Help Your Food Co-op Grow!

For over a year now, the Food Co-op has been serving the community with far-out food at prices you can afford. By trucking into Detroit every Saturday and buying directly from the farmers and wholesalers at Eastern Market, we can buy 30 - 40 Ibs. of fruit, vegetables and eggs for your $4. We aim for a nutritional balance, and lots of times we get better fruits and vegetables, or things you can't even get at the store - pink grapefruit, fresh strawberries, eggplant, yams. And you can't beat our price - this is what it would have cost you to duplícate last week's order at:

A&P $7.42

Wrigley's $8.10

Kroger's  $9.22

Ralph's Market -$12.42 !

Food is energy and we all need it to live and grow and stay healthy. The farmers aren't getting rich - more and more of them are getting squeezed off their land every year, by the government. They sell us apples for about $.15 a dozen but the store retail price is $. 59-. 89. Some of the difference comes from war-related inflation and Nixon's "economic" policies, some from supermarket waste, spoilage, rip-offs and useless plastic packaging. But the real culprit is profit - a few dozen multimillionaires getting richer at everyone else's expense. The monstrous corporations and head monopolies of the food industry rip-off more and more of the good green earth and the people whose labor goes into the production and distribution of the food that grows out of it.

We've taken the first step toward reversing this deadly process by organizing to take the distribution of the food we need out of the hands of local food profiteers. Our Food Co-op serves a weekly average of 300 households and our weekly expenses run under $100. The more orders we have the lower the expenses per order. But our pick up points at both Main and S. Forest are running close to capacity and the time has come to start work on expanding. This means getting together some capital, turning more people on to the co-op, getting more efficient, and most important, getting more brothers and sisters to work together on getting the food out to the community.

At the moment the money situation looks good. We wrote to Adele Davis, nutrition expert and author (Let's Eat Right to Stay Fit), and she was so turned on by what we are doing here in Ann Arbor that she said she'd do her best to come here late in the summer to give a benefit talk in Hill Auditorium. Not only that, but she may bring a media team from Time-Life to put us in their documentary on the "nutrition awakening". Once we get a few thousand dollars together,from this benefit or by any reasonable means necessary, we'll be in the market for a produce warehouse, cold storage, and a truck of our own. We'll be able to bid for food at the produce terminal in Detroit and bypass the wholesalers who make a profit off of us now. We could even truck fruit from Florida ourselves, or have farmers deliver truckloads to us instead of to the Market. All these things would cut down on the cost of our food.

But the key point in distribution is work in the neighborhoods. Lots of us don't have cars, so we should have distribution points in every neighborhood, within walking distance. A church, a University building, or a house with a big basement would be fine for sign-up, bagging, and pick-up. If you've got a house to work out of for next year, call us now so we can start getting it together. The itemized Food Co-op has been successfully working on a direct participation, neighborhood basis for several months now and we can learn from them and hopefully work more closely together in the future, As you can see, our strategy is to get more good food for less money through voluntary, cooperative work. But the ways we'll go about accomplishing this are open and depend on the energy that the community brings to the effort. If you'd like to rap about it, if you have ideas or questions or skills or free time, call Peggy Taube, or Jeanie Walsh at 761-1709 or call Janet at 761-4299. Weekly meetings are on Wednesday evenings at 7:30 pm - 3rd floor of the S.A.B. (Student Activities Building) Everyone is welcome! EAT TO STAY HIGH!