And Even More Cheese

December 31, 2012
By Mickey Friedman

We’re supposed to celebrate another great moment in the life and times of The Best Small Town in America. So many good things: The clean-up of the toxic New England Log Homes site; another Housatonic River Park; a new town piazza; and a state-of-the-art green food market with more parking and even more cheese.

But I can’t help wondering: If the Berkshire Co-op Market increases its size by 100%, and increases its business by 50%, what will this mean for Gorham and Norton? For Guido’s? For Rubiner’s? Locally owned businesses that employ good people and serve the community.

Some will say tough patootie! Business is business is business.

But the Berkshire Co-op Market is not your run of the mill, profit-making, business-is-business corporation. The Berkshire Co-op Market is supposed to care, I mean really care, about the community.

I was one of those who created the co-op in the first place. So I’m a bit of a sap about it, and I’ll admit it’s often difficult for me to accept how it has changed over the years.

Many people were having a hard time paying for food. And working for South Berkshire Community Action, we created co-ops out of a concern for and commitment to do something about the poor in our midst. Our members ranged from young families to seniors with limited incomes. And “the poor” were hard-working, very proud people who’d never call themselves poor.

Before GB was The Best Small Town in America, the First Congregational Church kindly provided space in the basement to distribute food. The Monterey Church did the same.

We offered 20 to 30 basic items like cheese and butter and flour and nuts. Two or three cheeses, not 35, because we had no storage space and limited human resources. And we tried to find the best bargains. We ordered in bulk. And drove at dawn to the Springfield produce market to buy fruits and vegetables. At the church, members divided larger items into the smaller quantities our members wanted. Everybody had a job to do and on average our members paid about 5% above wholesale. A working participatory democracy, it was, we believed, born of a clear need and a solution to the problem of expensive food.

And we hoped to create an alternative to the bigger-equals-better, the more, more, more ethos that was engulfing America.

Today, people work longer hours and, thanks to highly adept advertising, seem to want more versions of pretty much the same thing. And people have less time and patience to put up with well-meaning but often chaotic utopian ventures.

The Great Barrington Co-op Market hardly resembles the pre-order co-op we started, or the intimate working-member storefront on Rosseter Street we evolved into. The much larger food store on Bridge Street has changed its mandate from making healthy food affordable to the working poor to providing locally grown, organic food to those with sufficient discretionary income to pay a lot more for better food. And so today many of us just can’t afford the $150 Co-op membership or the premium prices for a free-range, antibiotic-free, Harvard-educated chicken.

I joke, but it’s a shame because we all deserve to eat college-educated birds.

Yes, there’s a small group of discounted basic foodstuffs, and a bulk buying club that offers discounts, but these are secondary to its self-expressed drive to be bigger, have more parking spaces and offer more products. But if you’re worried about money, God forbid you add a couple of heavy garbanzo beans, an artichoke heart, or an overweight cherry tomato to your salad-bar salad (at $7.99/pound).

In the small is beautiful days, we sensed there was something constitutionally amiss with capitalism’s relentless drive for more. Bigger corporations, more profits usually meant lower wages, fewer benefits, and jobs shipped overseas. More greed meant thalidomide, the Ford Pinto, $400 Pentagon toilet seats, endless war, and the Exxon Valdez.

Food co-ops were only one of the ways we tried to reincorporate compassion and a sense of fairness into our economic and social lives.

I left the Berkshire Co-op Market because it no longer was the kind of co-op I wanted it to be.

For those of you who are members today, I wish you’d think about other ways to spend your money. Do you really need a bigger co-op? More parking? More cheese? Thirty kinds of granola? When is enough enough? What about other ways to use the member-loans that will help fund a twice-as-large store? What does our community really need? What problem needs a solution? How about a co-op community transportation system: Shared bikes, small electric vans? Affordable food for the working poor? Affordable co-op housing?

By the way, I’m all for cleaning the Log Home site with new bioremediation techniques. But Tim Geller of the CDC calls this proposed development the “living, vibrant heart and hub of the community … the piazza [public square] of Great Barrington …”

I’m asking: Whose heart are we talking about?