Founded in the 1970s, The Park Slope Food Coop is one of few such organizations that requires work from all members. No, you can’t pay your way out of a work shift. When I first moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn in the early 1990s, a few friends said we should join, so I attended an orientation. I left muttering under my breath about all the rules and regulations. It was like the “Soup Nazi” episode of Seinfeld, and a hard no. We moved away from the city in 1998 and then six years later moved back to our old neighborhood. We shopped at Key Food and sometimes the fancier specialty markets. I grumbled about the prices but we kept on, since joining the much less expensive Coop wasn’t happening (“No soup for you!”).
And then, without warning, we had a teenager. And our teenager’s friends. I won’t say I’m any kind of parenting expert, but we did make one good decision: our goal was to be the house where misbehaving kids could safely congregate. Marijuana was still illegal, as underage drinking still is, but we knew this was happening—along with everything else that wily adolescents explore. Better if all these activities happened inside, in a home with caring parents, instead of who knows where. Looking back at my own urban adolescence in the late 1970s, I did most of my misbehaving away from home, specifically, at a friend’s house. She had two older brothers who bought weed and her mother was rarely home.
The downside of being the home where teenage things happened was that on weekends we hosted a group of kids who devoured hundreds of dollars of groceries between Friday and Sunday. Our project was not financially sustainable, especially after the 2008 recession. Reluctantly, I decided to give the Food Coop another chance. The older gentleman who led the orientation was mild-mannered; he downplayed the rules and regulations and I found myself persuaded. I would suck it up and give it a go.
A woman in the upstairs office, one of the few paid employees, showed me a chart with available work shifts. There was an 8 A.M. vacancy in the basement where workers cut and wrapped cheese, and bagged nuts, dried fruit, spices, and olives. She offered that this was a coveted shift, that I was lucky one had come up. I hesitated for a moment (because I am so not a morning person), but I took the manager’s hint and signed up. My partner is a morning person, so he took an even earlier shift cleaning out cash registers (you’d be amazed how much farm debris gets into them).
My shift crew was a true slice of Brooklyn, pun intended, since I chose to become a cheese cutter. The guy who ordered cheese for the Coop, another paid employee, showed me how to cut, wrap, weigh, and price, and gave me a tour of the freezing walk-in cooler. He always looked a bit strung out from lack of sleep—a toddler and new baby at home, plus their overtaxed mother—but he managed to keep everything together in our small sphere.
Upstairs on the shopping floor, it was noisy and bright, packed with shoppers all day every day (and beware the Tuesday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving). I understood why the office manager had nudged me to take the shift; down in the basement, I found an oasis of calm.
We appeared to be a random gathering of folks.
An older Black woman arrived each month and bagged dried mangoes with quiet and calm efficiency. Only mangoes. In our few exchanges, I heard a Trinidadian accent. I wondered if the mangoes reminded her of home. Perhaps her shift was a time for meditative time travel.
Two women were drawn to olives. A Hasidic man and woman did the kosher dried fruit and nuts.
A twentysomething woman with long, dark hair, pale complexion, and a sprinkling of tattoos looked like a singer in an emo band. I never found out what she did in the real world because after a curt greeting, she inserted ear pods for the rest of each shift.
Two moms, one in grad school; how she managed to parent two kids and defend a thesis in marine biology eluded me. There was talk of family beds, untidy husbands, so much laundry, how to roast okra without getting a slimy mess, the insanity of public middle school applications. Having been there, done that, and survived, I just listened and was entertained. (Pat okra dry, roast on high heat, with just a drizzle of olive oil, until they are slightly crisp. Remove from oven, sprinkle with salt crystals.)
I bonded with Greg, who turned out to be a prize-winning playwright, a co-author of The Laramie Project. He bagged teas and spices and cued up playlists. While Dusty Springfield sang “Son of a Preacher Man,” we shared stories of the publishing business, our precarious lives as writers. During conversation pauses, I often saw him looking across the basement with admiration and lust at the super-hot guy who spent his work shift cutting up steaks and lamb chops. If only our work shift had been a scripted series, we could have written in a romantic subplot.
Our family grocery costs plummeted and I was thrilled by the vegetables, freckled with damp farm soil. I now live where much of the Coop’s produce is grown, but at the time, immersed in urban family life, just touching and sniffing a dirty carrot gave me a thrill, like a magic teleport to the country.
Every month we would receive a summons over the intercom from the upstairs office. Always the same: they wanted us to choose a squad leader. The first time, we gathered around, except Earbud Girl, who did not deviate from her tasks to discuss the problem. Choosing a squad leader was representative democracy in action but none of us wanted to be the leader. We were happy as we were. The work shift was the price we were willing to pay to feed our families excellent and low-cost food, but we concluded that we would choose non-compliance. We understood that there were reasons for the rule. Not every shift was like ours: a group of self-motivated people who understood the value of our work without having to be ordered around. When further summons came from the office, one of us would go upstairs, receive a lecture about why it was Coop policy to choose a squad leader, mumble something about how we’d get to that soon, and then retreat back to our cave. We’d laugh about it, Greg would crank up Dusty, and we’d all get back to work. It was the first and only time I’d experienced a workplace that truly functioned without a leader and I understood that this couldn’t easily be replicated. What had at first seemed like random selection turned out to be more like self-selection. In return for working in a windowless basement, we were granted a calm environment, free of the cacophony upstairs. We were the introverts, who craved time in quiet rooms. The basement was our sanctuary.
It finally happened to me, as it does to all Coop members: our family travel plans interfered with our shift schedules. Upon our return we both had to do a dreaded makeup shift. I’d been warned that not all squads were like ours, but since I now knew how to cut cheese like a pro, I figured I’d be fine. When I arrived in the basement for the makeup, the squad leader barked orders at me. When I politely let him know that I worked the same job on my regular shift, and that Mr. Cheese himself had trained me, he was unimpressed. I looked around at the other workers, wondering how they put up with this jerk. They said nothing, but their eye-rolling let me know that they were used to this. For the next two hours and 45 minutes I was trapped in the particular version of hell created by a would-be dictator who did no work and made everyone else miserable. The following month I told Greg and the Park Slope moms the story of my makeup shift. The office still called us up to choose a leader, but we held firm. As Lord Acton wrote: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” No squad leader for us! We had created a socialist utopia that we now knew might not exist anywhere else on earth, not even at the Coop.
My partner and I became friendly with Ed, who purchased dairy for the Coop and also tutored kids—including our Olive—in SAT Math. We invited him to Thanksgiving and during the meal he shared the story of the Coop’s origin as a small Marxist-Leninist discussion group. Members decided to order food as a cooperative and the rest of the story followed. I imagined a bulletin board was all they needed to organize the shifts. During our time at the Coop, there were 15,000 members. I told Ed about our leaderless squad and he smiled.
Outside the hours we spent together in the basement, lives were in flux. One of the moms moved away. Greg told me that he planned to apply to grad school, so he could teach; soon enough he was accepted to a program in California. Olive left Brooklyn for college and we moved to the Hudson Valley.
Greg and I stayed in touch. We’ve discussed writing a dramedy series about the good and terrible and absurd and hilarious things that happen to a random group of people on a food coop work shift, an accidental utopia in which after many episodes of cringy pining, his character finally gets together with the super-hot butcher.
Thank you for reading and as with all posts here, I’d love to hear from you! More to follow each Friday. I hope you’ll subscribe and share with other readers. You can find out more about my memoirs Perfection and Eva and Eve here and purchase here. I work privately with writers on creative non-fiction projects. If you are interested, you can contact me through my website: juliemetz.com. A first consultation is free of charge.
Do it--write the dramedy! It'll be like Call My Agent...with cheese.
Great piece, Julie. I giggled my way through it while eating Mochi Snack Bites from you know where.
completely unfamiliar w food coops but interested! i’ll have to look into what might be available in my area