Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to cool people who did stuff that
Speaker 2: is cool. I feel like there'd be a better way
Speaker 2: to I like, just did cool stuff. Thing that'd be better.
Speaker 2: I'm Margaret Kiljoy and I'm usually your host, but I'm
Speaker 2: not today because today is another episode of Reren Explains
Speaker 2: Things to Me the pun that some tiny percentage of
Speaker 2: the guests, guests, listeners, listeners will find funny. It's an
Speaker 2: even smaller portion of the percentage of listeners who get
Speaker 2: the joke will be the ones who actually find it funny.
Speaker 2: Wren is explaining things to me Ren or I Hi, Ren,
Speaker 2: how are you please? Say?
Speaker 3: How are you doing? I you know you're the podcaster here,
Speaker 3: so that's embarrassing, okay, And Wren is our guest host.
Speaker 3: This is part two of a two parter. Although if
Speaker 3: you only care about food co ops and you don't
Speaker 3: care about free bread, then I guess you could start here.
Speaker 3: But you couldn't start until we introduce Sophie. Hey, Hi, Sophie, Hi, Hi, Rian, Hi,
Speaker 3: how's it going is?
Speaker 1: Everything's Everything's going very very well. I'm so excited for
Speaker 1: a part two.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and feeling better about food co ops, which is
Speaker 2: the spoiler. I mean it's not spoiler for anything.
Speaker 3: This might make you feel more interested in food co
Speaker 3: op history, but it won't make you feel better about
Speaker 3: food co ops.
Speaker 4: I hate to oh, okay to admit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well it will make me feel better about it
Speaker 2: won't make change how I feel about Ian. It's already
Speaker 2: very positive. Ian is our audio engineer. Hi, Ian Hey,
Speaker 2: Ian Hey? Ian? Hello? This is Ian.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sad Ian's not here right now.
Speaker 2: What we just heard him, I'm making it sound like
Speaker 2: I'm lying when I said I said last time that
Speaker 2: I don't drink effeine, and it sounds like I'm lying
Speaker 2: right now. Ian is our audio engineer. I already said
Speaker 2: that un Woman did our theme music and today food
Speaker 2: co ops.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so food co ops so similar to the last one.
Speaker 3: What comes to mind when you think about food.
Speaker 4: Co ops.
Speaker 2: Overpriced food? M h, there goes the neighborhood, but also
Speaker 2: the place that has the vegan food and also the
Speaker 2: place where people argue about the ethics of shoplifting from.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all of these things. So that's it nailed, Sophie. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's all the things. So I definitely think of co ops, right,
Speaker 3: it's these really fancy independent grocery stores that regular people
Speaker 3: can't afford to shop at. I feel incredibly privileged to
Speaker 3: be able to afford groceries on a regular basis, and
Speaker 3: I cannot afford to shop at the Tucson Food co Op.
Speaker 3: So I was surprised when while looking into the co
Speaker 3: op here in Tucson, which completely fits that stereo type, now,
Speaker 3: I discovered that it actually has this really radical history
Speaker 3: and that actually most food co ops in the United
Speaker 3: States do as well.
Speaker 2: Because the concept of it seems really yeah, right, like,
Speaker 2: let's all pitch in together to buy food in bulk,
Speaker 2: isn't that the that's to give you the what I
Speaker 2: think I know. I think a bunch of people, probably
Speaker 2: Finns and Swedes because they're in Minnesota, and shit, we're like,
Speaker 2: what if we all pitch in together and or Wisconsin,
Speaker 2: and what if we all pitch in together and buy
Speaker 2: food and bulk together as if we are the store.
Speaker 2: That's like, that's what I think I know about food
Speaker 2: co op history.
Speaker 3: So there might be a tie in with Wisconsin Finns
Speaker 3: and Swedes, but I don't know it. No, we will
Speaker 3: be in Minnesota in in a little bit in this episode.
Speaker 3: But yeah, but what I know of sort of the
Speaker 3: roots of co ops. I'm going to focus on the
Speaker 3: ones that emerge out of the counterculture of the sixties
Speaker 3: and seventies, but of course there were other co ops
Speaker 3: right that started long before then. And I should say, obviously,
Speaker 3: people have been pulling resources to secure food all over
Speaker 3: the world since time immemorial. Just because some folks are
Speaker 3: now calling it a food co op doesn't mean that
Speaker 3: it's a new thing. But an early example of a
Speaker 3: consumer cooperative that people often point to was founded in
Speaker 3: I think it's Roachdale or Rochdale, England in eighteen forty four.
Speaker 3: A group of weavers who had just lost to strike
Speaker 3: for better wages pulled their money to open a store
Speaker 3: and they sold basic food stuffs stuff like flour, oat, sugar,
Speaker 3: and butter. They also created a set of Roachdale principles
Speaker 3: ideals that their co op would run on, and these
Speaker 3: included things like voluntary and open membership, democratic member control,
Speaker 3: autonomy and independence and cooperation among cooperatives. And the Roachdale
Speaker 3: movement inspired thousands of consumer cooperatives to open across the
Speaker 3: United States, although most of these didn't last very long,
Speaker 3: and there was also a second wave of consumer cooperatives
Speaker 3: that arose from the Great Depression but waned during World
Speaker 3: War Two. And the exception was that some of the
Speaker 3: farmers cooperatives have sort of lingered on. And one of
Speaker 3: the ones that and I don't know how, you know,
Speaker 3: they're a big company. I'm not going to like claim
Speaker 3: that they're like super cool or radical in any way.
Speaker 3: But one of the farmers cooperatives that still exists is Tillamook,
Speaker 3: which is my cheese and ice cream brand of choice.
Speaker 2: Okay, do you want to like when you keep saying
Speaker 2: like consumer cooperative and I know what that means. Do
Speaker 2: you want to talk about like that versus a worker
Speaker 2: cooperative or something?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so this is mostly focusing on consumer cooperatives, right,
Speaker 3: so people aren't like pooling their labor to achieve something instead.
Speaker 2: Of the Yeah, it's owned by the people who shop there,
Speaker 2: rather than owned by the workers.
Speaker 3: By the workers. Yeah, so it's not like a bunch
Speaker 3: of people, you know, working together too. Although it gets
Speaker 3: really blurry when we go into the early history of
Speaker 3: like the countercultural food co ops, because they were kind
Speaker 3: of like both workers and consumers cooperatives. And I think
Speaker 3: that the farmers cooperatives, were workers cooperatives and are workers cooperative?
Speaker 3: Blurring that a little bit.
Speaker 2: Okay, I just wanted to, like because you were saying that,
Speaker 2: and I was like, wanted to, Yeah, clarify totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a really great clarification, thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So this is mostly consumer cooperatives. It's people pooling money
Speaker 3: and resources to be able to get products at a
Speaker 3: cheaper rate for the most part. Then there's also this
Speaker 3: extensive history of black lead farming and grocery cooperatives that
Speaker 3: emerges out of the Civil rights movement, and most famously, yeah,
Speaker 3: this is another like could do a whole episode on this,
Speaker 3: but most famously Fanny Lou Hamer, the twentieth child of
Speaker 3: sharecroppers who became a really important civil rights organizer, led
Speaker 3: the effort to create the Freedom Farm in Sunflower County, Mississippi.
Speaker 3: It was founded on forty acres and sixty seven. It
Speaker 3: grew to seven hundred acres at its peak, and it
Speaker 3: was farmed cooperatively by around fifteen hundred families. It included
Speaker 3: community gardens, absistant farms, a catfish cooperative, there was land
Speaker 3: for cattle pig cooperative. There crops that were raised to
Speaker 3: pay the mortgage on the land. There was also a
Speaker 3: tool bank and many many other things. And while the
Speaker 3: cooperative had black leadership, and while because of the demographics
Speaker 3: of the county and the impacts of racism, it primarily
Speaker 3: served black families, the resources were available to poor white
Speaker 3: families as well, and there were some that were part
Speaker 3: of the Freedom Farm or they were available to anyone,
Speaker 3: but demographically that that other contingent usually meant poor white families.
Speaker 2: And we talked a little bit about her. I think
Speaker 2: in the episode that we did about birth control people
Speaker 2: being able to choose whether or not to have children.
Speaker 2: I think it was her who was forced to not
Speaker 2: be able to have children by the state as part
Speaker 2: of a racist eugenesis policy.
Speaker 3: She was yeah, she was absolutely.
Speaker 2: And then there's like all of this, I actually know
Speaker 2: a little bit more about this part where there's like,
Speaker 2: for example, there's the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which is
Speaker 2: an organization that works to keep farming land in black
Speaker 2: hands because you have a lot of basically, over the
Speaker 2: past hundred years, the amount of land owned by black
Speaker 2: people in the South and US South has like dropped
Speaker 2: dramatically as a result of all these racist practices, and
Speaker 2: so cooperatives are coming together to try and like preserve
Speaker 2: all of that. And I've been doing it for a
Speaker 2: long time anyway, I got really excited about this. Please continue.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, they have for a really long time. And
Speaker 3: the Southern wait, the Southern Federation of Cooperatives?
Speaker 4: Is that what you just are?
Speaker 2: A federation of Southern cooperatives.
Speaker 3: Federation of Southern Cooperatives.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that gets me covered, right.
Speaker 2: Oh sick. Cool.
Speaker 3: Also, not in my scripts, but also in this book
Speaker 3: that I learned a lot about the Freedom Farm in
Speaker 3: which is Monica M. White's Freedom Farmers. And that's a
Speaker 3: really cool thing to check out if you want to
Speaker 3: learn more about this stuff. And so, unfortunately, for many
Speaker 3: of the above mentioned reasons, the Freedom Farm shut down
Speaker 3: in nineteen seventy six, just a year before Hamer's death.
Speaker 3: But it achieved a great deal in the nine years
Speaker 3: of its existence. And I have a quote here from
Speaker 3: Monica and White who wrote that book, Freedom Farmers, where
Speaker 3: she talked about the importance of the Freedom Firm. She says, well,
Speaker 3: it is important to analyze the problems that ultimately led
Speaker 3: to the demise of the organization in nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 3: We should not undervalue its successes given its time, scope
Speaker 3: and tension and liberatory vision, as well as the fact
Speaker 3: that this vision was enacted within a pervasively oppressive and
Speaker 3: racially hostile environment. The movement, while relatively short lived, was
Speaker 3: a manifestation of self reliance and the capacity of a
Speaker 3: community to come together for the provision of food, housing, shelter, education, healthcare.
Speaker 4: And employment.
Speaker 3: Yeah so super super important and other civil rights organizers
Speaker 3: such as Bob Moses and Stokely Carmichael also encouraged black
Speaker 3: communities to start cooperative food buying clubs to establish economic
Speaker 3: independence and a white supremacist society. Like previous grocery store
Speaker 3: co op waves. A lot of these buying clubs were
Speaker 3: short lived and there's not a ton of records on
Speaker 3: how many were formed. And then other buying clubs were
Speaker 3: also started during the War on Poverty, which was a
Speaker 3: program of the national government in the mid sixties that
Speaker 3: attempted to resp onto a poverty rate of nineteen percent.
Speaker 3: These included, for example, a co op started by Pedro
Speaker 3: Otero at the puert Riquino Center on New York's Lower
Speaker 3: East Side, among others.
Speaker 1: Is Bob Moses the same person as Robert Moses, because
Speaker 1: Robert Moses was the guy who fucking fucked up the
Speaker 1: urban planning in New York. So that okay, because I
Speaker 1: was like, I was totally different. I was like, these
Speaker 1: are two very different people. Yeah, the same name, okay, cool?
Speaker 2: Cool coo cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, Bob Moses is a sub arts organizer. Robert Moses,
Speaker 3: I mean, that's just unfassionate. Not a friend of the pod.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, no, no, he's he's a friend of Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards. Listen to those episodes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So so there were you know, there were precedents, right,
Speaker 3: These countercultural co ops don't just spring out of nowhere,
Speaker 3: and I want to make sure to kind of emphasize that.
Speaker 3: But you do have this interest in organic food, which
Speaker 3: is growing during the late sixties and early seventies. You know,
Speaker 3: we touched on this in the first part of this
Speaker 3: with the Diggers and the Whole week Bread. This interest
Speaker 3: was driven by a lot of different things, but one
Speaker 3: important one is the skepticism of additives and pesticides, especially
Speaker 3: in the wake of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a book
Speaker 3: I have not read, but according to things I've read
Speaker 3: about it. It called out indiscriminate pesticide use, specifically the
Speaker 3: use of DDT for its impact on the environment, and.
Speaker 2: It also started the modern environmental movement.
Speaker 3: I think sort of yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, that's what.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've read people say that. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sure there's like more more detail and nuance there,
Speaker 3: but I don't.
Speaker 4: Know what it is. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you know, DDT had health effects, including cancer.
Speaker 3: There was also like a general contracultural distrust of US
Speaker 3: processed foods, which were pretty much all that was available
Speaker 3: at mainstream supermarkets. So the political left belief that hardy
Speaker 3: natural foods like a whole weat read or granola would
Speaker 3: actually like sustain people longer during revolutionary activity. They're all like,
Speaker 3: bring your whole bread and granola to the building occupation,
Speaker 3: you know. So there's this whole idea about this kind
Speaker 3: of food that's so sweet, I know. And the commune
Speaker 3: movement had also started, right, so hippies are moving from
Speaker 3: cities to rural land where they're growing their own food
Speaker 3: or they're driving an interest in organic produce and like
Speaker 3: creating excess produce that you know, maybe could do well
Speaker 3: to be sold somewhere.
Speaker 2: I find it really interesting because we talk about, well,
Speaker 2: you don't a lot of people talk about food as
Speaker 2: if it's sort of like tangential, like revolutionary stuff, you know,
Speaker 2: And I think about, like, I mean, obviously dietary choices
Speaker 2: is complicated and things like that. But I remember I
Speaker 2: had been vegan for about a year before I became
Speaker 2: an anarchist and I got headled in New York City
Speaker 2: by a bunch of cops and I was like, and
Speaker 2: people were sharing food and I was like, oh no,
Speaker 2: I'm good because I I didn't know any vegans those
Speaker 2: two thousand and two and someone was like, oh no,
Speaker 2: it's vegan, and then gave me food and I was like,
Speaker 2: I found my people, you know, and like ways of
Speaker 2: choosing how to eat and like reading about my My
Speaker 2: interest in my knowledge has been more like vegetarians and
Speaker 2: stuff like that, right.
Speaker 4: But like, like I we.
Speaker 2: Just did a bunch of episodes about you know, these
Speaker 2: like revolutionaries in Argentina one hundred years ago and like
Speaker 2: and they were like straight edge vegan, like they were
Speaker 2: you know, and I'm like, or they were vegetarian, but
Speaker 2: there were vegan whatever. And it's just so interesting that
Speaker 2: this stuff, like even the like oh we all eat
Speaker 2: whole we eat bread, or we eat granola, or like
Speaker 2: you know, let's go eat sprouts so we have more
Speaker 2: energy to overthrow the government, or like refined sugar is
Speaker 2: going to just drain all your energy or whatever. Like
Speaker 2: it's it's cool to me that this stuff is part
Speaker 2: of it and that people see it as part of it.
Speaker 2: Obviously it gets I'm almost done this rent, but like
Speaker 2: it obviously gets recuperated and all this like weird stuff
Speaker 2: where like all the right wing people are like you know,
Speaker 2: talking about sometimes very similar things but anyway, sorry.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there's like a whole other threat of inquiry
Speaker 3: with this stuff where they it is really about looking
Speaker 3: at the foods and the foods that people were choosing
Speaker 3: to eat and the recipes that were being created, both
Speaker 3: in the sense that you're talking about, but then also
Speaker 3: sort of like this weird reoccurring of or not weird
Speaker 3: but complicated recurring of peasant food and cultural appropriation and
Speaker 3: all this stuff, and that this won't that won't be
Speaker 3: covered as much, but it is very fascinating and it's
Speaker 3: something that I've always thought that if I were going
Speaker 3: to go back into food co ops and look at
Speaker 3: them more. Looking at that angle would be really really cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, but this is going to be more about like
Speaker 3: the structure of trying to create this like anti capitalist
Speaker 3: food buying system that then, of course, spoiler alert, we'll
Speaker 3: get co opted in the end.
Speaker 2: Co opted.
Speaker 3: Yeah, co ops getting co opted.
Speaker 2: That's where the word co opted comes from. It's like
Speaker 2: what happened to the co ops? This is actual etymology. Okay,
Speaker 2: so you're saying.
Speaker 3: To us countercultural co ops were reaction to mainstream There
Speaker 3: were mainstream health food stores. They had products at hippies
Speaker 3: and leftists wanted to eat, but they were too expensive
Speaker 3: to shop. And they were also a reaction to old
Speaker 3: school consumer co ops, which, to quote Warren belasco author
Speaker 3: of Appetite for Change amazing food historian, were designed to supplement,
Speaker 3: not subvert capitalism, and didn't really stock organic or whole
Speaker 3: grain foods. Right, So you have the fancy health food
Speaker 3: store that has your organic and whole grain foods, and
Speaker 3: then you have your old school consumer cooperatives where you
Speaker 3: could just get the big box foods that you could
Speaker 3: get anywhere else just buying on a cooperative model.
Speaker 2: Okay, you know what else people can buy. This is
Speaker 2: my ad transition.
Speaker 1: I liked it.
Speaker 2: Thanks. Yeah, there's some stuff that if you want to
Speaker 2: it would be really funny if like we actually got
Speaker 2: ads for a decent funny it'd be really nice if
Speaker 2: we adds for decent things. But some co here, Okay,
Speaker 2: here's my sponsored buy. Some food cooperatives in some cities
Speaker 2: still actually practice a model of trying to make food
Speaker 2: accessible and offer discounts to people who low income and
Speaker 2: like do all kinds of work to subvert this. And
Speaker 2: so this is sponsored by but not that they gave
Speaker 2: us money, but I just think are cool. I'm going
Speaker 2: to call them the actual co ops.
Speaker 3: Very fair, Okay, sponsored by actual co ops.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we're back.
Speaker 3: We're talking about food co ops. So the first of
Speaker 3: these co ops, these countercultural co ops, started as buying clubs.
Speaker 3: Buying clubs often refer to themselves as conspiracies. And while
Speaker 3: food conspiracy may have been like a comment on the
Speaker 3: conspiracy of the US government to cover up harmful chemicals
Speaker 3: and food, some of these buying clubs were inspired by
Speaker 3: how households or groups of friends would actually buy marijuana
Speaker 3: and other drugs in bulk to get a lower price.
Speaker 3: Hell yeah, so the name conspiracy also gestures at that
Speaker 3: kind of like extra legal buying that was happening, and
Speaker 3: they shifted that skill set towards getting bulk grains, produce,
Speaker 3: and other food items instead of simply drugs.
Speaker 2: They hit thirty and they were like, what if we
Speaker 2: get food instead?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that seems very possible. And yeah, now I'm curious.
Speaker 3: I wonder what the age range was, because that didn't Yeah,
Speaker 3: that didn't come up too much in my research. But
Speaker 3: most of these buying clubs actually didn't last more than
Speaker 3: two years. And this doesn't sound familiar to anyone who's
Speaker 3: done anti capitalist organizing at all, but they too often
Speaker 3: depended on a key organizer. If that person moved or
Speaker 3: burned out, the buying club would fizzle out. Yeah, And
Speaker 3: that said, some of them did successfully transition into brick
Speaker 3: and mortar stores, which is what would become food co ops.
Speaker 3: And between five and ten thousand buying clubs and cooperative
Speaker 3: grocery stores combined opened across the US during the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3: And I'm going to be referring to two sound a
Speaker 3: lot because I did some research with some of the
Speaker 3: archives that like the special collections at the University has
Speaker 3: with food co ops are about our food co op
Speaker 3: here in town. And so I'm going to refer to
Speaker 3: Tucson because I've done research, like primary source research about
Speaker 3: the Chucson Food co Op. But a lot of the
Speaker 3: stuff I'm going to say, actually just like applies to
Speaker 3: lots of food co ops. Okay, So yeah, if I'm
Speaker 3: talking about Tucson, it's mostly just because it's like an
Speaker 3: example I have that I think is like pretty applicable
Speaker 3: to other places as well. Okay, So in Tucson, a
Speaker 3: buying club founded by the Marxist Leninist John Brown Party
Speaker 3: opened a storefront in nineteen seventy one where they sold
Speaker 3: things like grains and greens to shoppers at, according to
Speaker 3: their first by laws, the lowest possible prices. And they
Speaker 3: called themselves the Food Conspiracy, named after this idea, right
Speaker 3: of the food conspiracy, which is hilarious because it's fancy
Speaker 3: and not radical. Now it's still the Chuson food co
Speaker 3: ops named today.
Speaker 2: Wait it's still called Oh that's why it's unfamiliar.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's called the food Conspiracy.
Speaker 1: Ah.
Speaker 2: Now it just feels like a conspiracy to charge people
Speaker 2: too much money for free. Now, yeah, unless you're listening
Speaker 2: and work there, in which case we're talking about something else.
Speaker 2: Don't get mad at it, totally, don't get mad at us.
Speaker 2: Lower your prices or offer free memberships to people who
Speaker 2: are low income. Maybe they already do. I don't.
Speaker 3: Maybe they I haven't sound information that they do, but
Speaker 3: I don't want to. Things are changing all the time,
Speaker 3: so I don't want to say they don't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we believe in you to be better. We do,
Speaker 2: so we're inviting you.
Speaker 3: At first, these co ops ran on a participatory democracy model,
Speaker 3: so to become a member, you typically had to take
Speaker 3: on a certain amount of volunteer shifts. Some co ops
Speaker 3: did have staff, and they'd often be paid a flat
Speaker 3: rate called a people's wage.
Speaker 2: Was this a shitty wage or a good wage?
Speaker 3: I'm sure it was shitty, yeah, but it was like
Speaker 3: everybody was getting paid shitty.
Speaker 2: I'll take a living wage instead of a people's wage
Speaker 2: any day of the week.
Speaker 3: Staff and members would make decisions about the co op
Speaker 3: clib actively in meetings, and of course, because the patriarchy
Speaker 3: was and is everywhere, it's probably not surprising that male
Speaker 3: voices often dominated these meetings. So there was like a
Speaker 3: lot of frustration among female and non sistued members. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and I know about some of this because a lot
Speaker 3: of food cops published newsletters, and so I've spent a
Speaker 3: bunch of time looking at the Tucson Food Cop newsletters
Speaker 3: from the seventies and eighties, and it's where I've gotten
Speaker 3: a lot of this info. And in their newsletters, minutes
Speaker 3: from the meetings were printed in each issue and often
Speaker 3: included a by name summary of what those present committed
Speaker 3: to doing before the next meeting.
Speaker 2: So this is like public, like dam like the whole
Speaker 2: town knows that you said you would call call in
Speaker 2: the sugar order.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I found like going through these like part
Speaker 3: of what was so amusing to me about them was
Speaker 3: like how much sort of the problems that they bring
Speaker 3: up into personally trying to run these co ops just
Speaker 3: reflect collective projects today, right, And I can't imagine doing
Speaker 3: that like pblishing a newsletter being like Margaret said she
Speaker 3: would type up notes from the meeting or you know, at.
Speaker 2: One point when I lived in Amsterdam and the squat
Speaker 2: the squatter scene had a i want to say, like
Speaker 2: weekly or monthly or something. They had a fucking zine
Speaker 2: they put out that was just all of the gossip.
Speaker 2: It was like who's dating who, and like who's mad
Speaker 2: and what happened whoa. It was terrifying that that existed.
Speaker 2: I was like, yeah, I don't want to do anything
Speaker 2: because I don't want to end up in this yeah zcene.
Speaker 3: These weren't quite like that. They mostly stuck to like
Speaker 3: who said as you would say put who would put
Speaker 3: in the sugar order, who would make sure that.
Speaker 4: Like something was staffed.
Speaker 2: I hope that every now and then the notes were
Speaker 2: like and then John went on too long?
Speaker 3: You know, occasionally they are yeah and they're yeah they do.
Speaker 3: They do have stuff like that. And there are also
Speaker 3: like debates on how the cops should be run in
Speaker 3: the newsletter itself. The newsletter really was like this I
Speaker 3: don't know, dialogue about the co ops, from how much
Speaker 3: markup should be for non members to whether or not
Speaker 3: it was acceptable to purchase white sugar. There is like
Speaker 3: this series of debates about white sugar that goes on
Speaker 3: four years in the newsletters. And I haven't read them
Speaker 3: all in detail, all of these articles, but I would
Speaker 3: love to go back and do so.
Speaker 2: Was there like an overall like did one side win.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure. I think they stock white sugar now,
Speaker 3: so I would say probably that side one. But yeah,
Speaker 3: so these newsletters, alongside bulletin boards in the stores, were
Speaker 3: a major way that food cops were sort of like
Speaker 3: a communications hub for the counterculture and radicals. So in
Speaker 3: the Food Conspiracy newsletter, you see them do things like
Speaker 3: reprint articles from social movements occurring at the time, and
Speaker 3: some of them, like a movement that seemed to be
Speaker 3: about like reclaiming the American Revolutionist People's history, were definitely
Speaker 3: pretty cringey, but there are also pieces about the nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy one Attica Prison Uprising, the American Indian Movement, an
Speaker 3: arc of feminism, queer issues, and a lot of these
Speaker 3: articles were accompanied by calls for tangible solidarity, including some
Speaker 3: calls for funds to support the Attica Defense Committee and
Speaker 3: the nineteen seventy three aim occupation of Wounded me Nice.
Speaker 3: So yeah, so there was like some pretty radical solidarity
Speaker 3: based stuff going on, especially in these early newsletters, and
Speaker 3: it also included a lot of information about what was
Speaker 3: happening locally. So the second issue of the newsletter includes
Speaker 3: information about an upcoming march against the Vietnam War, an
Speaker 3: invitation to a down home feast and strategy meeting at
Speaker 3: a park under the headline let's eat again like we
Speaker 3: did last summer. There is also a connection between this
Speaker 3: phrase that a friend found and a golf course occupation.
Speaker 3: The golf course, which still exists, is on Tucson's West Side,
Speaker 3: and in nineteen seventy one, a coalition of predominantly Mexican
Speaker 3: American neighbors and supporters protested the absence of a community
Speaker 3: center in the neighborhood, and they turned the golf course
Speaker 3: into a people's park for an afternoon so they like
Speaker 3: played games, hung out, eight food nice. Think that's cool,
Speaker 3: is like right, Like every single town or city has
Speaker 3: these histories that are just you know, we don't remember
Speaker 3: that are you know, covered up in some way. And
Speaker 3: so going through these newsletters, which I think most co
Speaker 3: ops printed newsletters, and there's a lot of archives that
Speaker 3: have them, it's like a cool way to start to
Speaker 3: learn about some of this stuff. And then another piece
Speaker 3: decries the criminalization of vagrancy in the city. In it,
Speaker 3: contributor Elizabeth Basquet and Nouarez cited an incident which a
Speaker 3: sixty five year old was thrown into jail because, as
Speaker 3: she writes, he had no job, adding, it seems here
Speaker 3: that the authorities want to hide the poor, which shows
Speaker 3: that the streets do not belong to the people.
Speaker 2: I would bet that the way that you can track
Speaker 2: when a co op has gone from good co op
Speaker 2: to bad co op isn't even related to the prices.
Speaker 2: It's how they respond to vagrancy. I feel like that
Speaker 2: would be the like do they lock their dumpsters or
Speaker 2: do they put all of the food that could possibly
Speaker 2: be eaten on top? You know, like this is where yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Agree, I actually very much agree with you. And the
Speaker 3: newsletters also tracked the proliferation of other food co ops
Speaker 3: and other cooperative businesses. So in Tucson, several other food
Speaker 3: co ops opened in nineteen seventy three. They banded together
Speaker 3: to pool orders, and they started a distribution center called
Speaker 3: the People's Warehouse. They grew to serve co ops are
Speaker 3: at Arizona and New Mexico, and it included a trucking
Speaker 3: collective of folks they would go kick up food from
Speaker 3: places in the Southwest, but also as far away as
Speaker 3: Minneapolis and Arkansas. There was also a cooperative bakery, cooperative, bookstore,
Speaker 3: soybean guild, and a bike co op, so all sorts
Speaker 3: of other cooperative projects happening at this time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you could, like, I mean, at that point
Speaker 2: you start, that's when you actually start like supplanting the
Speaker 2: existing economy. That's where it gets interesting.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah. And so they put out a few issues
Speaker 3: that were like cooperative projects in Tucson, and there were
Speaker 3: just like so many things happening, which was very cool
Speaker 3: to see and very inspiring.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then another thing that food co ops, including but
Speaker 3: very much not limited to the Tucson one, offered was
Speaker 3: an alternative for shoppers who wanted to support the United
Speaker 3: farm Workers boycotts. Since most grocery stores and the old
Speaker 3: style consumer cooperatives bought non union lettuce and.
Speaker 2: Grapes, Yeah, so you can buy your like non scab food, yep.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it became a place to buy non scab food.
Speaker 3: The Chusan newsletter urged shoppers to avoid Safeway and Amp
Speaker 3: as well as to avoid certain wine companies, and they
Speaker 3: stock boycott Safeway buttons. And then also when lettuce workers
Speaker 3: in central Arizona went on strike in April nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 3: The Food Conspiracy provided food and a donation of one
Speaker 3: hundred dollars a week, but there was some strife because
Speaker 3: co op members failed to turn out in force on
Speaker 3: the picket line. So a co op member in the
Speaker 3: newsletter admonishes everyone else by writing, the farm workers came
Speaker 3: to us looking for bodies to pick it for one day.
Speaker 3: Out of the thousands to shop and work at the conspiracy,
Speaker 3: only two of us were present. And when we arrived
Speaker 3: and they heard we were from the co op, they
Speaker 3: asked everyone else, was where were you?
Speaker 2: That rules the salt newsletter. Uh huh, yeah, just everyone
Speaker 2: being salty totally.
Speaker 3: And then yeah. While for most cops only selling union
Speaker 3: lettuce and grapes was a given, there were a lot
Speaker 3: of debates around what other foods were okay to carry,
Speaker 3: so white flower and sugar were big nosed for most
Speaker 3: co ops at this time. Coffee and bananas were controversial
Speaker 3: because they were grown under exploitative labor conditions in the
Speaker 3: Global South. Because of things like colonialism, there were also
Speaker 3: debates around carrying meat, so Francis Moore Lapsed Diet for
Speaker 3: a Small Planet was a book that made an ecological
Speaker 3: argument for vegetarianism which was popular, but it wasn't ubiquitous,
Speaker 3: and it was also more common in California in the
Speaker 3: West versus the quote unquote Marxist East, which I find
Speaker 3: hilarious as an East Coaster living in the western half
Speaker 3: of the country.
Speaker 4: Uh huh.
Speaker 3: I'm not even a Marxist, but I kind of am like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm from the Marxist East, Like.
Speaker 2: Why are they over here? Get rid of them? But
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeahah, I think I think I have a little bit
Speaker 3: of it. Need to be a tough guy that probably
Speaker 3: I need to work through.
Speaker 2: But well, it's also probably it's probably because you eat
Speaker 2: meat and I don't.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2: That's probably. That's why I'm like, well, I'm with the
Speaker 2: West Coast on this one.
Speaker 3: We need a flip flop ourselves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or force the entire rest of the country to
Speaker 2: flip flop.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: A lot of people fell in the middle. They believe
Speaker 3: that the issue is factory farmed meat and being so
Speaker 3: disconnected from the butchering process that meat was taken for granted,
Speaker 3: which I am not great. I'm being careful about what
Speaker 3: meat I eat. I don't need a lot of meat,
Speaker 3: but this is I think where I fall philosophically, And
Speaker 3: one of the biggest debates was this whole good food
Speaker 3: versus cheap food divide. So the good food contingent often hippies.
Speaker 3: I felt that it was the food co ops choptor
Speaker 3: fed an alternative to mass produce junk food and to
Speaker 3: keep what they carried natural and organic. But some people,
Speaker 3: especially Marxists, felt that this hardline stance was the elitist
Speaker 3: and isolated co ops from the communities around them.
Speaker 2: Oh no, I've become more of a Marxist in this.
Speaker 3: While these debates happened in co ops all across the country,
Speaker 3: including here in Tucson. In Minneapolis, this debate erupted into
Speaker 3: what is called the co op wars. Oh are you
Speaker 3: ready to talk about the co op wars?
Speaker 2: I mean, all I can think of is there was
Speaker 2: a vegan place that was expensive both called food fight.
Speaker 2: That's what I'm imagining about to happen, not the store,
Speaker 2: but that there's going to be a food fight.
Speaker 3: Oh, there will be a food fight, but it takes
Speaker 3: a while to get there. Actually, Okay, so this story
Speaker 3: is really wild. It contains lots of moving parts, and
Speaker 3: it's very like he said, she said, they said. So
Speaker 3: I'm going to do my best to summarize it without
Speaker 3: leaving out the juicy bits. Okay, And a lot of
Speaker 3: this info comes from the Minnesota PBS documentary that hilariously
Speaker 3: is narrated by Peter Coyote, the Digger Whoa. But I'm
Speaker 3: bringing in some other sources as well, including from a
Speaker 3: book by Jonathan Kaufman called Hippie Food.
Speaker 2: Wait, which side was Peter? Did Peter try to be
Speaker 2: neutral or was Peter on like one side or the other?
Speaker 3: He literally just narrated the documentary.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I don't know what the Diggers were on
Speaker 2: this cheap versus good I.
Speaker 3: Don't think they cared. You know, they were in California.
Speaker 2: We don't even have meat here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, apologies to Peter if you have the Diggers actually
Speaker 3: did serve.
Speaker 2: Meat, oh right now, But I would say in your
Speaker 2: West coast East coast thing that the dichotomy were Yeah anyway.
Speaker 3: But yeah, apologies if you do have a side. But
Speaker 3: I Peter Coyote, but I.
Speaker 4: Don't know what it is.
Speaker 3: So the seventies cop movement was super prolific in Minnesota,
Speaker 3: which makes me wonder if you're weird comment about Swedes
Speaker 3: and finn starting co ops has some truth to it. Now,
Speaker 3: I want to figure this out.
Speaker 2: I'm under the impression that the previous the like Turn
Speaker 2: of the century co ops a lot of them. I'm
Speaker 2: under the impression of that movement largely started in the
Speaker 2: Upper Midwest and Wisconsin, and I think Minnesota being a
Speaker 2: fairly central part of it. And I actually was totally
Speaker 2: going off on a pure guest when I just know
Speaker 2: that a lot of the European immigrants to that area
Speaker 2: are from Scandinavian countries and Finland.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I should clarify when I say weird, I
Speaker 3: mean unusual.
Speaker 4: Not bad. Weird.
Speaker 3: No, yeah, no, Now I'm really curious about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But at the time of the co op Wars, which
Speaker 3: started around nineteen seventy five, there were two dozen co
Speaker 3: ops in Minneapolis, alongside their own People's warehouse, which distributed
Speaker 3: food not just to that city, but also to greater Minnesota, Wisconsin,
Speaker 3: and as far away as South Dakota. The Twin Cities
Speaker 3: actually had more food co ops in the Bay Area,
Speaker 3: which is where the countercultural co op movement, like so
Speaker 3: many other things of this era, got its start.
Speaker 2: Yeah. But you know what, else got a start somewhere.
Speaker 3: Is it ads?
Speaker 2: It is they? They probably started a long time ago. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it just continues. It's just an onward force throughout history
Speaker 2: trying to shape the way that we make decisions.
Speaker 3: And there were ads. There were ads in the food
Speaker 3: co op newsletters too.
Speaker 2: So all right, yeah, I'm sure they sold Reagan gold
Speaker 2: just like us, or a brand new car. Here's the
Speaker 2: ads and we're back.
Speaker 3: So in the mid seventies, some of these co op
Speaker 3: organizers from Minnesota moved out to a farm called Winding
Speaker 3: Road where they got really into reading MAO, which was
Speaker 3: a whole trend in the seventies that I did not
Speaker 3: back up. And as they were in the process of
Speaker 3: becoming state communists, this figure named Smitty shows up. That
Speaker 3: was a pseudonym, and he was underground. No one knows
Speaker 3: who he really was, and there aren't any surviving pictures
Speaker 3: of him.
Speaker 2: WHOA. He was a.
Speaker 3: Former member of the Student Unviolent Coordinating Committee in the
Speaker 3: South and the Dodge Revolutionary Union movement in Detroit. The
Speaker 3: documentary tends to do this thing where it emphasizes that
Speaker 3: he provoked a lot of what happened, but watching it
Speaker 3: does kind of feel a bit like mostly white folks
Speaker 3: displacing blame on a black organizer. So I don't really know.
Speaker 3: I'm just going to leave bit there, Smitty. The folks
Speaker 3: at Winding Road Farm and some other sorted group called
Speaker 3: the Cooperative Organization or the COO, which was Marxist Leninist,
Speaker 3: and their hope was to sell mainstream food to working
Speaker 3: class people and recruit them for the revolution. So the
Speaker 3: first thing they did was take over a failing Minneapolis
Speaker 3: cooperative called the Beanery. They spoke to the surrounding neighborhood
Speaker 3: about what people wanted and started selling things like whitebread,
Speaker 3: pepsi can goods, and sugar. And at one point a
Speaker 3: Cooperative Organization member wrote and distributed a position paper, which
Speaker 3: seemed to be very common in those days, like sharing
Speaker 3: thoughts and ideas through these papers about what changes had
Speaker 3: happened at the Beanery and why, And this included a
Speaker 3: condemnation of what the CEO saw as an elitist and
Speaker 3: bourgeoisie counterculture. So this sets off a flurry of debate
Speaker 3: between the CEO and the other contingent, who were referred
Speaker 3: to as both hippies and anarchists. And what I've read
Speaker 3: and watched, and who had a much stronger critique of
Speaker 3: big agribusiness and more interest in natural foods. Okay, it
Speaker 3: is true that the co op movement in Minneapolis was
Speaker 3: largely white, and in an attempt to rectify this, the
Speaker 3: CEO collaborated with Moe Burton. He was a community organizer
Speaker 3: in the Bryant Central neighborhood. He was a former of
Speaker 3: Black Panther, He had started community gardens in the neighborhood,
Speaker 3: and Burton, working with other community members in the CEO,
Speaker 3: opened the Bryant Central co Op to serve that neighborhood.
Speaker 3: Even though the CEO helped start Bryant Central, the co
Speaker 3: op was community controlled, not controlled by the CEO, and
Speaker 3: Gary Cunningham, who was Mowburton's nephew and was involved at
Speaker 3: this time and is interviewed in the documentary, emphasizes this.
Speaker 3: The big move for the CEO, however, was when they
Speaker 3: decided to take over the People's Warehouse at their Policy
Speaker 3: Review Board meeting in April nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 2: Is this through like entryism or like what is the
Speaker 2: way that they're taking over these places? So maybe you're
Speaker 2: about to tell.
Speaker 3: Me, Yeah, So the first co op was like a
Speaker 3: failing co op. And because the CEO had been involved
Speaker 3: in this earlier or you know a lot of people
Speaker 3: in the CEO had been part of starting co ops,
Speaker 3: they they were like, oh, buddies, we're willing to help
Speaker 3: run this failing co op. And so they kind of
Speaker 3: like snuck in that way. But this I'm about to
Speaker 3: tell you what happens. Right, So, when they decided to
Speaker 3: take over the People's warehouse, so the idea was to
Speaker 3: claim that the warehouse was poorly managed and use that
Speaker 3: as an excuse at the meeting to seize control. How
Speaker 3: they did that was in the middle of the meeting,
Speaker 3: members of the CEO walked in and announced they were
Speaker 3: taking over because the warehouse wasn't an effective organization. The
Speaker 3: hippies responded by having people in a building.
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 3: These respond by having people in the building around the
Speaker 3: clock to make sure the CEO couldn't take over. But
Speaker 3: the CEO returned that night brandishing steel pipes. Ultimately, the
Speaker 3: CEO expelled the hippies, who camped out in the yard
Speaker 3: trying to figure out what to do. And then there
Speaker 3: was this interesting detail where a CEO member was trying
Speaker 3: to break the windows of the warehouse, and since the
Speaker 3: hippie anarchists were ideologically opposed to calling the cops, instead
Speaker 3: of doing so, they sat on him so he couldn't
Speaker 3: get up and keep smashing the windows in.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, that's practice again. We've come back to practice for.
Speaker 3: Hours, like for hours and hours and hours. Finally there's
Speaker 3: a city council member aligned with the CEOs. Could you
Speaker 3: you want to say fucking marxist again?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Sure, yeah, okay, Marxist.
Speaker 4: H yeah.
Speaker 3: So a city council member aligned with the CEO calls
Speaker 3: the cops, and the cops facilitate doing their weird cop
Speaker 3: shit getting people out, and in two or three days time,
Speaker 3: the CEO had taken over the warehouse. Finally, funnily enough,
Speaker 3: the hippie started an alternative distribution warehouse that was much
Speaker 3: more successful and better run. They called it Dance Distributing
Speaker 3: Alliance of North County, et cetera, and use the Emma
Speaker 3: Goldman quote if I can't dance, it's not my revolution
Speaker 3: as a tagline.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah.
Speaker 3: And they also started a legal challenge for the People's Warehouse,
Speaker 3: which they ultimately won.
Speaker 2: Hell yes. And now they have bothhouses.
Speaker 3: It's like this that, you know, the CEO comes in
Speaker 3: with this like excuse that they're poorly run, but then
Speaker 3: the alternative that the hippie start is actually like better run,
Speaker 3: sonny to me. Yeah, And the co op wars have
Speaker 3: also been described as a war of ideas right where
Speaker 3: people would write these position papers. It'd be printed and
Speaker 3: distributed throughout the co ops and others would sit and
Speaker 3: read them. It was definitely a time when people were
Speaker 3: really thinking about politics very deeply and exchanging ideas within
Speaker 3: Minneapolis and also elsewhere.
Speaker 2: And what years are you talking about right now? So
Speaker 2: roughly the mid seventies okay, yeah, I wasn't sure if
Speaker 2: we were into the eighties yet or not.
Speaker 4: Okay, no, not yet.
Speaker 3: And so the CEO after all of this, continues to
Speaker 3: target the hippies. They spread a rumor that one opponent
Speaker 3: was a drug dealer, and they kicked in another one's door,
Speaker 3: so doing like pretty vicious things to try to like
Speaker 3: destroy the hippie anarchist co ops. And there were other
Speaker 3: CEO at I.
Speaker 2: Mean they thought that the ends justified the means.
Speaker 3: They thought that the end justified the means.
Speaker 2: Yeah, shocked.
Speaker 3: And then there were also CEO attempts to take over
Speaker 3: different co ops in that similar style of like barging in,
Speaker 3: and in one case, about fifty COO members tried to
Speaker 3: enter a co op and they were rebuked by anarchists
Speaker 3: throwing sticks of butter at them. Hell yeah, we have
Speaker 3: our food fight, all right. I Also, you know, there's
Speaker 3: always the like media spin of anarchists like throwing poop
Speaker 3: or something, and yeah, but these these anarchists were just
Speaker 3: throwing better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so just overall better overall. Yeah, it's a general rule.
Speaker 2: You're like, what should I throw?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The CEO ultimately turned against mow Burton and the black
Speaker 3: led Bryant Central co op surprise surprise, and their whole
Speaker 3: end justify the means thing, and Bryant Central broke off
Speaker 3: from the CEO because the CEO wanted full control and
Speaker 3: Bryant Central was like really committed to being community run
Speaker 3: and they started buying from the Dance warehouse. So the
Speaker 3: CEO spread rumors that mow Burton was an opportunist, and
Speaker 3: they actually attacked the co op and they blew up
Speaker 3: his truck jesus, I know, escalated, YEP, and members of
Speaker 3: the Bryant Central community, including Gary Cunningham had to defend
Speaker 3: the co op from the CEO, so in the end
Speaker 3: the CEO dispersed, a lot of them went to Chicago.
Speaker 3: But the co op wars had a big ideological impact,
Speaker 3: not just in Minneapolis but across the US co op movement.
Speaker 4: These debates really came to the four Yeah.
Speaker 2: But who secretly won was a third secret party capitalism?
Speaker 3: I know, capitalism wins surprise, and that.
Speaker 2: Would have been a good ad transition, I.
Speaker 3: Know, speaking of capitalism at the same time. Right at
Speaker 3: the same time that all this is happening in Minneapolis,
Speaker 3: co ops in the US and general are struggling financially,
Speaker 3: and another split starts to emerge. On one side, where
Speaker 3: these pragmatists who wanted to keep the stores open even
Speaker 3: if it meant compromising on ideals and who felt that
Speaker 3: moves needed to be made to draw in mainstream shoppers.
Speaker 3: On the other hand, were the purists, who were committed
Speaker 3: to loose collective process and carrying all natural foods. In Austin,
Speaker 3: which is one of the places that Jonathan Kaufman writes
Speaker 3: quite a bit about in his book, the pragmatists called
Speaker 3: themselves the Wheelies, a shortening of wheeler dealers, and the
Speaker 3: purists called themselves the Feelies, and.
Speaker 2: They called them or were these what they got accused
Speaker 2: by the others.
Speaker 3: No, they seriously called themselves the Wheelies and the Feelies
Speaker 3: M yeah, all right, yeah, And the Wheelies opened to
Speaker 3: food co op Wheatsville, which became the last food co
Speaker 3: op at the Hippie Air in Austin. It's still open,
Speaker 3: and in nineteen seventy nine they replaced their consensus based,
Speaker 3: non hierarchical decision making structure with a manager. And to
Speaker 3: quote Jonathan Kaffman who's writing about Wheatsville, this shift towards
Speaker 3: hierarchy and professionalization meant that Wheatsville was owned by its members,
Speaker 3: but it was no longer run by them. And you
Speaker 3: see this happening at co ops all across the country.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And there's also in addition to this, like financial struggle
Speaker 3: that people running co ops were trying to figure out,
Speaker 3: there's also this larger cultural and political shift happening that
Speaker 3: made co op members more comfortable with these changes. Right,
Speaker 3: So we have the collapse of the Nixon administration and
Speaker 3: the end of the Vietnam War, and we see many
Speaker 3: of the white and upwardly mobile young people who made
Speaker 3: up a significant contingent of a food couant movement start
Speaker 3: to feel less alienated from formal political institutions, right, They
Speaker 3: start to get more drawn into.
Speaker 4: Electoral politics, right.
Speaker 3: And you also see them getting older and drifting towards
Speaker 3: the mainstream, which is totally a stereotype but also sometimes happens.
Speaker 2: Well, it was, Yeah, it was more true for that
Speaker 2: generation than it has been safe for our generation, right,
Speaker 2: just literally, because the economy is getting worse instead of
Speaker 2: better right now, you know. Yeah, so like it's hard
Speaker 2: to sell out when no one's buying or whatever. Yes, okay,
Speaker 2: but to think about the wheelies and the feelies really quick, okay,
Speaker 2: like one of the reasons it annoys me. But before
Speaker 2: I actually before I started podcasting full time, my last
Speaker 2: employment was in workers' cooperatives. I worked for a place
Speaker 2: called seed Commons that finances worker cooperatives and is a
Speaker 2: really beautiful and interesting structure all on its own. And
Speaker 2: these are worker cooperatives, not consumer cooperatives. But it's a
Speaker 2: lot of like restaurants, it's a lot of I mostly
Speaker 2: a lot about the restaurants, but a lot of different
Speaker 2: places that are forming these worker cooperatis. Baltimore is a
Speaker 2: really good example of a city that is becoming kind
Speaker 2: of a cooperative city because of the work that is
Speaker 2: being put in by these like really actually still radical cooperatives.
Speaker 2: And what's interesting to me, So in my mind, I'm
Speaker 2: like making this dichotomy between like wheelies and feelies, like
Speaker 2: this is like part of the problem, right, because then
Speaker 2: you're like, oh, well, pragmatism. I guess we should be pragmatists.
Speaker 2: It's like, one of the things that happened in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty is that none of the cooperatives we financed through
Speaker 2: seat comments had to permanently shut their doors. And these
Speaker 2: are restaurants during fucking twenty twenty because actually, workplace democracy,
Speaker 2: the idea of not having bosses is a more economically
Speaker 2: like a resilient model for crisis than a top down structure.
Speaker 2: And so we have all of these, like a lot
Speaker 2: of our cooperatives are traditional businesses that are bought by
Speaker 2: the workers when the owner retires, because the owner of
Speaker 2: the workers are like, we know how to run this
Speaker 2: better than anyone, you know, And so this idea, I
Speaker 2: don't know, it's just so interesting me. I want to
Speaker 2: go back and shake them and be like you're both wrong. Yeah, totally,
Speaker 2: and like because like, yeah, you do need to be
Speaker 2: able to keep your doors open, and that makes sense, right,
Speaker 2: but also like, I don't know, I think you can
Speaker 2: do that and be economic whatever. It is easy for
Speaker 2: me to say my job is totally.
Speaker 3: And one thing that I've seen in some of this
Speaker 3: research is people talking about how they think that the
Speaker 3: co op movement, the countercultural co op movement, would have
Speaker 3: succeeded better if people had read more deeply and understood
Speaker 3: more deeply the history of co ops and that often
Speaker 3: people thought that they were inventing this thing, or they
Speaker 3: knew they weren't. They knew that there were precedents, but
Speaker 3: they didn't actually look at and study those precedents and
Speaker 3: what had gone yeah them, And I think that's a
Speaker 3: great lesson for today too, write where like studying what's
Speaker 3: happened in the past that's similar and what went right
Speaker 3: or wrong like really help do something in the here
Speaker 3: and now.
Speaker 2: So totally there is a point to having this show,
Speaker 2: yeah say yeah, totally, yeah, okay, but continue so they're yeah,
Speaker 2: so you.
Speaker 3: Start to see this process of what I might call
Speaker 3: like the I don't know middle classification happening in newsletters
Speaker 3: from two Son's Food conspiracy co Op in the eighties.
Speaker 3: So you do still see articles that are important calls
Speaker 3: to action for things like the anti nuclear movement, Central
Speaker 3: American solidarity movements, energy extraction struggles, and to Day and
Speaker 3: Hope Land take Back the Night Marches, but these pieces
Speaker 3: increasingly share space with articles like before You Buy That
Speaker 3: Dream Home and a whole recipe feature that uncritically celebrated Thanksgiving,
Speaker 3: which goes like way against earlier articles I found that
Speaker 3: were like super like you know, deep solidarity with aim
Speaker 3: and like critical about some of these things. And at
Speaker 3: least one issue of the newsletter from the nineteen eighties
Speaker 3: drifted even further right, running a racist and anti indigenous
Speaker 3: screen on overpopulation by not Friend of the Pod Edward Abbey.
Speaker 2: Oh god, uh huh Sorry, I.
Speaker 3: Just decided that Edward Abbey was not a friend of
Speaker 3: the Pod.
Speaker 4: But yeah, that's you would agree.
Speaker 2: A fair assessment. Edward Abbey is an important environmental writer
Speaker 2: who you can actually find a lot of his books
Speaker 2: in national parks in the Southwest because he wrote a
Speaker 2: lot about deserts and things. He was also very influential
Speaker 2: in creating the Earth First movement through his fiction. He
Speaker 2: was also in his younger life he was more of
Speaker 2: an anarchist. He was also, at least by the end
Speaker 2: of his life, deeply misogynist and racist, and specifically like
Speaker 2: didn't do a good job about what he thought about
Speaker 2: borders and overpopulation. I mean, that's the nicest way I
Speaker 2: could possibly say any of this. And so he's very
Speaker 2: influential on some people who actually have some good ideas.
Speaker 2: He's also very influential and some people have some very
Speaker 2: bad ideas. And he himself was a piece of shit.
Speaker 2: Yes's gonna worry on that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not a fan of Abbey at all. And so
Speaker 3: he publishes this article and their reader actually wrote in
Speaker 3: Maria Abden, and she refuted his points and reminded Abby
Speaker 3: that when the European colonists came here, they wiped out
Speaker 3: most of us and drove the rest of us onto
Speaker 3: fertile unfertile for the most part land. And this letter
Speaker 3: was printed in the next issue, but it didn't receive
Speaker 3: a reply from either Abbey or the editors. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: you also see this other thing happening, which is by
Speaker 3: the early eighties you start to see regular supermarkets stocking
Speaker 3: natural foods like tofu, granola and yogurt, and you see
Speaker 3: big business co opting the language of the natural foods movement.
Speaker 3: So Whole Foods actually comes out of the natural food
Speaker 3: stores in Austin, and some of its first employees had
Speaker 3: previously worked at the Wheatsville co op that I mentioned before.
Speaker 3: And this kind of competition meant that the co ops
Speaker 3: that survived had to do so basically by catering primarily
Speaker 3: to affluent patrons. So today, yeah, yeah, so now all
Speaker 3: of a sudden, like they're competing with regularly. They're not
Speaker 3: just competing with these like niche health food stores, but
Speaker 3: they're competing with regular grocery stores and also these like
Speaker 3: big business health food stores.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it seems like it'll be so easy to
Speaker 2: compete by just having the good food for less money
Speaker 2: than whole foods. It just seems like that's just like
Speaker 2: the way. I don't know, again, I don't run a
Speaker 2: health food store. I'm sure it's complicated, but it just
Speaker 2: seems to me just be cheaper than whole foods. How
Speaker 2: hard could that be?
Speaker 4: Totally?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And sometimes I think like Whole Food's actually cheaper
Speaker 3: than a lot.
Speaker 2: Of I know. And now that I say that, I'm like,
Speaker 2: when you're owned by fucking Jeff Bezos, you can make
Speaker 2: things cheap, you can. I mean that is the way capitalism. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I guess I'm like thinking of like hopefully used to
Speaker 2: be like very expensive. I don't know, but so are
Speaker 2: natural food stores. Okay, I don't actually have any answers. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't have easy answers. I shouldn't come in. You're
Speaker 2: trying to tell co ops how to run them. Besides
Speaker 2: that they should not run racist articles. I feel pretty
Speaker 2: confident about that one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or like not like criminalized fagrancy or criminalized friendlessness.
Speaker 4: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I you know, I, after I had looked at
Speaker 3: all these newsletters from Tucson, I looked into the food
Speaker 3: conspiracy co Op today, and it's too expensive for most
Speaker 3: twoson ins to shop at. You pay one hundred and
Speaker 3: eighty annually to be an owner. There's no option to
Speaker 3: become a member by volunteering, and the payment gets you
Speaker 3: discounts rebates. You can attend board meetings to voice your opinion,
Speaker 3: to vote for and vote for board members. You can
Speaker 3: run for the board, blah blah blah blah blah, the board,
Speaker 3: the board, the board. This is really different from how
Speaker 3: the co ops started as a non hierarchical, volunteer run organization,
Speaker 3: and this is true of co ops across the country.
Speaker 3: And what really really made me sad is how this
Speaker 3: radical history has been hidden. So if you go on
Speaker 3: to the website for the Tucson co Op, it says
Speaker 3: that the co op was born in nineteen seventy one
Speaker 3: when a group of Tucson residents formed a buying club.
Speaker 3: These original members used their collective purchasing power to get
Speaker 3: natural food products, which were largely unavailable in stores at
Speaker 3: the time, and without mentioning it all, the explicitly anti
Speaker 3: capitalist context of the co ops found Yeah, which is
Speaker 3: also just to say that I don't like I feel
Speaker 3: like the first half ended with me being like the
Speaker 3: diggers influenced all these cool things, And by contrast, I
Speaker 3: don't actually have something like super neat and tidy to
Speaker 3: say about the food co ops of the seventies, Like
Speaker 3: I think the people who founded them were trying to
Speaker 3: do a really cool thing, and like so many other
Speaker 3: really cool things, it got co opted and watered down. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but I think it's important to know this history. I
Speaker 3: don't know. I know you shared thoughts earlier, but you
Speaker 3: have any other thoughts about that?
Speaker 2: I mean, I would go back a little bit to
Speaker 2: the sponsor of this pod, real co ops, you know,
Speaker 2: I think about there are places that are still I mean,
Speaker 2: and some other food's expensive because it's expensive for them
Speaker 2: to get it right and they want to pay living
Speaker 2: wages to their employees and things like that. But if
Speaker 2: you can find cooperatives that actually do things well. I
Speaker 2: haven't been in any of the cities where I would
Speaker 2: otherwise name in a while, so I don't I don't
Speaker 2: feel one hundred percent confident about naming them. But if
Speaker 2: you have a cooperative in your city, it's like worth
Speaker 2: checking out. It is worth figuring out how how values
Speaker 2: aligned you are with it and then supporting it when
Speaker 2: you can. And I think like one of the ways
Speaker 2: to find out is that if it's like, well, if
Speaker 2: the bougie food is expensive, but then they also have
Speaker 2: the food that isn't expensive, and you're like okay, you know,
Speaker 2: and how their food prices compared to other places, and
Speaker 2: then the other thing would be like you can start
Speaker 2: buying club buying your sclubs with your friends, you know, totally,
Speaker 2: And there's ways to get things in bulk for cheaper
Speaker 2: and distribute them and evade a lot of the large,
Speaker 2: crappy systems that people have. And so I don't know,
Speaker 2: I think that I find cooperatives. I find food co
Speaker 2: ops like actually really interesting to me because the different
Speaker 2: gut feeling I have walking into one versus another is
Speaker 2: so different, you know, and it's not even necessarily their
Speaker 2: physical size. I've been in some pretty large co ops
Speaker 2: that are like chill, yeah, you know, and I've been
Speaker 2: in some tiny ones that are like not chill. It
Speaker 2: was actually always really easy for me because I was
Speaker 2: like a dirty, filthy crosspunk and so like if I
Speaker 2: walk into a place and they're just like following me
Speaker 2: around to make sure I'm not shoplifting, I'm like, oh,
Speaker 2: you actually suck. Whereas when I would walk into a
Speaker 2: place where people would kind of like recognize that I
Speaker 2: was sort of a caricature of a certain style of
Speaker 2: anti capitalist organizer, it would be like, hey, what's going on,
Speaker 2: and they would like want to know my name and
Speaker 2: be nice to me. I'm like, okay, Like you're great
Speaker 2: you're fine. I understand that sometimes not all food is
Speaker 2: going to be affordable to all people, which is a
Speaker 2: problem and we should deal with it. But one of
Speaker 2: the ways to do that is to get together and
Speaker 2: buy things in bulk. I don't know, I'm really I'm
Speaker 2: really excited for you share this history moved me though,
Speaker 2: because I didn't know about pretty much any of this.
Speaker 2: I knew about like cooperative starting in one hundred years ago,
Speaker 2: and I was like, and then it was like question Mark,
Speaker 2: question Mark bougie food in the following town, you know, Yeah.
Speaker 1: They usually have like the good snacks though for people
Speaker 1: with like dietary fictions or lifestyle food choices and stuff
Speaker 1: like that, which is really kind of great. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Actually, I would say that Portland is a place that
Speaker 2: both of the food co ops I know account is
Speaker 2: real co ops. Yeah, just to go on a limb
Speaker 2: and hope that they haven't changed in the past, like
Speaker 2: maybe ten years since I went to either. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I should also say, like, I feel like we
Speaker 3: see this specifically in the sort of wake of the
Speaker 3: COVID nineteen pandemic, but there are like in Tucson, there's
Speaker 3: a food chair and the food chare pools resources, but
Speaker 3: both people who can afford to pay, as well as
Speaker 3: like donations to be able to distribute groceries. And it
Speaker 3: started during the demic, right driving gershoes to people's houses,
Speaker 3: but it's still going strong. And so there are these
Speaker 3: other models that also exist and that seem to be
Speaker 3: re emerging that are really exciting and like maybe more
Speaker 3: rooted in like in some ways are buying clubs and
Speaker 3: then in other ways somewhere rooted right in this like
Speaker 3: kind of like digger inspired mutual aid.
Speaker 2: That's cool. Yeah, well, thanks so much for coming on
Speaker 2: and teaching us all this stuff. Okay, well, uh, how
Speaker 2: can people find you or read that book that you
Speaker 2: wrote all by yourself? This is me trying to make
Speaker 2: it because I called you the writer of but you're
Speaker 2: totally yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm on Instagram at rent Away. I am the editor
Speaker 3: of Nourishing Resistance. I also wanted to make a plug
Speaker 3: that I wrote an article specifically about those TuS food
Speaker 3: coop newsletters and it's coming out in the first print
Speaker 3: issue of Living and Fighting, which is a journal, radical
Speaker 3: journal based here in the Southwest. And by the time
Speaker 3: this episode airs, you should be able to purchase a
Speaker 3: copy and you can go to Living and Fighting dot
Speaker 3: net to find out more about that. And I also
Speaker 3: have a little a few references as well as things
Speaker 3: that inspired me that will appear in the show notes
Speaker 3: of this episode.
Speaker 4: So hell yeah, Sophie, you guy.
Speaker 2: Anything to plug.
Speaker 1: Listen to it could happen here now more than ever.
Speaker 4: That's true.
Speaker 2: I want to plug. I don't really want to plug
Speaker 2: them on social media, but I am on social media
Speaker 2: mostly Instagram these days, and I have a substack Marder
Speaker 2: Kiljoy dot substack dot probably Calm, I don't know. I
Speaker 2: never type in URLs. I just google things me too,
Speaker 2: and that's a good way to find out what I
Speaker 2: think about things, besides listening to this or hear me
Speaker 2: every Sunday now on this feed and it could happen
Speaker 2: here feed reading you stories the cool Zone Media see
Speaker 2: you next week.
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