Grocery Story: The Promise of Food Co-ops in the Age of Grocery Giants

This kindlebook that is Grocery Story: The Promise of Food Co-ops In The Age of Grocery Giants by Jon Steinman contains a prolific amount of grocery/food data pertaining to multiple parts of the United States. The following details include: the morning of December 7, 2016 when a new grocery store is being opened in the author’s hometown of Nelson British Columbia Canada, reference to the author’s Deconstructing Dinner podcast that he started in 2006, By 2012 Deconstructing Dinner evolved into a television and web series, some history on one of the earliest grocery store chains A&P that grew stories in thirty nine states and two Canadian provinces, details on the first supermarket that opened in 1930, some of the reasons why the author considers grocery stores to be living museum’s of earth’s bounty, the author provides stories of food co-ops being established I mixed-income neighborhood and food deserts, and more.

For anyone wondering what Food Co-ops are, wanting to start a Food Co-op, or grow a current Food Co-op this is definitely the book to read. I think it should be required reading for all Food Co-op Board of Directors!Jon Steinman provides a look at the history of grocery stores and the industry it has become but also provides hope for our food future through the growth of food co-ops. I did have to really push myself to read the first couple of chapters because of the charts and graphs, but I'm so glad I did as I did gain a new insight to grocery stores and it was exciting to read the next chapters with that knowledge.

Jon Steinman asks why efforts to fix the problems in our food system have so often focused on the small “alternatives” to mainstream food retail—farmers markets, CSAs, etc—rather than on the mainstream itself, since that’s where most people get most or all of their food? Anchored his own experience on the board of Canada’s largest food co-op grocery store and a strong storytelling sensibility honed in decades as a media producer and host, Steinman’s book is a useful overview and roadmap for how we might expand the space for alternatives within the world of the grocery store itself.Most of us have no idea how the “grocery giants”—huge supermarket chains that now dominate most market areas—became so powerful in the 20th century. Grocery Story gives a very solid and needed overview of that history. It was good to be reminded that the in the early days, many people—including lawmakers—recognized how fundamentally anti-competitive the growing monopoly power and vertical integration of the grocery corporations were becoming. “Compared to the chain store uprisings of the 1920s and '30s, North American eaters and regulators have been asleep at the plate” in more recent decades, Steinman writes (41).The book is a call to more active engagement with grocery store issues in the present, not simply through critiquing what we don’t like but by actually creating the kind of food retail that can work well for more people all along the food chain. Steinman does acknowledge the enormous challenges of doing this, especially in a time when nearly every grocery giant is trying to get into the organic and natural food niches that used to give food co-ops their tiny market advantage. But a strength of the book is the richness of examples Steinman draws on from creative, adaptive, and determined people in food co-ops around the US and Canada who are actively building that alternative world.There are practical suggestions here as well as big-picture clarity. A researcher might wish for more meticulous citation (page numbers aren’t included for quotes from other books and articles) and a co-op manager might find it helpful to have a slightly more detailed analysis of some of the failures as well as the successes in the co-op world. But as someone working on trying to keep a small co-op going in a low-income rural area, I came away from the book feeling inspired and enlightened. It’s a very useful resource for anyone who wants to understand the realities of food retail and food system reform.

Suspicion and uneasiness regarding food availability, quality, and marketing confirmed by history and associations of giant grocery stores. Obvious to me and I hope many others that my community and indeed my family are best served by a Cooperative grocery store.

This brand new book is fascinating, at times infuriating, and at times heartbreaking. Details are given about how the farmers get a shocking $.06 for that $4.50 loaf of bread, are being forced out of business by big agra, distrubutors, wholsealers and other middlemen who all take a cut of what we pay - so that not enough profit is left for them to pay the bills for feed, fertilizer, tractor fuel and other necessities. They are in desperate financial straits, losing their farms and committing suicide in increasing numbers. After recounting this, the book becomes inspiring, though in a qualified way. It's about grass roots community action of the best kind. Action that is necessary, but the results of which are by no means assured. It's a call to action.It documents the ruthless predatory tactics of giants like the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (the A&P) Kroger and a few others, who with numerous intermediary distributors, processors and middlemen dominated the landscape circa 1900. Then, around 1910, the government leveled the playing field so that the farmer and the neighborhood grocery were no longer at a disadvantage. FDR brought further legislation to bear during the depression, and farmers began to prosper again. Then came the Reagan revolution, and the previous anti-trust regulation essentially disappeared, with devastating consequences for farmers, small stores, consumers and people who live in poor neighborhoods where the giants fear to tread. Things have continued to deteriorate since the 1980's.The coop movement which is slowly gaining ground in enlightened communities offers a sliver of hope that we may undo the damage done to farmers, small stores and local economies. The movement will fail though if our only concern is where can one buy a generic product at the cheapest price, with no attention to quality or where the product comes from, or who is getting rich on the back of farmers. Food shopping involves making ethical choices. Are we prepared to take off our blinders and make them?

This is a really excellent book if you're interested in how the everyday came to be. It traces the evolution of chain stores, the changing ideology of capitalism & competition in the USA, and describes in detail how food co-operatives are a workable alternative to the chain store nightmare. Reading this book motivated me to re-join my local food co-op and made me much more competent at advocating for local food issues, because I now understand much better how the food system as a whole functions, and how it functions in the interest of private corporations, and against the interests of consumers and farmers.One weakness of the book is the absence of a treatment of the food co-op movement in the UK and Europe, where it grew much larger, and for a time dominated the grocery market (25% of overall food sales in 1945 in the UK).

Probably better to read than listen to. Lots of lists. But very interesting nonetheless .