In return for work, members will get steep discounts
By Sudip P. Mukherjee
smukherj@hunter.cuny.edu
A year from now, residents of Hunts Point, Longwood and other South Bronx neighborhoods will be eating fresh vegetables grown in the area’s community gardens, if a determined young woman who is organizing the area’s first food co-op has her way.
Residents will find a wider selection of foods than they’re accustomed to getting in local stores, as well as fruits and vegetables from farms upstate and organic products.
They will also save money—as much as 40 percent—by contributing their labor to making the co-op work, according to Zena Nelson, the business student from the Norwood section of the Bronx who is organizing the South Bronx Food Cooperative.
“The main goal is get people eating healthier and living better lives,” said Nelson. The widespread opinion that it costs too much to buy good food is wrong, she insisted. “Eating healthy, fresh foods daily is not an expensive task.”
Thirty members have already signed up. One of them is Karen Washington, a Tremont resident, physical therapist, and one of the founders of La Familia Verde, a community gardens coalition on Mapes Avenue. She describes the current lack of choices in most South Bronx markets as “food injustice.”
Washington complains that young people are not taught how to question where fruits and vegetables are grown, and why they can’t get fresher food. “With bodegas and supermarkets, you don’t know what you get,” she said, adding, “The rampant rates of childhood obesity, heart disease and diabetes should show people they need to start thinking more smartly about what they eat, and where they get it from.”
The food that will be sold at the South Bronx Food Cooperative will be quite different from what shoppers currently find in the groceries or bodegas in Hunts Point and Longwood, according to Nelson. The co-op will stock the best locally grown produce it can get, along with “normal” foods like cereals and beverages, she said.
“We’ll have cooked foods, like pastor-fried chicken and beef, but we’ll also have a lot more soy-based and organic products,” said Nelson.
“It will save us considerable costs to have farm produce from local farms,” she said, because the co-op will save the cost of shipping and of paying out-of-state taxes.
The other key to low prices is labor. Each member must agree to work at the co-op for three hours every four weeks. That donation of a total of 39 hours of work in a year will be the key to keeping costs down and passing the savings to the members, the co-op’s organizers say.
Lukas Herbert, who lives on the Grand Concourse, buys most of his food in White Plains, where he works as a city planner. He joined the co-op to change that.
“The problem with local stores in the South Bronx is a lot of the times when you buy vegetables, they’re in those bags from other states, and turn out to be quite stale or rotten,” he said.
Shoppers, he argues, need to be taught to eat better. “When I was in college, I ate really unhealthy foods,” he recalled. “It took a sort of education to change my habits.”
For example, he said, “I still see many families buying these large bags of white rice, whereas they can get the same product and taste, with more nutritional value from brown rice.”
Nelson hopes to provide the information necessary for people to make better choices in living and eating, including cooking classes, seminars on asthma and diabetes, and consultations with nutritionists and dieticians, some of whom have already signed up as co-op members.
She also wants the co-op to respect the environment, so the paper products it sells will be biodegradable, and bins will be set aside for unsold fruits or vegetables, so that they can be turned into compost to enrich the soil.
Joining the co-op requires a one-time fee of $120. The fee for families of two adults and for students is $80, for seniors $60. For families who receive income assistance or public assistance under such programs as Section 8, Food Stamps, and SPREE, the joining fee is reduced to $40.
More information is available, along with an application, at http://www.sbxfc.org.