Other Avenues Are Possible by Shanta Nimbark Sacharoff

Published 24 March, 2022 in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times as part of "Bay Area Blues, Greys and Golds." © Wyndy J. Knox Carr  

Other Avenues Are Possible: Legacy of the People’s Food System of the San Francisco Bay Area, by Shanta Nimbark Sacharoff is a short but carefully nuanced history of food cooperative stores and systems, including the Consumer Cooperative of Berkeley (CCB) that began when Finnish Berkeley Cooperative Union groups joined with food-buying clubs in the 1930s “to supply quality food at affordable prices.”[i] 

Sacharoff covers CCB and the birth of the Bay Area Food Conspiracy briefly, which shared much in common with other food cooperatives and services in the Bay Area, in Minnesota, (where I was involved with the North Country Coops in the 1970s,) and pockets like Massachusetts, Madison, Wisconsin and Santa Fe, NM. (photo -- Berkeley Historical Society Exhibit)

At Berkeley’s height of need during the 1930s, the Scandinavian carpenter-settlers seeded owner-worker principles of the 1844 Lancaster, England's Rochdale consumer cooperative model (photo, left) to buying clubs and food pantries that expanded to storefronts, a gas station and repair, an original coop credit union and the “Twin Pine Savings and Loan” over the years.

The 1966 International Co-operative Alliance Principles (revised from 1937 version) specified:

1.      Open, voluntary membership.

2.      Democratic governance.

3.      Limited return on equity.

4.      Surplus belongs to members.

5.      Education of members and public in cooperative principles.

6.      Cooperation between cooperatives.

(from Wikipedia 18 May, 2022 retrieved 10 August, 2022)

 

Sacharoff briefs us on history first; Bay Area, “old-wave” food cooperatives in the United States; then fleshes out the main groups and forces moving behind the People’s Food System of the San Francisco 1960s and 70s in its many expressions, how it blossomed, wobbled and then thinned down to a few “new-wave” survivors in the 1980s. * (see photo NOTE below) 

 The three she focuses on are Veritable Vegetable, Rainbow Grocery Cooperative and Other Avenues Food Cooperative (OA), all based in San Francisco.

These have had “socioeconomic challenges faced by urban populations” like “rising cost of housing driving away workers” and “competition of the retail health food market.” However; she, I and a few longtime Berkeley sources agree that  

the ones who made it through the fast rise and exhilaration of the early years, tumultuous volunteer/ commercial/ political shifts and splits of the unity/ storefront/ business/ solidarity models, shared:

“1) strong connections with both their immediate neighborhoods and the food and justice community at large,

2) constant attention to pragmatic business practices,

3) a clear mission to bring healthy food to the people, and

4) a strong commitment to workplace democracy.”[ii]

The whole “Food for People, Not for Profit” ideal sounds naïve in the 2000s, but it not only made perfect sense in the 60s to the hippies, but to the Black Panthers’ Breakfast Programs as well as Frances Moore Lappé’s[iii] Diet for a Small Planet “health food nuts” and anybody wanting to eat well on a pinched penny. 

Part of Lappé’s philosophy is particularly relevant right now (Mid-July, 2022) due to the global grain shortages caused by the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, terrible industry-assisted price inflation, “shrinkflation” and supply-chain consumer harassment (July-August 2022) ; and the threats to democracy here in the United States and parasitic bloom of autocracies elsewhere:

“Lappé makes the argument that what she calls "living democracy," i.e., democracy understood as a way of life, is not merely a structure of government. The three conditions essential for democracy, she writes in Daring Democracy and elsewhere, are

1)      the wide dispersion of power,

2)      transparency, and

3)      a culture of mutual accountability, not blaming.

These three conditions enable humans to experience a sense of agency, meaning, and connection, which she describes as the essence of human dignity. Democracy is not only what we do in the voting booth but involves our daily choices of what we buy and how we live. She believes that only by "living democracy" can we effectively solve today's social and environmental crises.” (ibid. Wikipedia “Frances Moore Lappé”)

Up until Ronald Reagan and the “trickle down economy” of the 1980s, Sacharoff notes that we were all for “politically and economically food-related communities… (who defied) the escalating international food conglomerates and …(defended) the rights of food workers, consumers, farmworkers, and small farmers.”[iv]

Not very popular in agribusiness-monoculture-based present-day California! But hey, small is beautiful, and “whatever works” in the ever-changing biosphere of which we are a part. 

Pinching pennies, shared child-care and communes may look pretty good when the tech/housing and other Bay Area bubbles burst again, and/or agricultural, sales and distribution monopolies continue pressure on workers, farmers and consumers alike. Inflation, "shrinkflation," excessive plastic packaging, health concerns and supply-chain slowdowns are certainly encouraging ME to "shop around" and buy as locally and organically as possible!

Part III of Other Avenues reflects on how “Food Sharing Builds Community” and part IV broadens to a horizon of  

“The Future is Now;” 

sustainability, possibility, vision, challenges, political climates and resources for the journey ahead.

She shares many asides to worker-owned coops and collective businesses along the way, with shout-outs to ACCI Gallery, Berkeley Free Clinic, Alchemy Collective Café, BioFuel Oasis, 

Cheese Board/ Arizmendi Bakeries, Food Not Bombs, Heartwood Cooperative Woodshop, Juice Bar Collective, Missing Link Bicycle Cooperative, 924 Gilman Street “Music and Art Community Coop,” 

Pedal Express courier/delivery and Three Stone Hearth Cooperative in her Appendix; but

doesn’t say much about presses, bookstores, distributors, cooperative housing (Rochdale student?) or even the food shelves and farmer’s markets that evolved through and survived the peoples’ food system days. A good starter volume for the Bay Area, anyway.

Governments, networks, coops, farmers and consumers can all learn from Other Avenues not only how to connect with and sustain existing food movement work in Berkeley, the Bay Area and beyond; but how Bay Area “successes” can be implemented further and how our identified organizational and political drawbacks can be avoided. Perhaps how to construct and cooperate on setting up entirely new systems of nourishment, reciprocity and equity that will work even better.

From Veritable Vegetable's website, some awesome advice from the past to take us into the future:

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

–Buckminster Fuller 

Right on, Sisters and Brothers, Right on!

 

*NOTE: Several of these Chris Carlsson and other photos were copied from Drew, Jesse, (1998?) “People's Food System: Historical Essay” https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=People%27s_Food_System (10 August 2022) @Found, Shaping San Francisco’s Digital History. “excerpted from "Call Any Vegetable: The Politics of Food in the San Francisco Bay Area" in Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics and Culture (San Francisco: City Lights Books 1998) Thank you for posting them @foundsf.org !

Also interesting info at Community-wealth.org (2021) “Overview, Cooperatives,” https://community-wealth.org/strategies/panel/coops/index.html

(10 August 2022) Democracy Collaborative, UK?

---

[i]  Sacharoff, Shanta Nimbark, Other Avenues Are Possible: Legacy of the People’s Food System of the San Francisco Bay Area, PM Press, Oakland, CA, USA, p. 13.

[ii]  ----  p. 60.

[iii] Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, (16 January 2022) “Frances Moore Lappé,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Moore_Lapp%C3%A9    (4 March 2022)   “Throughout her works Lappé has argued that world hunger is caused not by the lack of food but rather by the inability of hungry people to gain access to the abundance of food that exists in the world and/or food-producing resources because they are simply too poor. She has posited that our current "thin democracy" creates a mal-distribution of power and resources that inevitably creates waste and an artificial scarcity of the essentials for sustainable living.

Lappé makes the argument that what she calls "living democracy," i.e., democracy understood as a way of life, is not merely a structure of government. The three conditions essential for democracy, she writes in Daring Democracy and elsewhere, are the wide dispersion of power, transparency, and a culture of mutual accountability, not blaming. These three conditions enable humans to experience a sense of agency, meaning, and connection, which she describes as the essence of human dignity. Democracy is not only what we do in the voting booth but involves our daily choices of what we buy and how we live. She believes that only by "living democracy" can we effectively solve today's social and environmental crises.

Lappé began her writing career early in life. She first gained prominence in the early 1970s with the publication of her book Diet for a Small Planet, which has sold several million copies.

In 1975, with Joseph Collins, she launched the California-based Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First) to educate Americans about the causes of world hunger.” (Daughter Anna lives in Berkeley)

[iv] Sacharoff, op. cit. p.53.

 

Poetry & Science, Watershed 2022

(14 April, 2022, Knox Book Beat in The Berkeley Times) The five poet-scientists of Poetry & Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery; the poets and performers in Watershed: Writers, Nature and Community 2022; and Deborah Bachels Schmidt, author of Stumbling Into Grace; all share the world of animated nature. A holistic, vigorous, inspirational connection.

As Alison Hawthorne Deming says, “the denigration, suppression, and denial of science have rabidly spread in the last several decades,” even though “We are the asteroid” threatening Life On Earth, as Deming quotes C. D. Wright. Deming sensed “what poetry was for” as questions; “How do we know what we know? What are the forms of knowledge that I yearn for? That I trust?”

“Nothing was more interesting to me than the Big Story of Life on Earth,” and there was “Nothing more soul crushing than the diminishment of life on Earth at the hands of human cruelty and greed.”  

One of the “challenges” the “poet faces” is “getting beyond the outrage and elegy that are the dominant emotional hue of our discontent.”

Ann Fisher-Wirth, author of The Bones of Winter Birds, agreed with poet-physician William Carlos Williams that “the imagination”…(is) “the single force” able “to refine, clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live..” Poetry charged with scientific precision. Setting humans squarely in perspective, she begins the poem “Catalpa,” “This tree is older than Columbus.”

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke says, “Poets and scientists share a main line – curiosity. It inspires and activates us wholly.” Her “mixed” family “interwove a traditional sense of science and modern science… astronomy, medical terminology, physiology, chemistry were as typical a conversation as original stories or songs… an element of inclusion in all of this…when leaves fell, they were filled with anthocyanin. We also knew the traditional stories of the same trees… Just as poetry is life, science is.”

Elizabeth Bradfield was unable to participate in the Watershed reading, although her essay in Poetry and Science, “Grappling with the Ineffable: Sciencing the Science; Blurring Lines” makes me wish she had. Her own wonderful poems, welcoming in of other writers and the way “elder Willie Marks told the Tlingit killer whale origin story in the anthology Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors” knits together science, art, nature and culture. Under the umbrella of writings that “hold up the importance of (both) story and data, clear thinking and emotional resonance” “to blend experience, knowledge and story,” she opts for “not just storytelling but the telling of land, sea, and peoples (human and nonhuman) who live wholly in a place…” 

Lucille Lang Day, editor of P & S, read at Watershed. She puts it succinctly when she says, “Science looks askance at emotional reactions… whereas poetry embraces them, and by doing so, poetry allows a more complete expression of human experience.” In her poem “Lost Languages,” she bridges the rational/ personal gap with two lines:  

“Who knows what Cro-Magnons said 

to one another in sickness, love or fear?”

Clear images and stories expressed simply in excellent poetry both focused and moving. She sums up her essay with a connection to Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass author, who says of purely scientific language, “beneath the richness of its vocabulary and its descriptive power, something is missing, the same something that swells around you and in you when you listen to the world.”

The really wonderful small volume of poetry by Poetry Flash reader Deborah Bachels Schmidt, Stumbling Into Grace, fits well with P & S because of her straightforward, clear style, mostly couched in images of kind care for others, keen observation of the natural world and delight in harmony, language and music. All nearly perfectly crafted, balanced and sonorous.

Schmidt shares in “As If for the First Time” “Wondering at the creatures of earth, sea and sky,/ we take our place among them with new tenderness./ May it be so.”  

And from “Wild Goose:” 

“Flying in the wake, behind

and just above the last,

she will rest, uplifted,

in the vortex of their wings.

Together they will bring this flock

home.”

May we trust that we have this kind of homing instinct as well. 

----Poetry Flash Videos, including last year’s and this year’s Watershed and many other outstanding readings, including Barbara Jane Reyes, author of the poetry collections Letters to a Young Brown Girl (2020), Invocation to Daughters (2017), Diwata (2010), Poeta en San Francisco (2005) and Gravities of Center (2003) (photo left) can be found at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA/videos   !

 

Wikipedia defines Deep ecology as a recognition that “non-vital human interference with or destruction of the natural world poses a threat therefore not only to humans but to all organisms constituting the natural order.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, (7 April 2022) “Deep ecology,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology    (8 April 2022)

 

 

Pictures of a Gone City... Bay Area, by Richard A. Walker

 

Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area by Richard A. Walker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is a brilliantly researched and highly accessible presentation of the Boom Town to Metro Monster of "Size, Sprawl, and Segregation," (p. 236) and "technotopian escapism," the Bay Area "megaregion" (xiii) has become in which "Both Right and Left versions of this dystopia are wrong" (346-7). Walker presents a clear-eyed, data-driven (in a GOOD way) and frankly awe-inspiring history and explication of the crazy mess of land, humans, water, air, highways, businesses and neighborhoods the San Francisco Bay Area; as only a long-time resident and broadly experienced professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley could.

     Spectre Books from Oakland's PM Press is purportedly "works of, and about, radical political economy;" but after living here nearly a decade and observing the havoc of speed and greed around us, I don't find Pictures of a Gone City "radical" at all. He's just telling the truth he's garnered from vast scholarship, in pursuit of some answers and solutions that would make life easier for the largest number, rather than just the insanely wealthy and/or desperately politically connected elites.
Uncomfortable, All-American, end-of-the-continent truths.     

I've SEEN "the buying of (California legislative) propositions by the monied interests...undermining the legislative process" (371) in everything from keeping dialysis unsafe, unaffordable and inconvenient to turning delivery drivers into wage slaves so that corporate owners and management could hoard ridiculous power and wealth in the teeth of terrible human suffering and oppression of the unhoused, poor and otherwise disenfranchised. 

     A Canadian departmental director in the Vancouver, BC Women and Children's Hospital, for example, sneered bitterly "It's ALL ABOUT MONEY DOWN THERE" to me about our infant mortality rate and lack of national health care, and she was absolutely correct. Americans have lost our way in the humane values department, and it's no more visible than in California and the Bay Area.

    

     Problem is, it's also potentially more fixable "down here" than other places, too, if we'd only use the wonderful tools, human and other social and structural resources we have arrayed within and around us.
Throughout the book, Walker stresses the "five strands" of the Tech world's "success," which actually could be used to heal rather than destroy: 

"Social Openness," 

"Labor Power," 

the "Counterculture Rebellion" of alternative-thinking inventiveness, 

"Racial (and other) Diversity" and, for better or worse, 

"the Tech Titans' faith in libertarian capitalism...colliding with the Bay Area progressive tradition that nurtured the IT industry" to begin with. 

     They're "socially liberal but economically conservative," which hobbles them, their previous four strands of success and the whole area with "neoconservatism and neoliberalism" combined. This leaves us trying to dance both forwards and backwards at the same time, stepping on each others' toes and kicking each others' shins fighting over who goes first, who gets to take the lead and has the best (most distant?) view of the poisonously polluted but very "scenic" Bay. (362-365)

     Thorough, extremely readable and well-paced; other sections range from "The Golden Economy: Beneath the Glitter," through "City at Work: Making and Fighting for a Living," "Bubble by the Bay: Anatomy of a Housing Crisis" (193) to "Environmentalism in the Age of Global Warming" (279) and speculations on the "Future for the Left Coast," aptly subtitled, “Dreams, Nightmares and Political Realities.” (350)

     The good thing about the Bay Area is that "there's no place quite like it," but that's also the bad thing about it, too. Wonderful book. 

     Congratulations to Prof. Walker. A boon to metropolitan geographers worldwide, as well as Californians and Bay Area residents.

View all my reviews