SOCIAL CHANGE

Posted January 19, 2017 by Dan

Creating Social Change, Together

The extraordinary political events taking place in our country are affecting us deeply here at Real Pickles Co-operative, as they are for so many others. They highlight how far we have to go to build the just, democratic, and sustainable society we wish to see. We are reminded why all of us here take Real Pickles’ social mission so seriously, and why we must continue to work as hard as we can in pursuit of it. It is also now as clear as ever that we cannot do this work alone.

One essential lesson of the 2016 presidential election – among many others – seems to be that our economic system is truly not working for many millions of Americans, and that this fact cannot be ignored. The Dow Jones may be up, the economy may be growing, corporate profits and the 1% may be doing great. But many are being left behind. Real change is needed, and the big question is what kind of change will we work toward?

At Real Pickles, we are committed to creating positive social change based on an inclusive vision that prioritizes equality, justice, health, democracy, and sustainability. We are seeking to build a system that offers real opportunity to all people to live healthy and fulfilling lives. This means moving away from corporate capitalism and toward an economy where small, community-oriented businesses are the norm. It means making hatred and discrimination things of the past. And – urgently – it means doing whatever we can to avoid disastrous climate change.

Thankfully, we are far from alone in these efforts. A strong example is the New Economy Coalition (of which we are a proud member), whose vision is “a new economy…that meets human needs, enhances the quality of life, and allows us to live in balance with nature…a future where capital (wealth and the means of creating it) is a tool of the people, not the other way around.” As a diverse array of 175 member organizations, each is pursuing these goals in its own ways, and also coming together wherever and however possible to build on each other’s efforts. So much essential work is happening within this network, and we are grateful for the opportunities we’ve had to collaborate with such members as Equity Trust, Co-op Power, Cooperative Fund of New England, Cutting Edge Capital, Tellus Institute, Slow Money, and Project Equity.

Our work of creating a more sustainable food system is supported by many thriving organizations. Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA), for example, has been paving the way for countless food and farm businesses here in western Massachusetts to reach success as a result of their highly effective marketing of the “buy local” concept. The Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (NESAWG), a 12-state network of over 500 organizations, is leading the way in building a vibrant regional food system. The Northeast Organic Farming Association and Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association are each in their fifth decade as influential developers of the organic agriculture movement.

We are also encouraged to be seeing the rise of the co-operative movement which is building a valuable alternative to the traditional corporate model. Worker co-operatives are sprouting up here in western Massachusetts (and elsewhere), with the Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives providing a forum for area worker co-ops to collaborate as well as offering assistance to start-ups. Around the Northeast, we are seeing more and more consumer food co-ops both getting started and expanding, with support from the Neighboring Food Co-op Association – a regional network of food co-ops representing combined memberships of over 107,000 and annual revenue of $240 million.

While the primary focus of Real Pickles’ work is the Northeast U.S., we recognize the importance of maintaining a national and global perspective, as well. We admire and support the grassroots climate activism of 350.org, and have participated in climate marches in NYC and Washington DC. The National Co-op Business Association, a national trade group of co-ops, is doing important work developing and advancing co-operative enterprise both in the U.S. and internationally. The Cornucopia Institute is providing the public with essential reporting highlighting both the problems of industrial agriculture and beneficial practices of family-scale organic farmers. Over the past year, thousands have been camped out on the front lines protesting plans to build the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation (we recently made an exception to our Northeast-only distribution commitment to send a donation of fermented vegetables to the protesters).

We’re deeply fortunate to be working with so many effective partners who share our commitment to a just, democratic, and sustainable society. At the same time, we know that our approach to creating social change, as well as the scope of our own network, represents merely a narrow slice of what is happening and what must happen if we are to truly achieve our vision. In the months and years ahead, we commit to redoubling our efforts to create real and positive change by building on the work we’re already doing and by seeking out new connections and partnerships across our region, nationally and globally. We hope you will join us.

Posted September 24, 2015 by Dan

Calculating Food Miles at Real Pickles

In the course of preparing our latest annual report, we learned some interesting things about how far Real Pickles products travel from farm to fermentation to fork!

Since Real Pickles’ beginnings in 2001, one of our key social commitments has been to source our vegetables only from Northeast farms and to sell our products only within the Northeast. We do this because we want to promote the development of strong local and regional food systems. There are so many good reasons to be getting our food from closer to home – freshness and nutritional value, food security, strong agricultural economies, climate change, and more. And, as I’ve written about here, it’s not just local that’s important but regional, too.

We’ve always had some sense about how far Real Pickles products travel from farm to fermentation to fork, but we’d never before really tried to figure it out. For our most recent annual report, we decided to go for it. We posed the question, “What can a business do to build a strong local & regional food system?” We offered up our answer: “source locally & regionally…sell locally & regionally!”. And, then we got to work with the calculator and spreadsheets to ascertain just how far – on average – our vegetables traveled from farm to fermentation last year, and how far our products then traveled from fermentation to fork.

Upon delving into the project, it quickly became apparent that we weren’t going to come up with precise numbers. The reality of food transport involves all kinds of complexities that we could never fully sort through. But, we could arrive at some useful estimates that would illustrate the difference it makes when a business commits to sourcing and selling within a region.

Farm to Fermentation

Determining the average distance that our vegetables traveled last year from farm to Real Pickles was the more straightforward of the two calculations. We received a total of 128 vegetable deliveries from ten farms – beginning with the first load of cucumbers from Atlas Farm in late June, ending with our last drop-off of storage beets from Red Fire Farm in February. For the purposes of the calculation, we assumed that all vegetables traveled straight from the farm to Real Pickles, with no other deliveries along the way.

Organic. Local. Cabbage. Ready to ferment!

The result? The 285,000 pounds of vegetables used to make Real Pickles products from the 2014 harvest traveled an average of 17 miles from farm to fermentation!! We’re very excited by this number. Of course, it’s also what we’d expect given our commitment to working with suppliers like Riverland Farm (13 miles away), Atlas Farm (7 miles away), and Old Friends Farm (22 miles away).

What if we made no commitment to sourcing from Northeast farms? Real Pickles would likely be buying vegetables from much farther away. Most of our cabbage, for example, would be coming from major cabbage-producing areas like California, Texas, and Mexico. In that case, our cabbage would be traveling thousands of miles from farm to fermentation.

Fermentation to Fork

CJ loads the Real Pickles van for local deliveries!

Figuring out the average distance from fermentation to fork was a more challenging task. Nearly 20,000 cases of Real Pickles products traveled to over 400 stores last year. Retailers here in the Pioneer Valley – like River Valley Co-op and Foster’s Supermarket – receive their pickle orders via the Real Pickles delivery van. While those further afield – such as the Park Slope Food Coop and Martindale’s Natural Market – get their Real Pickles products through our distributors or via UPS. We couldn’t possibly know exactly what route each jar of kimchi or sauerkraut took to get to each store last year, nor can we know the route each jar traveled to get to our customers’ plates!

We do, however, have good data on how many cases of Real Pickles product were sold to each store last year. So, we mapped the driving mileage from Real Pickles direct to each of our top 50 retailers – which together sold about half of our product last year. (We made the assumption that doing the calculation based on this group of stores would yield a reasonably accurate result, while saving quite a bit of time.) Then, we used our sales data to calculate an overall weighted average for distance traveled. Based on this approach, the final result was pushed higher by fast-selling stores in places like New York City (~175 miles away), while kept lower by nearby stores selling lots of our pickles in such towns as Northampton, MA, and Brattleboro, VT (~20 miles away).

When all the math was done, we learned that Real Pickles products traveled an average of 131 miles last year from fermentation to fork!

We’re pretty excited by this number, too. As a growing business producing an ever more popular food (fermented vegetables), we know we could easily be shipping our Real Pickles products thousands of miles all around the country. But, we also know there are so many important reasons to be sourcing and selling regionally. When we consider that our 20,000 cases last year traveled an average of 131 miles – rather than 1,000 or 2,000 miles – we know we’re making a difference.

Posted January 30, 2014 by Dan

Beyond Local: The Case for Regional Food

Where should we get our food from? How far need it travel?

These are essential questions for anyone who wants a better food system – one that is ecologically sound and socially just. After all, a big impetus for the rapidly growing movement to transform the food system is the modern-day reality that places like New England – quite capable of raising such crops as apples or tomatoes – will instead import them from thousands of miles away and burn up large quantities of climate-changing fossil fuels in the process.

Long-distance food transport brings other drawbacks, too. By getting our food from California or New Zealand, we’re often giving up on flavor and nutrition because those distant farms are growing crops that were bred, first and foremost, to be shipped. Farms supplying national or global markets also tend to become big and concentrated, and thus are more likely (organic or not) to be engaged in industrial, monoculture practices, rather than the kind of agriculture that supports healthy soil, healthy crops, and healthy ecosystems. And, of course, eaters in this kind of food system are left hopelessly disconnected from the source of their food, which brings all sorts of unintended consequences.

As local as possible

Buy local! This has been a primary response to the crazy, unhealthy, industrial food system we have in this country. Leave behind that bad supermarket food shipped in from who knows where, and go get to know your neighborhood farmer. The push to buy local is taking the burgeoning new food system far. Countless farmers markets and community supported agriculture farms have come into being. More and more restaurant chefs are buying ingredients from local farms. Local food has even begun to make its way into schools and hospitals.

The idea of buying local makes sense in many ways. If our food system is broken and a central problem is that we’re sourcing from thousands of miles away, the obvious response is to switch to getting our food from as close to home as possible. And if the disconnect between farmers and eaters is a serious problem, we should start buying our food from a farmer who we can actually meet face to face. There’s a logic to it, and this indeed is an important part of the solution to building a new and better food system.

Is “buy local”, however, the end of the story? Is the right way to create the food system we need to buy as local as possible every time? It’s an increasingly popular idea. These days it serves as the basis for commissioned studies and marketing slogans suggesting that single small states – even single towns – might feed themselves almost entirely. But, I think the real answer is more complicated.

Urban and rural

A trip to a pickle festival in New York City a couple of years ago got me thinking about the issue in a new way. Addie Rose and I traveled to the Lower East Side to set up the Real Pickles booth at the Peck Slip Pickle Fest, a special one-day event at a public food market called New Amsterdam Market. During a short break between pickle sales, I got a chance to walk the market, and was struck by how different it was than the farmers markets back home in western Massachusetts. In rural western Massachusetts, farmers and other food producers typically travel ten or twenty miles to get to a farmers market. Here at New Amsterdam Market, I noticed that the vendors – vegetable farmers, cheesemakers, maple syrup producers – were coming from a much greater distance. Some had driven 100 miles or more from various points in the Hudson Valley. Others had traveled even further, coming down from the Finger Lakes or Northern Vermont. There were a few vendors with products made in Brooklyn, but few if any were using agricultural ingredients produced local to the city.

None of this came to me as a real surprise. A place like New York City – with its urban development stretching for many miles – obviously can’t support many real farms anywhere close to its borders. But, it got me thinking about all the talk about being a “locavore” and switching to a “100-mile diet”.

For those of us living in rural places like Vermont or the Berkshires or Maine, it’s remarkably easy to become convinced that solving our food system’s problems can be wholly accomplished by the act of buying as local as possible – and organic – in an effort to create a multitude of insulated, local food systems. And, yet the point of changing the food system is not to create an elitist alternative for a limited subset of the population. The point is to bring about a transformation that gives everyone the opportunity to participate in and benefit from a healthy, just, and sustainable food system.

If everyone is to be part of the new food system, then I think we need to keep this fact in mind: the majority of the U.S. population lives in concentrated urban areas whose local agricultural resources are entirely inadequate to support the food needs of their populations. For those in and around cities, then, the task of sourcing food from much closer to home means re-building the food system on a regional level. Instead of local food systems with a 100-mile radius (as many choose to define “local”), this means focusing on regional food systems with, perhaps, a 250- or 500-mile radius.

Those of us in rural areas – rich in agricultural resources – thus have an inescapable responsibility. As we do the necessary work of helping to overhaul the food system, we must consider what part we can play in feeding the populations of places like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. While it is surely tempting (and so much simpler) to focus inwardly and exclusively on how to feed merely ourselves, that is not, in the end, the way to build a better food system. It is essential to be actively promoting and supporting our local farm economies – and, at the same, we need to be thinking more broadly.

Resiliency

There’s another strong reason why we need to think regionally as well as locally, one that undermines the notion that it would even be possible for any one town or small state to securely depend on its own agricultural resources. It has to do with things like weather and pests – those unavoidable factors that make farming inevitably risky and unpredictable. Factors which also threaten to make farming even more unpredictable as a result of climate change.

The changing pattern of cucumber growing here in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts helps to illustrate the issue. Dave from Chamutka Farm in Whately has been growing pickling cucumbers (among other crops) since 1980. Before that, as a kid, he helped out his parents and other local growers raise them for the old Oxford pickle plant in nearby Deerfield. Dave, who was Real Pickles’ first cucumber supplier, has witnessed the harvest season for local pickling cucumbers shrink dramatically in recent years. When he first started growing, he could harvest cucumbers all summer long, typically going into mid to late September. By the time Dave started supplying cucumbers to Real Pickles in 2001, cucumber harvests would last at least until early September. Over the last decade, however, it has come to be a crapshoot to expect a harvest beyond mid-August. For Real Pickles, that means pickling all of our cucumbers for the entire year (60,000 pounds in 2013) within a single six-week period.

What’s steadily squeezing out our local cucumber season? It’s a disease called cucurbit downy mildew, which blows in from the southern states each summer and, just about overnight, wipes out the cucumber crop. These days it’s showing up much earlier than it used to, a trend that is likely to continue as the climate warms. As UMass Extension vegetable specialist, Ruth Hazzard, explained to me recently, human attempts to breed cucumber plants resistant to it have been failing to keep up with downy mildew’s rapid evolution via genetic mutation and natural selection. In the future, cucumbers could become a much less reliable local crop. And yet, as downy mildew does not typically reach all parts of the Northeast (check out these maps illustrating its recent impact), it may still be a reliable regional crop.

Differences in weather (and its effects) from one locale to another point us in a similar direction. Tropical Storm Irene barreled through the Northeast in August 2011 and brought epic amounts of rainfall. Small rivers flooded immediately, and within a few days, major rivers started overflowing their banks – leading to crops losses for numerous farms located along riverbanks (where the best soil is). Three of the six farms that regularly supply Real Pickles had flooded fields and ruined vegetable crops. It was a disastrous event for many farmers – though not for all farmers in the region. For one thing, Pioneer Valley farms located on higher ground tended to fare better during Irene. Looking regionally, the storm was a disaster for farms in such places as Vermont, the Hudson River Valley, and western Massachusetts. But, farms in many other parts of the Northeast – further from the track of the storm – emerged relatively unscathed.

Last season, farms in our area had to contend with one of the rainiest months of June in memory. About ten inches of rain fell here in the Pioneer Valley that month, adversely affecting our local food system in a variety of ways. The direct effect on Real Pickles was that 20,000 pounds of summer cabbage that we had planned to buy from one of our local farms rotted in the sopping fields. While our local farms had all experienced similar weather, farms in some other parts of the Northeast had not. The same week that we got the local cabbage news, we received a call from our friends at a farmers co-op in Pennsylvania and learned that organic farmers down there had produced a bumper crop of summer cabbage. We bought enough to fill up a tractor trailer – making the transport as energy efficient as possible – and were able to make the batches of sauerkraut and kimchi that we needed.

These examples all drive home the same point: While a global industrialized food system is clearly not a resilient one, neither is an entirely local one. If we are to build a better food system, resiliency must be among its central features. The inevitable conclusion, then, is that we need to make a shift toward regional scale. We must move away from the hopelessly unhealthy, inefficient, and insecure reality offered by our current global food system. And we also need to properly account for the impacts of weather, pests, and climate change – and do our best to ensure that everyone can be reliably fed.

Local and Regional

The work of building the new food system that we need involves a wide array of priorities – like reducing corporate dominance, expanding organic production, and shifting to healthy, minimally processed foods. Cutting back dramatically on long-distance food transport is another top priority. Here, we need to engage in food system development on two scales: local and regional.

How do we do this? CISA recently put out a fantastic guide, Eat Up and Take Action for Local Food, outlining all the many ways one can help build up our local food economies. Buy locally-grown food, support access to it for low-income folks, become a local foods entrepreneur, invest in a local foods business. There is plenty of important work to be done.

On the regional level, a key task is to build up the regional connections between farms, processors, distributors, retailers, and eaters. At Real Pickles, we enjoy working with and supporting three family-owned distributors – Angello’s, Regional Access, and Associated Buyers – all of whom do a great and efficient job of connecting Northeast family farms and producers with retailers throughout the region. (I mention “efficient” because regional food distribution can, in many cases, outcompete local food distribution when it comes to minimizing energy consumption, a key consideration.) We also make a point of keeping in touch with Northeast farms outside the Connecticut River Valley, so that we are prepared whenever those inevitable weather challenges arise. We primarily buy our vegetables from local farms, but we can turn to Pete’s Greens in Vermont or Tuscarora Organic Growers in Pennsylvania if we need to.

Encouraging retailers and eaters to support local and regional products is important, too. For years now, “buy local” marketing campaigns have been successfully raising awareness about the benefits of supporting local farms. It may be time for “buy regional” campaigns, as well. At Real Pickles, we honor our original commitments to buy our vegetables only from Northeast family farms and sell our products only within the Northeast. This is our way of publicly promoting the idea of regional food systems. We would love to see many more food businesses making similar commitments!

If we want a better food system, then we must be sourcing our food much closer to home. The food system is complex, however, and simple prescriptions will only take us so far. Responding to the reality of global food transport with the call to “buy local” is extremely important. If, however, we are to truly to change the food system – the whole system, not just the margins of it – we must also develop a regional perspective. By doing so, we will help to ensure that our food system can be healthy, secure, and sustainable. And that it can be so for everyone!

NOTE: If you’re interested in learning more about regional food systems, I recommend checking out the work of Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (NESAWG). In particular, you’ll find excellent in-depth papers on the topic here and here. For a number of years now, NESAWG has also been helping to build a Northeast regional food system through their annual conference, It Takes a Region.

Posted February 19, 2013 by Addie Rose

“We don’t want no climate drama!”

Who does? Dan and I traveled down to Washington D.C. this past weekend to be part of Forward on Climate, the biggest climate rally in U.S. history. We joined over 40,000 people on the Mall near the Washington Monument, and then marched to the White House to make sure that our message was heard. Our message was serious, but we had a great time conveying it.

The Sierra Club, 350.org, and 160+ other organizations sponsored theevent, and Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the Hip-Hop Caucus emceed the show. We heard from author and activist Bill McKibben, tribal leaders from British Columbia, Alberta, and Oklahoma, and even a member of the 1% (a billionaire investor) who came out to let us know that he saw the Keystone XL pipeline as a very bad investment. All spoke out strongly against the pipeline that is proposed for transporting oil from Alberta’s tar sands to the Gulf Coast for refining and exporting. The quantity of oil estimated to be locked up in the tar sands is equal to all the oil that humanity has ever yet used – and if burned would raise the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere from an already dangerous 400 ppm to a frightening 600 ppm.

“You are the antibodies kicking in as the planet starts to fight its fever,” Bill McKibben told the crowd as we gathered on the Mall. Many people referenced Dr. Martin Luther King’s visit to the Mall 50 years ago and the crowds of people who came to fight for human equality. The difference, Rev. Yearwood noted, is that now “we are fighting for existence.” Indeed, climate change is already picking up steam – as recent extreme weather events keep reminding us – and the stakes are high. The opportunity to convince President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline is an opportunity to impede the burning of that dirty Alberta oil – and to give us time to get on track reducing our energy consumption and switching to renewables. Dr. King’s famous words ring true today: “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.”

Climate change is a big deal to us at Real Pickles. Our work here is to strive to create a business that is sustainable and energy efficient, one that helps to build a strong and healthy community. Many of the principles on which we base our decisions are principles that also define the climate movement. Climate change is also central to the work I do outside of Real Pickles: managing communications and outreach for the Northeast Climate Science Center (NE CSC) based at UMass Amherst. The center is a federal-academic partnership that works to provide tools to natural resource managers as they plan for a future of changing climate. My two workplaces – Real Pickles and the NE CSC – span a broad spectrum between big picture and community scale action. In both, I think about the issues surrounding climate change on a daily basis and hope that our government will take action to prevent the worst, even as many citizens prepare for it. For these reasons, I was thrilled to join the 40,000+ protesters in Washington on Sunday.

The march begins

“Hey Obama! We don’t want no climate drama!” – chant from the crowd

We felt very inspired by the attendance and the vibe at the rally. People traveled from all over the country to participate and show their support for a low-carbon future. Together, we shouted and we shook our fists. We danced to the drum line and the brass band. And we danced extra hard to keep warm – did I mention that it was a crisp 25 degrees with a brisk wind?

There were signs declaring that “fossil fuels are SO last century” and stickers against hydrofracking (“No fracking way!”). The tribal leaders spoke of the incredible pollution risk posed by the Keystone XL pipeline: “Oil always spills. It is not a question of if, but a question of when.” And there were numerous chants in favor of solar and wind power, with Dan and I occasionally adding in a good word for conservation as priority #1.

Turnout for the event far exceeded expectations, and we left feeling particularly proud of the Western Mass contingent: we heard that 5 or 6 full buses traveled to the rally from the Pioneer Valley, yeah! We took a bus down from Greenfield and were serenaded in the parking lot by activists unable to join us – with songs like CSN’s “Long Time Comin'” – before we boarded the bus and set on our way. Amidst the enormous crowd, we didn’t run into many Western Mass folks but did see our neighbor Alden, owner of the People’s Pint, toward the end of the rally. We were hoping he would have 2 pints of his Farmer Brown and a couple of pulled pork sandwiches to offer us, but alas – we’ll have to wait until we get back to Greenfield.

We’re including a few photos from our trip – we hope that you enjoy!

Addie tells Obama that she “don’t want no climate drama”.

Dr. King’s words ring true today, “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.”

The polar bears show up to the rally to advocate for their future existence.

A brilliant policy solution that could make a profound difference. (Carbon Tax Center is a good clearinghouse for info on a revenue-neutral carbon fee.)

Posted December 12, 2012 by Kristin

Why I Want to be a Worker-Owner…Again

When I first starting working with Dan and Addie at Real Pickles four years ago, I was impressed by their delicious fermented vegetables and commitment to family farms here in the Pioneer Valley. I was also intrigued by how they thoughtfully rejected the conventional wisdom that success for a natural foods business means getting national distribution, scaling up and selling out. What kind of organic food business would limit sales to the northeastern US when there was clear demand across the country? Who would decline sales to big food distributors in favor of local companies and direct deliveries?

This approach has been very successful for Real Pickles over the past eleven years. And these unconventional ideas about how to run a business are not just ideological. They are sound decisions for owners whose concern is not maximizing profit, but creating a stable business that contributes to a vibrant regional, organic, and values-based food system.

Based on these priorities, Dan and Addie have decided that the best path for them is to convert their business to a co-op. As member-owned enterprises, co-operatives are designed to meet human needs and aspirations before maximizing profit. Because of this, co-ops tend to focus on long-term goals beyond the quarterly balance sheet. Dating back to the 1800s, the co-operative movement offers a democratic economic alternative that roots wealth in local communities. When the United Nations declared 2012 the International Year of Co-ops, the goal was to shine a light on a business model that now includes over a billion members worldwide – more people than directly own stock in publicly traded corporations.

For me personally, Real Pickles’ transition to a co-op is an exciting opportunity. Before joining the business, I spent a decade as a member of Equal Exchange, a Fair Trade Organization committed to working with small farmer co-ops throughout the world. Through this work, I was able to see how co-operatives enable people to change their lives and communities — often in the context of geographical isolation, governmental neglect and poverty — and meet their needs, together.

In Darjeeling, India, I visited a community living on an abandoned tea plantation that had formed a co-op and were slowly bringing the tea bushes back into production so that they could diversify their incomes beyond local cash crops. In Chiapas, Mexico, I saw how coffee co-ops are essential tools for the independence of Zapatista Autonomous Communities, where indigenous communities provide themselves with essential services.

Kristin having morning coffee with the Castellon family, Miraflor Co-op, Nicaragua, 2002

Most meaningful to me were the co-operative communities I met in Nicaragua. Like many coffee-growing countries, Nicaragua is a stunningly beautiful place. But the beauty of the countryside contrasts with the lack of opportunity faced by much of the population, a result of decades of dictatorship starting in 1937, an earthquake that devastated the capital in 1972 and a brutal civil war in the 1980s. Coffee co-ops, however, are a bright spot in rural Nicaragua. During my visits to these communities, I met teenagers from farming communities who give passionate tours of the local rainforest as part of eco-tourism programs created by their co-op, women who run co-op-sponsored outreach programs on domestic violence, and young co-op staff people who are trained experts in coffee quality. Through their co-ops, thousands of coffee farmers in Nicaragua have shared ownership of highly efficient coffee processing and export facilities. The farmers, co-op staff people, and community activists I met in Nicaragua during my time at Equal Exchange have persisted through political conflict and open warfare, and inspired me to continue to work for justice and community ownership in the food system.

To me, it is important that Equal Exchange is itself organized as a co-operative, living the values of democracy that it values in its suppliers. As a former worker-owner, I – along with my fellow members – elected the board of directors and participated in core business decisions. It was the worker-owners who decided to expand beyond coffee into tea and chocolate, to create a policy that limited our highest salary to four times the lowest, to buy a building, and to set up our own roasting facility. These weren’t always easy decisions and we did not always agree. But democratic ownership means that we are accountable for own work lives and the success of the business that we share.

During my time at Equal Exchange, I watched a series of socially responsible businesses in the northeast transition from small, committed companies to “brands” purchased and managed by multinational corporations: Stonyfield Farm (Danone), Fresh Samantha Juice (Odwalla and later Coca-Cola), Organic Cow of Vermont (Dean Foods) and Tom’s Toothpaste (Colgate). While some of these businesses have been able to keep some portion of their mission intact, their bottom line is to generate profit for the parent company and enhance its reputation. Over time, commitment to the values that drew consumers to these companies seems, inevitably, to fade.

I admire Dan and Addie’s commitment to their vision. Real Pickles as a co-operative is a logical extension of this commitment and I am impressed by their decision to follow this path. Looking forward, my day-to-day job at Real Pickles Co-operative will look about the same — I’ll still work on new product ideas, make sales calls, and, in a pinch, forklift cases of sauerkraut and kimchi onto delivery trucks. But becoming part of the co-op will provide a deeper sense of ownership of the business and commitment to sustaining our mission. Together with my fellow co-op members, I am looking forward to being a worker-owner… again.

We are excited to announce the latest step in our plan to go co-op: An opportunity to invest in Real Pickles! Offered to MA & VT residents, this is an excellent way to support our transition to a co-operative structure as well as our continuing work in helping to build a vibrant, regional, organic food system. Read more: www.realpickles.com/invest

Posted October 10, 2012 by Dan

We’re Going Co-op!

by Dan and Addie

We have big news to share: Real Pickles is becoming a worker co-operative!

Along with Real Pickles staff, we have been laying the groundwork for a co-op transition for a number of months now, and earlier this summer – during the UN’s International Year of Cooperatives – we officially decided to make the switch! Everyone here is excited about the plan to convert Real Pickles to a worker co-op, and we will be working to make it happen over the next few months. While the two of us will no longer be the sole owners of the business, we will continue to be part of Real Pickles as worker-owners and managers. We think a worker co-op structure will be an outstanding way to help ensure that Real Pickles will succeed far into the future – producing delicious and healthy food for people and making a lasting contribution to building a new and better food system!

Why co-op?

We have worked hard over the last decade to build up our business: creating and scaling up our recipes, developing markets for our products, and educating folks about fermented pickles. We have figured out how to manage the challenges posed by our commitment to sourcing locally – purchasing and processing our year’s supply of vegetables all within the short span of the New England growing season. And three years ago, when we had completely outgrown the community kitchen we were using, we made the big leap to our own organic food facility.

Now, after eleven years in business, it is quite gratifying to be able to say that Real Pickles has achieved a certain level of success as an organic food business. We are not making big bucks, but things are financially solid. We have a fantastic staff of twelve. We operate out of a 100% solar-powered, energy-efficient facility. We are supplying over 300 stores around the Northeast with delicious, nourishing food. And, we are supporting local farms with annual purchases nearing 200,000 pounds of certified organic vegetables. Yes!

Where does one go from here? These days, the typical path for a business like ours involves continued rapid growth followed by selling out to a large industrial food corporation. Entrepreneurs who have gone this route will offer a variety of rationalizations for why such a move can be socially beneficial. As we see it, leaving it to big corporations to run the world leads to very bad social outcomes. As far as Real Pickles goes, our deeply socially-responsible approach to doing business doesn’t fit with big corporations’ drive for monetary profit. We are committed to keeping Real Pickles a small business working to truly change the food system, and so we clearly must choose a different direction.

We have decided, then, to try to help re-write the standard storyline for a successful organic food business. We are interested in creating a new structure for the business which will support both its continued financial success and success in contributing to a better world. And, while neither of us have any plans to leave Real Pickles anytime soon, we want this structure to help ensure that Real Pickles can be viable in the long run by eventually coming to be able to thrive without dependence on its founders.

As we see it, a worker co-operative is the most promising structure for Real Pickles. As a worker co-op, Real Pickles’ social mission and guiding principles will be inscribed in its articles of organization and bylaws, and be made difficult to change. The business will stay rooted in the community. Its owners will continue to be local residents who are directly involved in the day-to-day operations, and they will be highly unlikely to re-locate the business out of the area. A worker co-op structure will also give members of our staff the opportunity to share in the decision-making and profits. We expect this opportunity will serve as an important contributor to Real Pickles’ future success as it incentivizes our excellent staff to remain at Real Pickles on a long-term basis.

How will it work?

Five of us here at Real Pickles have made the commitment to sign on as founding worker-owners of the co-operative: Brendan Flannelly-King, Annie Winkler, Kristin Howard, and us (Dan & Addie). Our hope is that additional staff members will join us following the transition. According to our plan, staff will become eligible for worker-ownership following a year of employment at Real Pickles. Once approved by the existing membership, a staff member will purchase one share of common stock in the co-operative, entitling him or her to a single vote in co-op affairs and to a share of the profits through annual patronage dividends.

As a co-operative, Real Pickles will be governed by the worker-owners via a board of directors. On a day-to-day level, our current management structure will remain in place. The business will continue to be managed in as participatory and inclusive a manner as possible, an approach which has been greatly successful in contributing to a satisfying and productive Real Pickles workplace.

This fall, we will be working through the remaining steps necessary to making our co-op transition happen. A key task will be to raise additional funds so that the worker-owners can purchase the business. As plans develop we will keep you updated, so stay tuned! It’s an exciting time here at Real Pickles. We are hopeful that at the end of this process – and the beginning of a new chapter – Real Pickles will be in an excellent position to be producing delicious and healthy food for people, providing meaningful and satisfying work for its staff, and making positive social change in the food system for many decades to come!

Posted May 4, 2012 by Kristin

Regional Distribution: An Interview with Joe Angello

At Real Pickles, we have always had an unconventional approach to distributing our fermented vegetables, choosing to work with small independently-owned regional distributors rather than large national ones. Angello’s Distributing, based in upstate New York, was the first distributor to carry our products. I recently talked with Joe Angello, its founder and owner, about his experiences in the natural food industry and what it’s like running a regional distribution business.

KH: Why did you decide to start a food distribution business?

JA: It was a reaction to the consolidation of natural food distribution. Northeast Cooperatives had just been purchased by UNFI [United Natural Foods] and a clear monopoly was being established. We were recognizing that good local producers had no access to the market. The only way was through UNFI and they were more focused on national brands.

I didn’t spend a lot of time on a business plan. If I did, Angello’s might not have happened. I’m more of a jump in and do it kind of guy. I borrowed a truck and was working out of the cooler at Hawthorne Valley Farm. Later I found space at Clermont Fruit Processors in a building that had been in agricultural use for over eighty years.

KH: What does Angello’s look like now?

JA: We have fifteen staff people, both full and part time. We run two to four trucks. Produce wasn’t our original intention but we started the business at the height of the season and within a month it became obvious that people were interested in fresh, local produce. I came from fifteen or twenty years in the fish business. Fish is expensive and perishable and the intensity level and competition is high. Produce can be hard but it’s easier than fish and we really worked on how to make it as fresh as possible.

Produce accounts for about 40% of our sales now. We also distribute dairy, grass-feed beef, baked goods, fermented foods and some beverages.

Our core customers are independent natural food stores and co-ops in the Hudson Valley, North Jersey and the Berkshires. What we do resonates with the end user customer. Shoppers really look for and appreciate good quality organic foods.

KH: Angello’s has been distributing Real Pickles since 2004 – before my time at Real Pickles. How did Real Pickles and Angello’s first start working together?

JA: One day in the early days of Angello’s I ran into a guy I knew doing a delivery. He had been the Northeast Cooperatives delivery guy when I had worked at the Hawthorne Valley Farm Store. He was grumbling about the UNFI purchase and I said, “Come on over. We could use some help”. It was a rough time in our business. I think he might have introduced us to Real Pickles. He definitely introduced us to Paul Harlow at Westminster Organics. Real Pickles and Angello’s stand for the same thing on different parts of the food chain. It’s one of the brands we’ve had from the beginning that keeps carrying on, and the relationship keeps get stronger.

KH: What do you see as the biggest challenges for independent and regional food producers and distributors?

JA: Marketing is one of our biggest challenges, both for producers and distributors. We go head to head with major corporations like General Mills and Kraft Foods, who have an unlimited amount of marketing money. Most all of these companies are giant publicly traded stock companies. Is that really where we want our food dollar to go? Those of us who work in regional food all need to be looking at ways to pool our interests so that we can better promote the independent brands that get passed over by the big guys.

KH: What do we need to be thinking about as consumers and shoppers?

JA: We need more public scrutiny about what’s inside the package. People like Michael Pollan have been doing that and Vandana Shiva has been doing it on a global level. We need to make high quality food a priority – for the health of our environment, the health of ourselves, the health of the economy. The idea that cheaper food is better food is deep in our psyche. That has got to get thrown out the window.

If you spend an extra twenty cents on a six ounce yogurt to buy yogurt from a dairy in your region rather than from a multi-national brand, where is that money circulating? How is it impacting our society, the environment and where we live? What’s really happening? These are important questions to ask.

KH: Is there anything else interesting about Angello’s that we might not know?

JA: We care about these issues at the international level too. We’ve been importing chocolate from the Grenada Chocolate Company. The chocolate bars are actually made by a cooperative in Grenada. Extreme things like child labor and slave labor happen in the chocolate industry, particularly in the Ivory Coast which produces 40% of the world’s cocoa supply. There’s a great documentary called Nothing Like Chocolate that looks at these issues and features the positive things being done by the Grenada Chocolate Company.

KH: What has changed in the industry since you started the business?

JA: When we got started there was not much of a consciousness or awareness of local food. We didn’t recognize it as a trend. It’s not why we started. For us it was more common sense. All this stuff is here and you can’t buy it in the stores. It didn’t make any sense.   We were in the right place at the right time. There was more awareness starting around 2005. Banks still had money so we were able to buy our building. We couldn’t do that now. People started to be really interested in local. Have you been into a Walmart recently? Everything says “local”. Banks and insurance companies talk about being local. It’s like the word “natural”. It gets to be ridiculous.

KH: What should we know about food distribution that we probably don’t know?

JA: What appears at face value to be a simple task of getting a jar of pickles from Greenfield, MA to Clermont, NY to getting to a retail shelf in New York City is extremely complicated. There are so many ways for that not to happen. We’ve been doing it well and doing it continuously.

Giant companies have done a good job of keeping their costs at a level that is hard to maintain at a smaller scale like ours. It’s more difficult than I think people realize.

Posted April 5, 2012 by Dan

People Power, Not Corporate Power

Big corporations are a central part of modern American life: We buy an overwhelming proportion of our goods and services from them, we absorb their advertisements nearly everywhere we go, we invest our retirement savings in them, and we depend on the latest twists and turns in their average stock values to tell us whether our lives are headed in the right direction. These institutions have brought us many material wonders, to be sure. But what, we might ask, is their collective impact on our pursuit of loftier goals? Does the dominance of big corporations in our society, for example, make it harder to achieve sustainability, social justice, or true democracy? Might it be that such institutions actually put these kinds of social achievements fundamentally out of reach? If so, what can be done?

In the aftermath of two recent federal court decisions – both, as it happens, ultimately threatening to impact a western Massachusetts food business like Real Pickles – I think these are questions worth exploring.

Cukes, Not Nukes

A couple weeks ago, many of us on the Real Pickles staff traveled to nearby Brattleboro, VT, to protest the continued operation of our neighbor, the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. With our “Cukes Not Nukes!” protest signs, we joined over 1,000 people in marching to the local headquarters of its absentee owner, New Orleans-based Entergy Corporation, where 130 people were then arrested in a non-violent civil disobedience action.

There have long been plenty of good reasons to shut down VT Yankee. The question of how to responsibly manage its waste seems hopelessly unanswerable, given the million-year duration of its radioactivity. And, a major failure at the reactor could make a sizable portion of New England uninhabitable for thousands of years. While such a prospect was real even when VT Yankee first went on-line in 1972, it has become ever more possible as the reactor has grown older and experienced a longer and longer list of mishaps.

In recent months, however, another reason to protest has come to the fore. And, that is the extreme level of corporate power revealed in the decision-making process about VT Yankee’s future, as well as a corresponding failure of democracy. VT Yankee’s original 40-year operating license expired on March 21 (the day before the march). But, unfortunately, rather than now heading toward decommissioning, VT Yankee continues to operate. Last year, in the midst of an unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) granted a 20-year license extension, a lucrative prize which Entergy worked for years to obtain.

How could the NRC make such a decision? After all, VT Yankee is the very same reactor model as those that failed at Fukushima. Serious problems continue to plague VT Yankee, and the consequences of a major accident there would be profound. It is difficult to view the result as anything other than the undue influence of a powerful energy corporation faced with the opportunity for massive financial gain. Perhaps, a “corporate mind-set” was at play, as well – a phenomenon which leads people to have outsized faith in corporations to bring about positive societal outcomes. I view the corporate mind-set as a consequence of big corporations’ pervasive influence in society.

In January of this year, even more serious questions about democracy were raised when a federal court invalidated the state of Vermont’s decision to deny Entergy permission to continue operating the plant beyond March 21. The NRC had given its permission, but Entergy had previously signed a contract with Vermont agreeing it also would need the state’s go-ahead to keep the reactor going. After a long public debate during which it was firmly established that the clear majority of citizens wanted VT Yankee shut down, Vermont’s legislature sided with the citizenry. But, Entergy sued. It hired a team of superstar lawyers, spent millions of dollars, and – in a wildly off-base court decision – won. Vermont has appealed the decision. For now, however, corporate power has won. And the inhabitants of New England remain at risk.

Real Food, Not Frankenfood

Another recent court victory for a big corporation raises many of the same questions as the Vermont Yankee story. It also hits particularly close to home for an organic food business like ours. This case involves Monsanto, the world’s biggest marketer of genetically engineered seeds.

Nuclear power is a very risky business, though its risks are fairly well understood. With genetic engineering, the risks are similarly great. Yet, it’s hard to even predict all that could go wrong. The problem is this: our understanding of living organisms is insufficient to warrant messing around with their basic genetic structure in this way. Living organisms are highly complex. To think that inserting a fish gene into a tomato will not produce a long list of unforeseen effects is naive and dangerous. Will new carcinogens or allergens be created? Will the plants cross-breed with wild plants and then undermine the health of our ecosystems in some unexpected way? It turns out that such things are already beginning to happen. To fully understand the impacts of genetic engineering could take decades, by which time it will be far too late to rein in this technology.

It is a serious problem that the federal government has essentially decided that any and all genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are safe and require no testing, raising the question again about the influence of corporate power on our government. The most recent win for the biotech companies is just as troubling. Last year, a coalition of organic farmers, seed companies, and advocacy organizations decided to challenge Monsanto for its aggressive actions against farmers whose crops have been contaminated by Monsanto’s GMOs. The contamination happens when GMO pollen gets carried by wind or insects onto other farms, and then cross-pollinates with non-GMO crops. Farmers who have never purchased genetically modified seed suddenly find GMO crops growing in their fields.

GMO contamination threatens the existence of organic agriculture – and poses huge threats to all agriculture. One would expect farmers to have legal recourse against the biotech companies. After all, these corporations are clearly guilty of “genetic trespass”, robbing farmers of the organic or non-GMO status of their crops. In actuality, Monsanto has, for years now, been harassing and successfully suing farmers for patent infringement whenever their GMOs are found in those farmers’ fields. It has made no difference that the farmers neither planted Monsanto’s seeds nor wanted them in their fields in the first place.

In response, the group of farmers, seed companies, and non-profits filed a lawsuit against Monsanto, preemptively seeking protection from patent infringement should the farmers represented ever find their crops contaminated by Monsanto’s GMOs. Monsanto hired a team of top lawyers and fought back hard. In February, the judge threw out the case, ridiculing the plaintiffs for a “transparent effort to create controversy where none exists.” The case is now being appealed. One is again left to wonder about the prospects for a society where corporate influence is so pervasive.

People Power

Is there another path? Is an economy dominated by big corporations the only way?

My opinion is that it’s time to dig out that old classic, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973), and consider the advice of E.F. Schumacher: “Today, we suffer from an almost universal idolatry of giantism. It is therefore necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness.” Forty years later, “bigger is better” remains the conventional wisdom. Yet the evidence tells us that bigger is not always better. Increasingly, the idolatry of giantism brings us to a place in which profit-driven corporate influence wins the day, regardless of what ordinary people want or need. If we instead want a society run by the people, many changes are needed. Among the most essential is a shift from an economy dominated by big corporations to one oriented around small businesses (especially those with democratic structures, like cooperatives).

In a corporate-dominated economy, corporations hold the power. In an economy predominantly made up of small businesses (even if big businesses still exist), it is possible for people to determine the direction of their lives, and of society. We are no longer battling the excessive influence of big business on government decision-making processes, nor the pervasive “corporate mind-set”, nor the effects of all that slick advertising. What happens when businesses misbehave, acting against societal interests? Small businesses can be held responsible for their actions; in a corporate economy, the big corporations always seem to evade true accountability. Small businesses are less likely to misbehave in the first place. Only a huge absentee corporation – headquartered 1,500 miles away and beholden to the financial interests of investors on Wall Street – could possibly fight so hard to keep Vermont Yankee running.

To move to a small business economy, we will need entrepreneurs starting up new small businesses – and keeping them small. Customers supporting these businesses with their purchases. Millions moving their money out of the big banks and into community banks. Investors shifting their money from Wall Street to local and regional enterprises. Masses of people pushing for political change thru protest movements like Occupy Wall Street. In other words, we must choose to make use of the people power we do have, however limited it may be. We will then see that we have what it takes to build a green, socially-just, and democratic society.

Posted December 16, 2011 by Dan

Why Our Food System Needs the Occupy Movement

Here in western Massachusetts, we are fortunate to be part of a community brimming with exciting efforts to build a new and better food system. Farms of all kinds are starting up or heading in new directions: offering winter CSA shares, doing on-farm cheese or yogurt production, growing grains and selling them to local bakeries. Non-farm businesses are using more local ingredients in their restaurants or using them to produce value-added foods like salsas, meads, and (in our case) fermented pickles. New retail markets are forming for local/regional foods, such as winter farmers’ markets and a new food co-op. Non-profits are doing tremendously valuable work, as well, whether encouraging people to “Be A Local Hero, Buy Locally Grown” or running an incubator kitchen for start-up food businesses.

To someone like myself who sees enormous social value in transitioning to a regionally-based, organic food system, these developments are very encouraging. And, of course, such activity can be found in many other communities around the country (and beyond), not just in western Massachusetts.

In my view, this is an approach to social change that can produce substantial progress. Small farm and food businesses create the building blocks for the new food system. People generate increased market demand by choosing to buy their products. Non-profit organizations help in all sorts of ways. The momentum starts to build as more people come to be exposed to the benefits of a regional, organic food model–as more people get to taste the really good food it puts out, as they see the farms in their communities beginning to thrive. And in time, people can even come to perceive a new food system taking hold (at least at the margins), and imagine the possibility that the corporate, industrial food system could truly be replaced.

But, while this work on a local/regional scale to start building the replacement for the current food system is hugely important (I would not have started a pickle business if I thought otherwise), I don’t see a true transformation of the food system happening by this avenue alone. We also need something like…well, the Occupy movement.

The Cheap Food System

A key challenge in trying to change the food system is that our political-economic system offers enormous advantages to the purveyors of industrial food. The result is that the big food corporations can sell their products for extremely low prices. With healthy, regionally-produced, organic food made to look expensive in comparison, it becomes difficult to compete. Those who see the benefits–and have the ability to pay–will buy regional, organic food. But, as long as we have a cheap food system, local efforts to change things will only be able to convince so many people to switch to the good stuff.

Of course, cheap food is not actually cheap. It’s just that a portion of its cost is being paid for at someplace other than the supermarket checkout. Our taxes, for example, fund the billions of dollars in subsidies–mostly going to the largest farms–for commodity crops like corn and soybeans, whose by-products can then serve as cheap ingredients for processed foods. Our ever-increasing health insurance premiums pay the bills for the diabetes and obesity epidemics caused by high-fructose corn syrup and other refined sweeteners.

Other costs are being substantially passed off to future generations. The current-day farm practices which are causing our agricultural soils to erode away ten times faster than they can be regenerated will mean less farmland from which our grandchildren will be able to feed themselves. And, the burning of fossil fuels to transport our food thousands of miles from farm to plate will result in an outsized burden for our descendants as the effects of climate change further unfold.

These are the kinds of “externalized costs”, as economists call them, which constitute the unfair advantage of corporate, industrial food. (Regional, organic food has such costs, too, but to a far smaller degree.) Until eliminated, this advantage will continue to stymie efforts to fundamentally change the food system. And yet, those working on a local/regional scale–as opposed to a national scale–are not going to be able to change this equation. This is where we need the Occupy movement.

There are, of course, the more everyday tools for effecting national political change–lobbying, petition drives, electoral campaigns. And, use of such tools has yielded some progress, as illustrated by programs in the Farm Bill promoting local food and conservation (as limited as they may be). But, as I see it (and I’m clearly not alone), not enough progress has been made. The problems of our food system are serious and urgent, and the ever-increasing influence of money in politics makes the prospect for serious change by everyday means very slim. Our food system needs a non-violent, direct protest movement that views our society’s challenges in a systemic way and demands serious change. The kind of change that would mean an end to the excessive advantage and influence held by corporations in our food system–and in our society as a whole. Our food system needs the Occupy movement.

Food as a Right, Not a Privilege

There is a second reason why our food system needs the Occupy movement. If we are to finally succeed in stripping the big corporations of their unfair advantage–the ability to pass off to society the social and ecological costs of their activities–then most of us are going to find our food costs increase. Having learned just how expensive “cheap” industrial food really is, we will have substantially switched to healthy, organic, regionally-produced food. The price on that delicious tomato from the organic farm down the road will finally beat out the price on that pale, sad excuse for a vegetable (or fruit, to be precise) flown in from who-knows-where. But the local, organic tomato will still cost more than the industrial version used to cost.

For many people–I would venture to suggest the clear majority of Americans–this will be a manageable adjustment. It will require a re-alignment of expectations about the percentage of household income spent on food: perhaps Americans will end up devoting closer to 24% of income on food as we did in the 1920s, up from the 9% we currently spend. Many millions of Americans, however, will be able to handle this–especially when one considers all of the societal costs which will have been avoided (societal costs, of course, eventually translating into individual costs like taxes and insurance premiums).

Still, a substantial number of Americans will not be able to afford higher food prices. Many of them cannot afford food even at current prices. Thus, what is already an imperative will become even more critical: that access to food be made a right, rather than a mere privilege. Every person deserves to be able to afford to eat healthy, nutritious food, and we as a society need to figure out how to make that an assured reality. This is not something that those involved in local efforts to change the food system can do much about. Communities can develop good food pantry networks or organize fundraisers for low income shoppers at farmers’ markets, but they’re in a poor position to institutionalize food as a right.

The Occupy movement, however, can help get us there. Just as with corporate advantage, this is not a challenge that is likely to be overcome by everyday petitioning and lobbying efforts. Establishing access to healthy food as a right will come only as part of a bigger societal shift. And, such a shift is precisely what the protesters at Occupy Wall Street have been talking about from the beginning. As stated in their Principles of Solidarity: “We are daring to imagine a new socio-political and economic alternative that offers great possibility of equality.” This is about moving toward a society in which it is not just the 1% that are guaranteed to eat. 100% are guaranteed to eat.

If, then, we are to build a truly new food system, I suggest this: Let us be engaged, wherever we are able, in that much-needed work of creating a better structure from the ground up–buying local/regional, starting or supporting small farms and food businesses, developing community gardens, joining support organizations. And in our broader-scale efforts, may we not give up on the standard citizen tools of the political process (letters, petitions, etc.). But at this moment, let us also give serious consideration to how we can best support and participate in the Occupy movement and help to chart its future direction.

After all, we are the 99%. It’s our movement, too, regardless of whether or not we have yet joined a single street protest. This is a moment with great potential to effect serious social change and move us toward becoming a more equitable and sustainable society. May we make the most of it.

Posted October 28, 2011 by Dan

Occupy Wall Street: An Interview

As I noted last time, on the subject of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and Real Pickles: We are doing essentially the same work, even if employing different approaches to making change in the world, and from mostly different locales. But, some actual connections are being made these days between the two efforts. A couple weeks back, we shipped two gallons of sauerkraut as food donation to the protesters in NYC as a show of support. And, recently some staff members from Real Pickles have made opportunities to drop in on the protests. Joe Mirkin, Real Pickles’ stellar facility manager and co-production manager, joined in on the events in NYC for a weekend and came back with some thoughts to share. Here are some excerpts from an interview I did with him:

DR: What prompted you to travel down to NYC to join in with OWS?

JM: After several weeks of reading news reports, it seemed the protests were gaining steam. What at first seemed like a flash in the pan quickly turned into the genesis of a popular uprising. Hey, who doesn’t want to be part of a popular uprising? So I got restless, grabbed a couple friends, some sleeping bags, and drove down to OWS. I also have friends in NYC who had participated in the OWS protests in the weeks prior to my visit. They all said the same thing, “You gotta get down here and see it for yourself!” Which is now what I tell everybody who is interested in the goings on of OWS: Go see it for yourself!

DR: When you arrived, did you find what you were expecting? How did things match your expectations? What surprised you?

JM: Heading down there, I figured I’d find just a bunch of young people having meetings and sleeping in the park. What I encountered was deeply surprising and, for the most part, encouraging and inspiring. Volunteer cleaning crews roaming the park 24/7 collecting trash and recyclables; a composting/gray water operation for recycling food scraps; a makeshift kitchen serving thousands of decent meals every day; an extraordinarily well-stocked, well-organized People’s Library fully staffed with friendly and competent librarians offering free reading material on all matter of subjects; people of all ages and various social classes; successfully facilitated General Assembly meetings with hundreds or thousands of participants; spontaneous classes and workshops organized and attended by interested people; clothing and bedding donations arriving by the carload, all sorted by volunteers and given away for free to anyone in need.
One of the things I did expect to find was a very significant amount of police present, and that was certainly the reality. The NYPD has these surveillance towers which can raise and lower from the ground to a height of almost 30′. The only other times I’ve seen anything like them were at Obama’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., and overlooking Beale St in Memphis, TN. The police apparently prepare for the worst when it comes to large gatherings of peaceful people, whether it be in protest, in celebration, or to hear blues music and eat barbecue.

DR: How do you see OWS fitting into the work for social change that needs to happen?

JM: Having untold numbers of people marching and demonstrating in the streets everyday allows for a whole slew of other social change to take place. The primary benefit I can see is that the protests allow all the groups that were already engaged in making change to expand their imaginations on what kind of progress is possible. They can demand more in their lists of goals, they can intensify and amplify their tactics for winning change, and they can build relationships and coalitions with other groups that may not have previously had specific overlapping issues. You’ve seen all sorts of labor unions come out in support of OWS, and now you’re seeing OWS link up with other movements for change around the city. The same dynamic is playing out at Occupy protests all over the country. I don’t think the camping out part alone is going to bring down corporate greed and all its associated ills, but it does seem to be a catalyst for a more networked and energized movement for justice.

DR: What’s your assessment of the “message” coming out of OWS? What do you think of the criticism that the movement doesn’t have a clear, coherent message?

JM: The moment people at OWS begin pushing a single demand is the moment a lot of people will decide to stop participating. The real strength of the protest – the actual power that makes the city and the banks so bloody nervous – is the broad base of support OWS has. Any action taken to weed out some issues in favor of others will only weaken this power, and so it is best to avoid any such thing, in my estimation. That certainly does not preclude OWS from issuing messages about the protest, which they have done. Nor should it keep individuals from teaching and talking to others about those issues close to them, which some people do. Keeping the message as broad as the 99% of people in this country is no easy task, least of all because of the pressure from media to present clear, concise demands. But it’s well worth the effort if OWS is to maintain the strength it has gained.

DR: After posting my blog entry, “Occupy Wall Street and Organic Pickles”, we heard from a couple Real Pickles customers who were frustrated over our support for OWS. They cited several reasons for opposing the protests. One was that the protests were “disruptive”. Any thoughts about that, having participated in them?

JM: My response to that criticism is: Ask the millions of people losing their housing due to mortgage lending practices if they consider the protesters “disruptive”. Ask any farmer who’s been taken to court by Monsanto for intellectual property theft if they think OWS is “disruptive”. Ask any teacher or firefighter in Wisconsin if the word they would use to describe OWS protesters is “disruptive”. It goes on and on. Hard to imagine that a single protest in New York City can be even remotely close to being as disruptive as modern-day global neoliberal capitalism.

DR: Another criticism we heard was that direct action (i.e.-street demonstrations) is not the way to go about changing the world. Instead, it is best to follow Gandhi’s precept to “be the change you want to see in the world” and focus on, say, making organic pickles from locally-grown vegetables or buying locally-grown food. What are your thoughts about the relative importance of these different approaches to making social change?

JM: Changing the systems of food production and consumption in this country is of obvious importance to creating a better world. Sometimes in order to achieve your goal you need a diversity of tactics. Say you want to purchase food that was produced by workers who are paid fair wages. It may be as easy as going to a different store or market and maybe spending a little bit more money. But, sometimes one may have to do as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers down in Florida has done, and head out to the streets to demand that corporate grocery chains pay fair prices for hand-picked produce!

SOCIAL CHANGE

Where should we get our food from? How far need it travel?

As local as possible

Urban and rural

Resiliency

“Hey Obama! We don’t want no climate drama!” – chant from the crowd

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