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