The Park Slope Food Co-op (an institution I alienated myself from early on and proceeded to walk past daily for two years, living around the corner from it but stubbornly refusing to join, admittedly in part because I imagined they might have a picture of me somewhere in the back as someone not to allow in, a not entirely unfounded fear given that what I wrote was written up in their newsletter) is premised on the idea that time is not money. OK, it's premised on a number of causes and ideas, but fundamental to the project is the notion that one is getting a discount on groceries. As explained in the most recent take-down of the supermarket-that-isn't:
Unlike many co-ops — including the Flatbush Food Coop in Brooklyn, where guests are allowed to shop without joining and members who don’t want to serve work hours can pay a slight markup for items — Park Slope has one of the stiffest work requirements: 2.75 hours every four weeks for each adult member of a household.
It also has some of the best bargains. The organic spinach that costs $2.97 at the co-op fetches $3.99 at the Whole Foods in Union Square; 17 ounces of Bionaturae Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil costs co-op members $7.80 and Whole Foods shoppers $13.99.
After a moment's consideration, it becomes clear that whatever markup there is at Whole Foods (and, by the way, Whole Foods sells perfectly good 365-brand olive oil for far less than the cost of this overly-voweled organic one) comes from the fact that to shop at Whole Foods, you are not required to work at Whole Foods, and can indeed head there after a day of your own job, shop, go home, and be done with it. Now, I could hold forth once again on how the work requirements of the Co-op are largely about yuppie liberal guilt at being served in a regular supermarket by a cashier from a different class and often race background, and how the We Are All Cashiers Now approach actually takes jobs away from would-be cashiers looking for paid work, but that's not the issue here. The issue here is that if you have to work to get a discount on groceries, you are not getting a discount on groceries.
The same is true, apparently, of apple-picking. I don't believe I've ever picked an apple, but Daniel Gross had me convinced to fully despise apple-picking, once he framed his argument as being anti-terroir:
We've been educated (or bullied, depending on your outlook) by foodies like Alice Waters and Dan Barber to adopt the European concept of terroir—the best stuff to consume is the stuff grown in closest proximity. For people in the Northeast, that's fine in the summer, when the Union Square greenmarket bursts with locally grown exotic greens, yellow squash, and heirloom tomatoes of such flavor (and cost) as to make a gourmand weep.
But in the fall, while the region's landscape lights up with foliage, the farm stands' color palette becomes more drab: potatoes, root vegetables, pumpkins, gourds, and, of course, apples. And so, to the pick-your-own orchards we go.
I could hold forth once more on my deep suspicions of terroir and my conviction that it is a fundamentally racist and anti-Semitic ideology, but the issue here is, once again, money and time, so I'll attempt to focus on that angle.
Gross argues that apple-picking is basically a scam for orchards to place the time and labor burdens of their own businesses into the hands of consumers, who must in fact pay for the pleasure of working. Again, coming at this with no apple-picking prior knowledge, I can't say I'm shocked - the same is apparently true of the DIY archeological digs in Israel, and one could argue that the ever-rising price of coffee drinks coinciding with the ever-reduced services we expect coffee-shop workers to perform (pouring in the milk yourself is generally a good thing; attempting to bus your table into a hard-to-locate and already-full tub of dishes at an understaffed coffee bar is not) falls into this same category.
In all of these cases - moments for the environment, volunteer shifts at the Co-op, apples and archeological shards plucked by consumers, tables bused by paying and often even tipping customers - it starts to look like time has a different and if anything more important value than money for the yuppie mired in guilt. By showing his willingness to take the time to do a task a previous generation would have conferred on an underling, the yuppie of today shows his discomfort with the class system, and that he doesn't see himself as too busy and important to stop and be The Worker at a few particularly visible moments, as appropriate. The archeological shards are perhaps a case not so much of yuppie guilt as Diaspora-Zionist guilt, but the principle's the same. Offering time rather than (much) money might ultimately mean a lower commitment, but it's often a more visible one.
16 comments:
I'm a member of a co-op grocery store, in part because it's only a block and a half from my house, and where I live now doesn't have much shopping. It's small but generally good. Because I don't pay much attention to price (not because I'm wealthy, but because I don't care that much) I don't know how it compares to other places. Slightly more than trader joes, slightly less than whole foods, I think. It has a "cooperation" requirement, but might change to allow people to pay more. (Non-members can shop, but pay 10% or so more. I think non-cooperating members would pay a bit less than that but I'm not sure.) "Cooperators" don't check out people and there are other "professional" staff, too, because some of these jobs do take skill- if you let cooperators check people out you'll be very slow and probably give wrong change, ring things up wrong, etc. But even in mundane jobs, the cooperators don't save the place much money because they can't do the jobs very well. The reason the place keeps cooperation aspects at all is the ethos of the place- neighborhood people working together, everyone has an "equity stake" (I think mine is $30 or so, so not so big) in the place, etc. It's basically a hippy thing. I'm not super keen on it, but go along so as to be able to shop close to home.
I don't think that apple picking is a scam, unless it's done on stupid people. People go pick apples not because they think it's cheaper, again, unless they are idiots, but because they think it's fun. If it's fun for them, then great. It's not fun for you, so obviously you shouldn't do it, but the guy you cite seems confused as to what's going on and people's motivation. (Also, there's plenty of good food at the Union Square farmer's market all year, if you have a bit of desire to make things. It was my main (though not only, of course) place for shopping all year round for the two years I lived in NY City.)
Matt,
I get that the principle behind co-ops, apple-picking, and so on is that if the people involved get something out of it (a sense of community; a day out with the kids), inefficiencies are irrelevant. The problem is in part the fury anyone who dares question any of these institutions falls under - a response of 'if you don't like it, don't do it' is fair, although an argument could be made that some critics like the idea, but wish it were executed differently. But at any rate that's not typically how defenders of the Park Slope Food Co-op, at least respond. Instead, it's more like 'you lazy, entitled idiot, aren't you so special, thinking you can't spare the time it takes to participate in this wonderful social experiment.' They tend to assume it's not that people have deemed the sacrifice unreasonable, but that they aren't hardcore enough to make a sacrifice they know in their heart of hearts they should make.
Another problem is the insistence of the pro-Co-op contingent on the one hand that they provide cheaper food than the supermarket, but on the other that they are not a supermarket but so much more, and so should not be compared to supermarkets when they'd come out unfavorably - with the Park Slope co-op, this is primarily in the fact that you are not permitted to even look at the store if you are not a member and there's no member there to guide you on a tour. (I once went by wanting to look, was told I couldn't, decided on account of this I wasn't interested in joining... and then heard from angry members that I'd judged the place without even having seen it!) For those for whom the work requirement is fun, a social outlet, a working-class-fantasy-camp, a way to further a cause they believe in, whatever, by all means, this is worth their while. But for those who simply want cheaper groceries, a better approach is to notice the supermarket specials.
The Union Square market is pretty good year-round, but even the larger of the smaller markets (Grand Army Plaza and Tribeca, for instance) are near-useless except in summer, with even milk and eggs at times hard to come by, not just berries and other summer items you expect them to only have in summer. I'm willing to forgo certain ingredients according to season, but we don't even seem to have reached kale season, and I'm not willing to subsist on apples, lavender and expensive, pre-packaged potatoes. Whole Foods comes in handy, and if you shop it right (on-sale canned tomatoes, say) it's not even a grad student's Whole Paycheck.
I grew up u-picking lots of fruits in the summer, but mainly because it was much cheaper than buying them in the store. In the Pacific NW you can pick your own berries (and other fruits) for a fraction of the price at a store, only several dollars for a flat of berries (of course, this was a while ago). Picking berries, especially strawberries, is uncomfortable, hot, and literally back breaking, so if it weren't for the significant cost advantage, my family wouldn't have done it. Also, berries freeze easily, so you can pick a year's worth in an afternoon. We would also go into the woods and pick wild berries as well.
With apple picking though, I can see both sides. If you are doing it for fun and entertainment, well, it's a much better cost per ratio for a family to go apple picking instead of watching a movie, and also involves fresh air and exercise. If you are doing it for fun, you may full well realize apples are cheaper in the store, but that's not the point.
On the scamming issue, I also feel that farmers have to make money somehow, so if they can make it off of yuppies, more power on them. It reminds me a little bit in China, where Tibetan merchants would get white hippies to pay easily 5 times the going rate for trinkets, basically based on them being Tibetans. I can't begrudge the Tibetans for making a buck off foolish white people, though I wasn't going to be ripped off. The problem is of course, when naive/willing-to-shell-out people set/inflate the going rate, to the point that prices get distorted to the point where activities that used to be frugal no longer are. Of course, this is true with a lot of things, e.g., restaurant prices in business districts. I don't know anything about NY apple picking, so I don't know if it's the case.
In terms of coops, I can see different sides of the issue, but what gets me is the all-or-nothing aspect (i.e. pay tons of money and support the right causes, or pay less and be a corporate whore). My mother, who is a) frugal and b) socially conscious, manages to pay much cheaper prices for locally sourced foods from local businesses. She joined the local coop (which does not require labor) but couldn't afford to shop there because veggies were $4.99/lb. Instead, she has the options of going to a vegetable market by our house where the same things are well under $2 a lb (also local and/or organic, etc.) or a family-run grocery store which also stocks local produce for not much more than Safeway (and stocks things in bulk for very cheap).
Of course, this is Portland, which a) grows lots of produce locally so it's easily and cheaply available and b) where alternates to large corporate shops are such that you can find stuff at any and all price ranges and targeted at many social groups. This might not hold up for the rest of the US, but I feel that if you ferret around you can find cheap local stuff that doesn't also involve working or being condescended to by environment freaks.
Britta,
Just about nothing you describe - berry-picking, good and available local produce - sounds familiar to me. In New York, the local-seasonal trend has hit, but aside from this one market that, though central, is out of the way for most and located in a very wealthy area, any season that requires even a light jacket also requires all with taste buds and without greenhouses of their own to abandon the local-seasonal ideal. And New York's not that bad, as the US goes, or so they say.
In terms of farmers having the right to rip off yuppies... everyone has the right to rip off yuppies, I suppose, but the issue now is that yuppies who decline to be ripped off (either because they're frugal or because they're in that weird category of semi-yuppie not earning much - say, grad students) get presented as uncaring, as though all legitimate consumption is a form of charitable donation. I'm not aware of anyone bullying anyone else into apple-picking, as the Slate piece almost implied, but this does happen with the Food Co-op, and in the best-behavior-in-the-coffee-shop realm. While no one likes an entitled yuppie, the guilt-ridden variant isn't so hot either. Ideally, consumption would occur in an atmosphere of mutual respect, rather than 'fetch me my latte, stat', but also rather than tipping $3 on a $2 drink, followed by the self-busing of a table, followed by the pat-on-the-back of someone feeling like they've done a good deed and that's basically enough for the day.
I'd wrote a reply that I guess got lost somehow. Probably it was my fault. But yes, the park slope co-op rules, as you describe them (I have no reason to doubt you on this, though they are certainly different from the 2 or 3 co-ops I've shopped at or joined) sound very dumb, especially the one that you can't look at it or try it first. As to the "guilt" part, why worry about it? Lots of people have dumb beliefs about all sorts of things, but why this should matter to you isn't clear. So if they believe they are being virtuous for being in the co-op and you don't, why should it matter? They are safely ignored or snubbed, I'd think.
You're probably right about most of the farmer's markets in NYC being bare much of the time. Other than Union Square the only one I went to regularly was at Columbia, as it was close to my house. We used it mostly for a few things (goat cheese, mushrooms, apples) and it was good for those, but was much more hit-or-miss on other things, and you'd not want to use it as a main shopping place, as I did w/ Union Square.
Matt,
No need to trust me on the place's rules - they've been written up everywhere because they're so odd, and might even be visible (if made to sound palatable) on the place's own website.
I don't doubt their written up a lot, especially if they are so odd. I just can't imagine caring enough about them that I'd look, which is why I'm just happy to take your word for it.
I see. I suppose I misread the I'll take your word for it tone to mean you suspected I was exaggerating. All I wanted to get at was that I am, alas, not. Unfortunate, too, since I did live near it for two years and next to it for two more, and anything less ridiculous I probably would have signed up for due to proximity alone.
Yes- I didn't mean to suggest you were exaggerating- I really did just mean that I was happy to take your word for it that the rules there were, in fact, crazy. Sorry for the confusion.
But there are loads of activities that are done not because they are the most economically efficient way to accomplish a goal, but because the idea is to create some sense of investment or community.
My husband absolutely hated the pro bono requirement for law school (40 hours completed over your 2L and 3L years), because he thought it was ludicrous for people at our law school (who in pre-recession times reliably got jobs as summer associates that paid $3k per week) to spend 40 hours doing a mediocre job of helping poor people file income tax return or challenge their evictions or what-have-you. He thought it would be much more sensible if those of us who weren't going the public interest track could just pay our public-interest-minded classmates, who had summer jobs paying minimum wage at best, to do our pro bono for us -- with much greater interest and expertise. He'd have even been willing to fork over the 40 hours worth of law firm summer associate salary (the $3k for a full-time worker's week), which would have been as much as the public interest folks were likely to make all summer. He feels similarly about Habitat for Humanity -- shouldn't corporations and law firms just give Habitat the money they could be making by spending that Saturday at the office instead of awkwardly putting together a house?
Something I've never succeeded in getting him to accept is that the idea behind pro bono requirements or Habitat for Humanity roof-raising is to get people educated about and interested and invested in these charitable efforts. (It's particularly funny because the only legal charity to which my husband donates money is exactly the one at which he did his pro bono hours, even though he generally sides with landlords over tenants.) Even 40 hours, especially if done at a single organization over the course of a semester, is enough to make people feel like they know the people who work there and understand the mission of the organization.
As for your concerns about the racism of terroir, it seems particularly odd to raise it with regard to yuppie apple-picking in NY State.
(1) The original inhabitants of the land (who may have been agrarian themselves; I don't know much about NY Native American tribes) had to be displaced in order for the current farmers to plant apple orchards there.
(2) The yuppies are presumably of all ethnicities, including ones that in prior generations never saw an apple (I don't think any of my ancestors, who were all landlords and farmers within a particular few districts in a particular region in a particular state in India, ever ate much less grew an apple).
That said, Daniel at Crooked Timber is with you:
"Budweiser is not 'full of chemicals'. It does not comply with the German 'Purity Law', but this is because it has a non-barley grain in it (rice). The Rheinheitsgebot is a stupid law in any case, and was originally passed not to safeguard the sacred purity of German fluids (a concept that ought to be regarded as suspicious in its own right, as history has shown that when the Germans get keen on 'purity' it is not always a wholly positive development) but to preserve wheat for making bread."
PG,
"But there are loads of activities that are done not because they are the most economically efficient way to accomplish a goal, but because the idea is to create some sense of investment or community."
Fair enough. But why, then, must the Co-op promote itself as having 'cheaper' groceries than the supermarket, when this is plainly not the case when you look at the full picture?
In terms of my grievances against terroir, I should be clear: I don't think all current manifestations of the terroir impulse are racist, or even all earlier ones. I certainly don't think it's racist to go apple-picking. It's that I think there's a bit of back-and-forth between the two impulses - once you start claiming one particular plot of land and its products have spiritual value, and that everything from the outside is inherently suspect, you open up the possibility that people from certain places are inherently, spiritually rooted to those superior places and thus themselves superior, and that a certain amount of xenophobia is necessary to preserve the sanctity of what you've got. This sounds like a paranoid leap on my part, I realize, but this in a sense was the ethnic revival of early 20th century France, the one that 'won' in 1940, and that hasn't exactly died out since. And, it isn't/wasn't just France.
Phoebe,
Re: the racist potential of terroir, it seems like it fundamentally can't apply to the U.S. because we're so blatantly (i.e., recently) a nation of immigrants. I'm sure there are some Native Americans who consider themselves "inherently, spiritually rooted to those superior places and thus themselves superior," but since the original inhabitants of this land are so utterly marginalized at every level -- economic, social, political, legal, even academic -- I'm not going to begrudge them that sentiment.
PG,
"Terroir" is always a construct, with only the most coincidental relation to where anyone's ancestors actually lived since time immemorial. It's all about feeling your family preceded someone else's. So while I don't see Native Americans as about to wage some terroir-based war on the rest of us, I do see the potential of Sarah-Palin-esque populism fusing with terroir.
I'm not sure how that would work, unless you're framing it as springing from the "they tuk are jawbs!" racist anti-immigrant wing of the GOP (which I do charitably try to distinguish from the section that's sincerely opposed only to illegal immigration, and is just as troubled by Latvian illegal immigrants as by Guatemalan ones). And I'm pretty sure the fastest way to get that group to reconsider their beliefs is to tell them those ideas are French.
It would come from a weird fusion of back-to-the-farm and anti-immigrant sentiment - 'good' localism getting absorbed by 'bad'. I'm not terribly worried about this happening, however, because the local-food movement is largely about francophilic New York Jews and other non-WASPS buying food at Greenmarkets in the center of the city, along with some Californian equivalent.
It would come from a weird fusion of back-to-the-farm and anti-immigrant sentiment
Oddly enough there is something like this (not exactly like this, but something like it) in one branch of the Sierra Club that has become strongly, and to my mind completely mistakenly, anti-immigration on the grounds that immigration to the US will (perhaps necessarily, at least likely- their view isn't that clear) lead to environmental degradation. This group of people at least claims to be non-racist, but their main role seems to be to provide cover for more racist anti-immigration sorts.
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