It’s very strange to think of food
co-ops as part of the good old days. To me, the good old days
happened back in my mother’s youth – and she was born over 100
years ago.
When I came of age in the 1960s, the
world was being reinvented by kids like me. At least we thought we
were more clever than anyone had ever been before. We thought our
ideas were new. We thought we could bring about world peace, end
poverty, eradicate injustice, feed the hungry and take back the means
of production from the corporate blue meanies.
In New Haven, as in most places, the
food co-op started small. The lesbian-and-straight-feminist
collective where I lived joined forces with the
mixed-female-and-male-straight commune around the corner plus some
alternative culture strays, and turned the basement of the Unitarian
Church into a food store on Saturday mornings.
A few members – that would not
include me – hit the produce wholesalers at the crack of dawn and
loaded whatever was available into VW vans and Datsun pickups. They
trucked it back to the church, probably playing “Keep On Truckin’"
on their eight-tracks, and the rest of us would pile into our VWs and
old beaters to pick up the cheap eats.
Huge sacks of brown rice, shiny purple
eggplants, bushel baskets of small, sour apples, tubs of tofu, the
co-op offered up a cornucopia of fresh off the farm vittles. Back at
the collective, we had all the right cookbooks: Diet For a Small
Planet, the Whole Earth Cook Book, Adele Davis’ Let's Cook It
Right. Soaking beans adorned our counters, the house was fragrant
with garlic and onion, cooks experimented with saffron and fennel.
This was all new to me. I was nine or
ten years old before my brother married a woman who introduced our
family to oregano. My mother fed us like the Irishwoman she was:
boiled potatoes and green vegetables with the life cooked out of
them. In the collective, broccoli was served almost raw – or
completely raw in salads. Potatoes lost out to rice. Pasta, not
canned Franco American, was actually tossed at the ceiling to test
its readiness for homemade spaghetti sauce. I was big on dishwashing,
a huge task, but easier for me than attempts to be creative at the
stove.
While we made messes of our kitchen,
the straights were doing the same a block away. The men were learning
to cook. They were the beginning of the gentle male phenomenon and
made a point of recognizing their feminine sides. Now and then a
woman left the straight commune to join the dykes. Eventually, the
guys took over the co-op and somehow obtained a store front,
eventually moving into a big old grocery store where, after a few
years of unsuccessful competition with for-profit grocers, and
probably burnt out from lefty political struggles filled with guilt
and angst, they shut down, just as our collectives did.
I’d been so busy being radical in
this new world that was so different from the gay bars that I never
noticed we weren’t reinventing any wheels at all. Co-ops have been
around a very long time, at least since the 19th century. There was
an inherent flaw in the counter culture co-ops of the 1970s: we
wanted to make good food available to all, but for the most part,
only we disaffected middle class college grads actually belonged to
co-ops.
Eventually, I got a job in retail food,
managing small stores for a middling large company, and learned what
it took to make money selling groceries. No one was idealistic there,
even those of us who once had ideals about taking the profit out
feeding the world; we worked to get paid and took our pay to the
bars. We hired our gay friends and helped one another out at work. We
partied together and sometimes stole one another’s lovers. We
worked our asses off for the man selling highly processed foods while
we abandoned the co-ops, run by a different breed of men.
Today, the food counter culture takes
the form of foodies, gay and straight, who make a hobby of their love
of food and food preparation, and locavores, people who are committed
to eating locally grown foods. The first place I ever took my
sweetheart (an unintentional introduction to Lee) was Sevananda, a
co-op in Atlanta, Georgia. The small co-ops in Ashland, Oregon,
Bloomington, Indiana, and all over the country, survive today by
carrying pricey gourmet cheeses, offbeat wines and heritage tomatoes.
Whole Foods may have co-opted the co-ops, but now farmers markets are
great for meeting dykes while buying from the long hairs who are
still growing and selling food.
[Editor's Note: Lee Lynch is the author
of over 12 books. Her latest, Beggar
of Love, was called “Lee
Lynch's richest and most candid portrayals of lesbian life” by
Katherine V. Forrest. You can reach Lynch at
LeeLynch@ontopmag.com]
Copyright 2010 Lee Lynch