The Past and Future of Boston Food Co-ops
Illustration by Michael Piazza
Marcos Beleche grew up in a farmworker family that grew tomatoes, cabbage, eggplant and other produce. As he got older, he realized that while his family was producing fresh vegetables, they didn’t get to enjoy what was grown: Their crops were destined for a national food production system that ships produce grown in California to customers in Minnesota.
“I love eggplants, but they never showed up on our dinner table,” Beleche said. “Food production was a source of oppression for my family and for myself.”
Beleche is now Board President of the Dorchester Food Co-Op, working to create a better system responsive to the community it serves. When it opens in 2021, it will be the only food co-op in Boston.
The Co-op has been in the works for nearly 10 years, since co-founder Jenny Silverman started talking to her neighbors about creating a community grocery store in Dorchester. The neighborhood, despite being the biggest and most diverse in Boston, has limited options for groceries, and the ones that exist are mostly big chain stores on the periphery. Silverman envisioned a store that would bring people together by connecting them to a resilient local food system and be accountable to people who live in the community.
"The co-op is not a gentrification project,” Silverman said. “It’s a project where the people who live here own, control and govern the business for the benefit of the community.”
As coronavirus has upended the old normal and exposed the inequity of our food system, community-driven groups have surged. CSA memberships are on the rise. Mutual aid networks help neighbors get the groceries and funds they need. Everyone needs to eat, and food is often at the heart of the requests and projects that have grown out of the networks. The Cambridge City Growers emerged from the city’s mutual aid group and plans to collectively grow and distribute fresh produce in the city.
Co-ops also could be part of the new normal in our post-Covid-19 food system. Their collective model responds to many concerns raised by the pandemic. Want to keep money local to support the people in your own community? Co-ops are owned and governed by their members, your neighbors. Horrified by the images of farmers dumping milk and produce? Co-ops have relationships with small farms closer to home instead of the industrial food system. Worried about the dangerous work conditions of grocery store employees, many of whom earn minimum wage? Co-ops, since they’re not part of a national chain, can respond quickly to the needs of their employees.
The national Food Co-Op Initiative, which helps new food co-ops—including the Dochester Food Co-op—get off the ground, usually fields a couple of inquiry calls a month. Now, they’re getting multiple calls a week.
Even before the pandemic, a new wave of co-ops was on the rise. In the 1970s, the last co-op peak in Boston, many members were interested in getting healthy food products unavailable in standard grocery stores. Now, you can buy tempeh and almond milk at Market Basket. Both the past and current co-op iterations are grounded in the ideas of collective ownership. While the basic model remains the same, the Dorchester Food Co-Op is part of the 60% increase in co-ops opening in and by communities of color.
“Co-ops and mutual aid are part of the history of communities of color,” Beleche said. “We want to embrace and reclaim that: It’s what has helped us come together. We’re in a place now to embrace a collective vision for new normal. It’s important. It’s timely.”
The co-ops opening in these communities are driven by a lack of access to quality food in neighborhoods. The pandemic may have shone a light on the issues, but they existed well before.
“Right now, there’s a lot of co-ops being formed in communities that are a lot more similar to Dorchester than Cambridge,” Silverman said.
These new co-ops are approaching their operating model from a public health perspective, recognizing how food choice and food access are part of building a thriving community. They’re working to correct decades of race-based systemic disinvestment that has led to health problems more prevalent in communities of color, like diabetes. A food co-op is part of the solution.
“This kind of venture is low-hanging fruit,” Beleche said. “It’s so catalytic to making a difference for how we acknowledge our health disparities and work to change them.”
Although Boston currently has food-oriented co-ops, like the small-scale yogurt and granola cooperatives or the worker-owned Olio Culinary Collective catering group, at the moment there are no grocery co-ops. When the Harvest Co-op Markets closed in 2018, Boston lost its final remnant from the city’s last wave of collective grocery ownership. By the time Harvest declared it had “no viable path forward” for its stores in JP and Cambridge, the stores had also lost some of the elements that defined them as co-ops to begin with, operating more like conventional grocery stores on a day-to-day basis and, in Cambridge, competing with recently opened H-Mart and Target.
But back when it started, Harvest was one of many co-ops in Boston. Founded as a bulk buying club at Boston University in 1971, it began like many ’70s co-ops as a way for people to collectively purchase healthy or organic foods, often directly from farmers, at a cheaper price and distribute them to members.
“Boston in the ’70s was going through a recession, social turmoil, opioid epidemic, white flight—it was a tough time to be alive, from what I can gather,” said Tim Devin, who wrote a three-part series of books on 1970s counterculture in the Boston area. “Out of the ashes, there were these hopeful utopian projects.”
Many of the co-ops started like Harvest did, as exclusive buying clubs that eventually rented space and became public. At the time, there were many neighborhood co-ops across the city. To find space that was affordable to rent, the co-op carrying the name of one neighborhood often ended up in another: The JP Food co-op ended up in Roxbury, and the Allston co-op landed in Brookline.
Over time, many of the co-ops closed, and the ones that remained merged to form Harvest, until its own closure two years ago.
“They were built with enthusiasm and idealism, then the bottom line came and bit them in the butt,” Devin said. “It’s easy to focus on the negative—why they went under—but they achieved a lot. They changed how we all eat, and it wasn’t just about access to good food. It was also this idea that you were building community.”
Right now, the Dorchester Food Co-Op’s community has more than 820 members and continues to grow.
Joye Williams, who grew up in Dorchester, joined the co-op in April. She’s passionate about sustainable agriculture and grows the medicinal herbs she uses for her Joyefully Natural herbal remedies business. She credits her experience with The Food Project at 13 as an “eye-opener” to the benefits of growing her own food and bringing fresh produce to her family. She hopes that the co-op will get other young people of color involved in work around food systems.
“I grew up noticing the differences in accessibility to healthy food resources in my community as well as the lack in education and guidance navigating what resources are already available,” she said. “I feel like Dorchester Food Co-op’s mission involves giving power back to the people. I hope that the co-op will work on giving community members, especially people of color a voice, and increased decision-making power on how we cultivate the health of our community as whole.”
The co-op will be member- and worker-owned, giving everyone involved a seat at the decision-making table. And although the doors on their space—on the ground floor of an affordable housing complex at the corner of Bowdoin and Topliff Streets—won’t open until next fall, they have already been getting fresh food into the hands of their neighbors.
“Co-ops were first to respond when the crisis hit, because of other local connections,” Beleche said. “We don’t have major corporate infrastructure that has layers of decision-makers. Because co-ops have relationships with vendors and local farmers, their chain of supply was less disrupted.”
The co-op is calling all of its member-owners to check in and has helped people get food delivered to their homes. They also coordinated with with Fedco, a seed and gardening co-op in Maine, to gift fruit trees to over 500 local families.
Even before the pandemic, the co-op was engaging with their neighborhood partners without a permanent physical space. In 2012, Silverman helped start the Dorchester Winter Farmers Market, which she no longer runs but described as “a chance to test out theories and build relationships.” Two years ago, they started a pop-up farm stand with Uphams Corner Health Center to sell quality produce from the Boston Area Gleaners to seniors at a low cost. The co-op also runs a CSA in partnership with the Urban Farming Institute in Mattapan and OASIS on Ballou in Dorchester.
“We believe it’s the strong partnerships that will help this co-op be a success,” Silverman said. “We’re not trying to go it alone. We’re trying to build a network, build a food system that’s resilient and responds to the needs of our community.”
As the current pandemic has made clear, food is a unifying factor that connects economic development, public health and environmental issues.
“The co-op movement is a vision for how the world would like to be structured, and we’re building it,” Silverman said. “We’re building something positive—the message of being an owner, being equal, that no one has more stock than anyone else. We’re building a different kind of world.”
This story appeared in the Summer 2020 issue.
