And despite what reviewers have been saying, the graphic footage from the CAFOs and kill floors isn't nearly as bad is it could have been. Overall the tone was only gently alarmist; everyone who spoke onscreen seemed credible, and even the mother of the 2 year old who died from E-coli poisoning managed to seem like she had a sense of humor. Stylistically, it was reminiscent of Super Size Me, with very slick graphics (the opening title sequence is especially nice).

Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser are onscreen a lot, but they share time with the farmer Pollan profiles in TOD, Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms in Virginia. It's Salatin who provides the most philosophical contributions to the conversation, pointing out that a culture that treats its animals so inhumanely most likely has the same approach to its own citizens, and peoples from other countries.

At the end of the film, there is a text-only sequence listing actions that we as consumers can take to make change to the system, and overall the message seems to be one of power to the consumer. Since it's a Participant Productions film, the website is full of info as well and activism is fully integrated into the release strategy. I sat through the credit sequence and as the lights came on, the group of four young women (about my age) were still sitting in my row, debating whether or not it's really possible to eat healthily on a minimum wage. I hope the film sparks many such debates. Who knows what can come of it?