Grocery Story by Jon Steinman

The full title of this book is Grocery Story: the promise of food co-ops in the age of grocery giants.

I bought this book in my local food coop.  The author was there with a table one Saturday, flogging copies to shoppers.

The author is very dedicated to food:  local food, empowering farmers, empowering eaters, growing diversity in the food economy. He spent a decade creating a weekly podcast on food issues, helped organize a collective that put grain grown by local farmers directly in the hands of eaters, and served on the board of the Kootenay food Co-op in Nelson BC for a few years.

He wrote the book as an expose of the state of food economy and the enormous power yielded by food retailers on consumers and on the entire supply chain.  Farmers and food manufacturers can be bankrupted by the fickleness of huge monopolistic chains who contract for a supplier's entire production, and then renege on their obligations, leaving farmers with huge quantities of unsellable food.  Manufacturers are universally forced to pay retailers tens of thousands of dollars in "shelving fees" in order to get their products stocked....only to have those same retailers copy their products by issuing cheaper "own brand" versions, undercutting their business. Whole Foods required a small-scale chocolate manufacturer of the author's acquaintance to provide days of volunteer labour annually to take her turn managing the entire chocolate section of every BC store: removing all products, cleaning shelves, and restocking in exchange for the privilege of selling what she produces the rest of the year. 

The solution?  Well, Steinman points out that until well past mid-century, anti-monopoly laws controlled the concentration of ownership of grocery stores.  But the days of government acting in the interest of communities or of consumers is well past.  Today Steinman advocates food coops as a way for consumers to take direct power over what they eat, and as a way to create the food economy that they want to participate in.

Steinman means the book to be inspiring:  he even ends with a call to action, telling readers that they can found their own coops, join existing coops, and participate in a food revolution.

But the stories he tells about coops .... are mixed.  He discusses the history of food coops, mostly in North America, focusing on the wave of natural food food coops founded in the 1970s. He talks about the history of his own Kooteny coop, including the story of the recent-to-eater grain collective sponsored by that organization.  And he talks about a new wave of food coops founded post 2008. 

The two "modern" coops whose stories he tells in some detail, both founded in "food deserts" in American low income communities....failed, no more than 3 years after they opened, despite the huge amount of fund-raising and organizing that went into their creation.  After a roaring start, the Kootenay grain coop shrank....Steinman seems forcedly patient at the lack of commitment of members who found that they couldn't manage to mill all their own flour and then use it to make all of their own pasta and bread.   He doesn't talk about how many of those 70s era coops are still thriving, and why...I know that some are barely hanging in there, and many have closed.

Overall, the book has many ideas for improving coops, best practices from active coops, and a whole lot of passion for the ecological, economic, and practical benefits of local control of food. It just isn't inspiring in the way that the author intended.