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on Food Access
Labor costs are about 21-23% of budget for a modest, 6000-square-foot grocery, with property taxes less than 1%.
posted 1 year, 2 months ago
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on Food Access
Thank you. I'm glad it was of service.
posted 1 year, 2 months ago
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on Food Access
I believe that the first Piggly Wiggly had a unicursal "track" that shoppers pushed their carts through, so that they literally had to pass each and every item. A picture of the original Piggly Wiggly at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggly_Wiggly shows what appears to be chain-link "cyclone" fencing at the end of each aisle to direct traffic and this concept was patented by the founder. It is interesting to track the evolution of food distribution systems in the 20th century, particularly around issues such as the influence of advertising, standardization and suburbanization that came with cheap,post-war oil.
Hypermarkets such as WalMart and Fred Meyer are the logical end point for this model, and if they could afford to do so they would build a half-dozen major stores at freeway interchanges and sign contracts to restrict competitors from opening at competing locations. This sort of tactic is why many commercial leases have explicit requirements for stores to open, lest major companies lease space and keep it "dark" to shut out competition within a market area.
The more one knows, the dirtier it gets.
posted 1 year, 2 months ago
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on Food Access
A key point that Sandor Katz makes in "The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved" is how underground a lot of changes within the broader food system are. Regulations were ostensibly put in place to protect consumers against big producers, but are more and more used by big producers to protect market share, "pulling the ladder up to the treehouse" with government brought in as a business partner to help stifle competition. One of the advantages of the buying-club model is that as a private group or friendly association, a lot of these issues are avoided.
Some regulations will need changing to allow new and more equitable food systems to go forward, but that is happening. Witness the popularity of urban chickens over the past ten years and more humane policies on "urban livestock" in cities such as Vancouver WA. To a certain extent the emergence of "food cart culture" in Portland is because of such regulation, which inarguably hurts many smaller and fixed restaurants while providing more opportunities and access at the lower end of the market.
One of the things I've noticed about garden groups, buying clubs and other neighborhood-level food activity is that it becomes about more than just nutrition. I suspect we shall a return of "community kitchens" or rentable commercial facilities to encourage more local production of food for local consumption. Since many churches, lodges and grange halls already have licensed kitchens, those seem like a logical place for such production and distribution systems to emerge.
Given that a lot of health regulation is done at the county level (and often only comes into play when one is selling to "the public"), I am hopeful that good grass-roots changes can take place. Community kitchens are a logical model (http://www.cias.wisc.edu/economics/community-kitchens-key-elements-of-success/) and there are strong incentives for these to develop at the county or neighborhood level.
Elimination of imports IS economic development, and making food closer to where it is eaten (especially value-added foods such as preserves or "grab-and-go" items like soups, large entrees and bean salads) makes sense. The "dream dinner" prepare-meals-ahead business model that hit the suburbs a few years ago can easily be adapted for local, sustenance use.
posted 1 year, 2 months ago
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on Food Access
Buying clubs are also good for local producers, who value the higher profit margins inherent in more direct distribution models. Even a modest buying club can readily distribute a single "whole animal" purchase, or several such purchases over a period of years: half a cow, a flock of chickens, a pig or lamb or goat. Cultivating a relationship with a small, local meatcutter is often the simplest way to do this, since they will know who the small-scale farmers are, and those farmers will know other farmers.
The fewer hands a whole food passes through, the less expensive and more nutritious it tends to be.
posted 1 year, 2 months ago
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on Food Access
Smaller groups can work for a time, but have difficulty sustaining over several years. Larger groups can gain access to more vendors and better prices, but tend to have participation and accountability issues. Commercial operations which try mimic the structure of buying clubs will find that the resultant loss of goodwill and need for profit margin will poison the concept, as commerce so often corrupts things. Although all Portland-area food cooperatives still standing emerged from buying clubs, not every buying club should aim to go retail. Any cooperation which helps you to get better food for yourself, your neighbors and your family is a good thing, but no buying club is utopia. Buying clubs are not the best way to get food, just sometimes better than the alternatives.
Below are a few links on buying clubs or related matters that might be of interest.
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2010/08/food_clubs_put_power_in_custom.html
http://www.seikatsuclub.coop/english/
http://www.westonaprice.org/news/1415.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grocery_store
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarket
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermarket
http://www.theendofovereatingbook.com/
http://michaelpollan.com/books/in-defense-of-food/
http://www.newtrendspublishing.com/SallyFallon/
http://www.wildfermentation.com/books_notmicrowaved.php
posted 1 year, 2 months ago
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on Food Access
One aspect of the modern logistics and supply-chain hypermarkets such as WalMart is that each household and store operates with fairly lean inventory. Many households do not have more than a week or two of groceries, if that, and I am told that conventional grocery stores may have even leaner reserves for key items such as dairy, meats, milk and bread. Weather events such as a snowstorm, hurricane or natural disaster may prevent resupply and easily lead to local food shortages. Shorter distances between producers and suppliers help with this, as do the development of stronger and deeper home pantries which food-buying clubs encourage.
Some buying clubs aim to replace conventional grocery stores, while others are more specific and may focus on occasional or seasonal purchases such as produce for home canning or annual, whole-animal meat purchases. My own buying club has been around since approximately 2004 and focuses on bulk staples such as dried fruits, cereal grains and other things that the ten or so member households do not produce easily in their home gardens. Almost all of us have chickens and do a bit of gardening, so get by with a few orders each month from five or fewer suppliers each year. This may or may not be the right size for you.
My own experience with buying clubs has led me to value the model established by the Seikatsu buying clubs of Japan. The Seikatsu Consumer's Cooperative is a national company that serves approximately 300,000 households of the 22 million consumer cooperative members in Japan. The Seikatsu group focuses on a couple thousand of key staple products where their efforts provide the greatest health gains. Each "drop point" consists of approximately ten families and each "route" has approximately ten drop points. Each distribution center serves approximately ten routes or 100 drop points. Distribution centers are coordinated at a national level, and I believe that this method of grouping households together is a solid one. A group of ten or so households is large enough to have significant buying power, but small enough to be cohesive and accountable. Such a group is large enough to share the work equitably, but small enough to be accountable. It is hard to shirk and easy to step up, thus avoiding freeloaders and "founder syndrome" burnout. The Roman Legions were organized into ten-man groups, for example, into mess-group "contubernia" which shared a single mule, mill, cook and cooking pot.
posted 1 year, 2 months ago
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on Food Access
"Food security" refers to culturally-appropriate access to nutritious food: enough to lead an active and healthy life. At one end of the internationally-recognized "famine scale," food security is right next to "food insecurity," when people may go hungry, not know where their next meals come from or have to engage in socially deprecated activities such as begging, dumpster-diving or stealing to eat. Because modern grocery and food-distribution systems appreciably favor for-profit hypermarkets such as Whole Foods Market, Safeway (Von's), Kroeger (Fred Meyer) or WalMart, there are many areas in the United States that are "food deserts," without affordable access to nutritious foods. These include many low-income areas, which may be served by one marginal grocery store or devoid of wholesome grocery stores entirely: dominated by fast-food restaurants and "convenience stores" which feature higher-margin items such as beer, cigarettes and pornography more than fresh produce. When people do not have physical or economic access to nutritious foods, they cannot be said to be food secure. This is where buying clubs come into the picture.
Buying clubs are groups of people who pool their resources to purchase foods that might otherwise be unavailable, whether those are basic staples or "specialty foods" within the distribution system such as organic foods, raw milk or grass-fed meat. Usually such clubs include a large number of young families because (A) they tend to have an adult interested in such things and (B) strong incentives to pursue them. Buying clubs of the early 1970's largely created the current "natural foods" niche market, through the creation of retail cooperative grocery stores. As or more importantly, though, buying clubs and food cooperatives provide access to wholesome foods in areas that have been abandoned or written off by the for-profit grocery industry. Not all buying clubs will become retail food cooperatives, though, nor should they.
Buying clubs occupy a special place in the development of alternative food infrastructure, by creating awareness of more wholesome food choice and supporting small-scale producers who might otherwise be shut out by the dominant system. Not every family needs to select from 100,000 or more grocery items, and not every farmer or producer wants to provide cases or pallets of product to some corporate distribution center. By encouraging and supporting local economies with shorter supply lines, buying clubs help build more diverse, resilient food systems.
posted 1 year, 2 months ago
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on Food Access
As people may or may not appreciate, our present food-distribution system is a fairly odd and recent one. The idea that people should purchase brand-name foods at a supermarket only emerged in the last century with the first self-service grocery store, Piggly Wiggly, in the 1920's. Supermarkets emerged after this and were an innovation because they combined several businesses under one roof: the dry grocer, bakery, creamery, butcher, green grocer and pharmacy. In combination with suburbanization and the huge subsidies of the interstate freeway system, traditional supermarkets rose to the dominance in the United States after World War II, and were shortly replaced by the "hypermarket" of which Walmart is the best modern example. Before the first world war, most households purchased their food from a variety of more-or-less local sources. Today, industrial food distribution makes its money through extended shelf life and improved logistics. Global logistics. The more that whole foods can be turned into commodities and resold as value-added "convenience foods," the higher corporate profits.
The problem with an industrial food system, of course, is that it mainly feeds industry. As the emphasis switches from local production of fairly nutritious whole foods to large-scale commodity farming by corporations, shelf-life increases but nutrition goes down. Engineered "frankenfoods" such as high-fructose corn syrup and genetically-modified organisms dominate the industrial food chain with resultant "hyper-palatability," obesity and health concerns. Concentrated economic systems also tend to steal resources from small-scale and local entities, such as young families and small farms. The dollar value menu replaces home cooking and the theory of three square meals and family dinners is replaced by Lean Cuisine and super-sized value meals. None of these things is good for human bodies, or for local economies.
posted 1 year, 2 months ago
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on Food Access
One key tool I've found in bringing better nutrition to less affluent areas is gardening, while another is "food buying clubs," both of which are fairly easy to organize at the neighborhood level with a few families, some friends or a small church group. By banding together to explicitly bring better foods into our neighborhoods and home, resources and buying power increase (as well as a sense of community and efficacy). In doing research toward a failed cooperative in Vancouver, I found that many neighborhoods used to have a small grocer who basically operated from their home, and believe that food clubs are a logical analog to that in today's economy.
posted 1 year, 2 months ago
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on Lottery Profits
No problem, whatsoever! Lots of folks got quite a laugh, and even asked me what I was hiding beneath my beard... 8^)
Thanks for a great show, as per usual.
posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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on Suggest a Show
I believe that the current Referendum 71 campaign and the broader issue of domestic partnerships in Washington state would make a good show. Referendum 71 would affirm the domestic partnership law passed by the legislature in 2009 and there are a lot of great resources. In addition to the two camps at http://Approve71.org and http://ProtectMarriageWA.com, there are public opinion pollsters at http://www.WashingtonPoll.org, the Washington Seniors Lobby and groups such as http://ACLU-WA.org
One particular heart-wrenching story of SRDP's in Washington has also been recently told in the documentary "For My Wife" as per http://www.formywife.info
One of the interesting things about the Washington situation is that the legislature explicitly tried to avoid the marriage issue by restricting SRDP's to seniors over 62 and same-sex partners. There have been a few stories on this at http://www.kuow.org/program.php?id=18532 and http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009814434_r71seniors06m.html with many local angles available from Clark County couples and politicians reachable through http://Approve71Vancouver.org
If you would like exact contact details I have many local contacts who could make it into the studio, including a gay man who lost his partner, a committed lesbian couple, a state senator, a state representative and perhaps a few other mayors, city council folk or a county commissioner.
With mail-in ballots going out this coming week, the topic seems timely and relevant, in advance of future political campaigns all up and down the west coast.
posted 2 years, 7 months ago
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on School Trips
posted 4 years ago
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