urbanMSP

Excuse me I take the train to Taco Bell.

I'm not much of a coop fan either. I belong to the Wedge, but I rarely shop there. Plus, they do not carry everything that I need, so I'd have to go to another grocery store anyway. Why waste the time and hassle?

This is pretty much it for me. They don't meet all of my food needs, and depending what meal(s) I'm shopping for (either weekly groceries or spur of the moment dinner), they don't meet my needs at all.

Target/Cub for dry stuff and Lunds/Kwals for the fresh stuff, butcher, and deli case. The Wedge/Seward can't adequately replace either of those two trips for me, so they're the odd one out.

I guess I don't have a problem with coops in theory, but I just don't like The Wedge or Seward.

Not having a ton of pesticides or herbicides would be a great reason to buy organic, if it was true!

The oft-cited Stanford meta-study that claimed to find no evidence of health benefits from organic food still found that conventional food contained 30 percent more pesticides than organic foods and that antibiotic resistant bacteria were less likely to live in organic chicken and pork. So you do get less pesticides in organic food even though you don't get none.

But the theater around co-ops is not just about organic food. It is also about local food (something I know you are opposed to as well), and fair-trade food, in addition to being cooperatively owned. If you find all those things worthless and just want to support Yum! Brands that is fine too.

And, for me, shopping at a co-op is also about supporting a business that treats its employees relatively well (pay and benefits are better than most similar jobs). That's part of the reason the food costs are higher.

Support unionized Cub Foods if you're concerned about employee pay & benefits.

...but not concerned about a good selection of organic produce.

Didn't you hear? Organic produce is green theater or something.

Remember, the goal of coops in Minneapolis is not to provide products cheaply, it's to make rich white people feel better about their consumerism by hiding behind vague notions of green theater.

This is less of an issue here, where nearly all the major grocery store chains are headquartered locally (Lunds, Kowalski's, Cub, Target, etc.) but co-ops generally keep a much larger share of their profits in the community than a chain grocer. But I'll admit that I don't get a lot of value out of the co-ops here, except the checkout line caramels at the Wedge. I could eat those all day.

I don't understand why you (according to LakeCharles) are opposed to local food, though. There's a lot of "green theater" out there, but eating local is one of the few things you can do that really does have a significant net impact, as long as you're also willing/able to eat seasonally. That's why we get CSAs every summer (or did; we've been slow on the draw this year).

Support unionized Cub Foods if you're concerned about employee pay & benefits.

I assume Lunds & K-wals are also unionized. Am I wrong?
Target is not, but that seems like pretty common knowledge.

I don't "hate" local food I just don't think it's the panacea that some make it out to be. The ultimate conclusion to the local food idea is that your food should be grown in an urban environment and I think from a CO2 emissions perspective having people live densely in urban environments and food be grown on farms is way better than displacing housing with urban agriculture. I also don't think even regionally local is necessarily going to have fewer emissions than transporting food a longer distance. There's a classic example that from Britain's perspective, it uses less energy to grow tomatoes in Spain and ship them to Britain than it does to build greenhouses necessary to grow them in the country. Now obviously something like a seasonally appropriate CSA negates that because they're only growing things that are actually in season for the climate they're grown in. But I don't know, maybe our climate is best suited to growing staple crops and farther south it's more appropriate to be growing our fruits and vegetables. I think if we only ate things that were appropriate to grow within a few hundred miles of us, we'd find our diets suddenly very restricted. Not to mention we'd have issues actually feeding everyone.

Which gets to kind of my biggest gripe with this local organic artisanal food movement. Industrial agriculture and the science behind it feed the world. The Green Revolution at the beginning of the 20th century wasn't a return to agrarian methods, it was the intensive application of modern science that revolutionized the crops we grow and the way we grow. Norman Borlaug is credited with saving a billion people not by teaching them to grow seasonally appropriate vegetables in their backyards, but by teaching them to produce food on an industrial scale. Turning your back on that is in some ways turning your backs on those people that were saved by having enough food to eat. I think it's easy for the middle class in one of the if not the wealthiest countries in the world to say we can afford to spend a little bit more money on our food, but I'm not sure that's a thing the poor of our country can say, and I'm fairly certain it's not a thing that people in less wealthy countries, countries that literally wouldn't be able to provide enough food to feed their populations without these modern techniques, would say.

That really goes to the heart of the problem with "organic" farming. Organic farms can yield 55% less than modern farming methods, which means if everyone were to go "organic" you're going to need to cut down more forest to feed everyone.... or people will have to starve to death.

Norman Borlaug just rolled over in his grave.

That really goes to the heart of the problem with "organic" farming. Organic farms can yield 55% less than modern farming methods, which means if everyone were to go "organic" you're going to need to cut down more forest to feed everyone.... or people will have to starve to death.

While I generally agreed with this post before, reading it a second time I noticed the "can" in bold, which could use some qualification. I'd be much more interested in what the actual difference/average difference in yield is.

I said "can" because it seems to vary greatly from crop to crop and climate to climate. After going back just now and looking for this reply, it turns out that the 55% number was for England overall yield difference.

In the US, the numbers vary greatly between crops. For instance while organic spinach yields a whopping 71% less than conventional methods, crops like sweet potatoes actually yield more (I don't know why). Still, for major food crops the difference is greater than 25%.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensavag ... 7c33f5240f
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... te-change/

Really what bothers me is the naturalistic fallacies built up around coops and "organic" food and all that stuff. And then there's the green theater that "organic" food is "greener" when that's often not the case. And then for example, the last time I went to Seward the parking lot was filled with priuses, more Green theater!

Last time I went to Seward, there were a lot of bikes.

I shop at the Friendship (and occassionally Seward) store because (1) there are products I like that I can only get there (or other similar coops), and (2) it's a short side trip on my bike commute home. I shop at Bergran's SuperValu, which has significant limitations, because (1) it's close to my house, and (2) it's cheap. I shop at the Highland park L&B because (1) it's the closest one to me, and (2) it's hard to beat them for selection/quality.

I liked it better when the Hennepin Ave L&B was three blocks away, but what are you going to do? Although even then I'd go to the coop for a few things.

Target/Cub for dry stuff and Lunds/Kwals for the fresh stuff, butcher, and deli case.

For whatever reason, I've never been happy with Kawalski's. Too much prepared stuff, maybe. Produce is fine. Meat selection blows (at least the Chicago location). Even the tiny Friendship store has better meats.

Meat selection at Kowalski's at 54th and Lyndale is appallingly poor as well. Must be a thing with them.

Seems like they cater to customers who don't really cook.

Wedge, Linden Hills and Eastside Co-Ops considering merger.

http://www.startribune.com/wedge-eastsi ... 383709651/

Lunds family dispute is kinda interesting: http://startribune.com/lunds-amp-byerly ... ection=%2F