I visited my first food co-op in 1989 and became a regular shopper and convert about 2 years later.
I visited my first food co-op in 1989 and became a regular shopper and convert about 2 years later.
Prairie Coop, Northfield, MN 1982. It was just like East Calhoun and SAP and North Country and Mifflin Street and Powderhorn were then; all, sadly, gone now.
I think my first co-op was New Pi in Iowa City (which might have been Old PI back then??). I was, what, 8 or 9 years old and visiting my sister who was a big ol Iowa city hippie.
The rich spicy smell of ANY of my life-long co-ops — Mifflin St., Willy St., Outpost, Wedge — reminds me of being a kid in that store. The big buckets of black beans and bright lentils really confused me, but I remember loving it.
My first week in college my roommate and I walked to New Pioneer Co-op- the only grocery store within walking distance. We came home with a bag of apples, a loaf of bread, and 2 pieces of spicy tofu that we warmed up in our toaster. Four years later, English degree in hand, I started working there.
Santa Monica Co-op had a store on Barrington Avenue in Los Angeles. My parents shopped there very occasionally, but they loved the art classes for kids upstairs. I made an amazing paper-maché monster mask for one Halloween early in my career as an artist. That store was also the location for the first recycling center our family every used. I vividly remember sorting bottles and crushing aluminum cans, in the late 60s.
Oh, it must have been in the late 1980s after I moved to Seattle and I visited PCC. Then in the early 1990s when I went on one of those awful candida elimination diets a co-worker took me to a food coop and gave me a short nutrition lesson. I’ve been hooked on coops ever since.
My first visit to a co-op was in 1968, when I helped form Austin’s first food co-op (actually a buying club) called the Milo Minderbinder Memorial Food Co-op (slogan: everybody has a share). Since then I have been involved in/shopped at food co-ops in Austin, Berkeley, Denver, Seattle, and Portland, where I am a long-time member/owner and very part-time employee of Food Front Co-operative Grocery, Portland’s largest food co-op.
My group house joined People’s Food Co-op of Ann Arbor in 1977 and my job was to be the volunteer worker for our house’s member discount. My first job was to break down boxes in the basement of the co-op’s Packard store (now closed).
Maybe the Belfast Maine co-op around 1977? I am recently informed that my late brother was one of their founders. First co-op I belonged to was Mission Hill in Boston, ca. 1980. Preorder produce and bread and 2# frozen blocks of squid!; buy cheese and spices at the storefront on Mass Ave. I’m not sure this is the right answer.
In 1973 I moved to Corvallis, Oregon. First Alternative was my first co-op experience. It was like a store made just for me, with all the foods I couldn’t find anywhere else…all the foods that were in Diet for a Small Planet, the first cookbook I had ever purchased for myself. I loved shopping out of the bulk bins. It just seemed so right.
In college I visited Sevananda Natural Foods Market in Atlanta on recommendation of a friend. I wasn’t sure what to expect because my friend was vegan. I’m not vegan but that didn’t stop me from acquiring an addiction to Sevananda’s delicious vegan cream pie sandwich cookies. Holy smokes. I have dreams about them even to this day.