It would appear that our Altadena co-op efforts began with a structure fire. The old bank building on Lake Avenue was heavily damaged and an on-line discussion wondered what would become of the property. Someone suggested we petition the next door conventional grocery to expand.
I went out on a limb and suggested a co-op.
This has led to a serious effort to research and establish a medium-sized grocery store. We're hoping to engage the community so it becomes our shared asset. Since I'm spearheading the effort you all deserve to know where I'm coming from.
Before the fire I was mourning the loss of a nice little grocery store in Pasadena. It was human sized; my wife and I got to know some of the employees; it offered a lot of organic items and some local produce. We used to meet people there that we knew. In general it worked for us - until a larger company bought it out (using questionable tactics) and immediately closed it. I still refuse to even visit their huge replacement location.
Before that loss it was becoming clear to me that our society's food system was turning into a mess. Genetically engineered crops were being slipped into just about all conventional foods - without adequate testing or any consumer notice. Ocean dead zones were expanding - largely due to farm pollution. Our government was protecting the perpetrators not the environment. For a while it seemed like grocery stores were beginning to turn around. Organic items began appearing on shelves. But organic is not enough, the standards are sometimes gamed and carbon footprint is not factored in. Large grocery operations deal in huge volume so local items hardly ever make the cut.
And before all of the above I used to belong to a great co-op in Seattle. The Puget Consumer's Co-op was doing quite well back then, with a number of locations throughout the city. I belonged to a newly opened location, a friendly market that somehow managed to shoehorn a meat market and lots of bulk items into their tiny residential neighborhood location. They even had a community room upstairs where I learned some of the nuances of gardening in the Pacific Northwest. In the years since I left that area, PCC has continued to do very well. They have something like nine locations and are a strong advocate for sustainable agriculture in the region.
Our effort to bring a cooperative grocery store to our area seems to have touched a nerve - we regularly get enthusiastic reactions to the idea. Yes, it will be quite an effort to put this together but there's a lot of help available to us. My contribution is mainly that of project management experience from when I used to manage large animation projects.
As mentioned elsewhere on this site, there are very few co-ops in the Los Angeles area. Opening one in Altadena not only seems like it will be greeted with much demand, but a successful startup here will serve as a model for what other Los Angeles neighborhoods can pull off.
We need to more assertively move to a sustainable economy. There are so many ways we can do this and lots of them are fun. Here's one: the concept of "local-exotic". We've been charmed by the idea of exotic foods from around the world. In fact one very successful grocery chain promotes this with store decor and employees wearing tropical shirts. Yet, looking into the products, we realize that most are not organic, definitely not local, no mention is made of what working/environmental conditions they were made under. Sometimes it's even hard to determine what country they came from!
Instead, a co-op with a health-code compliant kitchen could be used to make products from local sources. Personally I'd be thrilled to find blood orange marmalade made from the fruit off my neighbor's trees. How about salsa made from a local family's old recipe, using local ingredients? Get it? Local items, only available through our co-op that are unique to our community. This, in addition to sustainable/local/organic items made available through normal health food suppliers and local farmers, will make a shopping experience that is sustainable, practical and empowering.
Overall I'm tired of having an adversarial relationship with the source of my food. I want to have a win-win arrangement with my grocery store - a store that looks after my interests and those of its suppliers/farmers/environment while operating responsibly itself.
I think of it as a search for honest food. A food co-op would be the answer. Join me please in the effort to bring this to our community!
Patrick Reagan
Patrick with wife Agnes