There are moments when it feels to me like it’s just getting harder all the time to find clear, informed, useable information about what’s going on the grocery business. Among other things, I’ve been liking Errol Schweitzer’s The Checkout, and there’s some good industry reporting at places like Progressive Grocer (spoiler alert: not really what a political progressive would call “progressive”). But in general? Not so much.
I may just be particularly triggered by sloppy writing about the complexity of small-scale grocery retail, since I’ve been spending so much of my energy trying to make that more explicable and compelling to people. Here’s one that set me off on this first day of the new year: a piece in Food & Wine about “farm stops,” a kind of hybrid locavore-market-slash-food-hub that operates mostly or entirely on consignment, in partnership with nearby producers.
Despite some seemingly solid credentials, the writer doesn’t seem to have any context for understanding the sector she’s writing about. In contrasting farm stops with food co-ops, she signal-boosts the misinformation about co-ops being for members only (what would it take to drive a stake through the heart of that out-dated notion once and for all??). She notes the agonizingly slim profit margins for these kinds of stores but discounts that as a problem because the people running them aren’t only in it for the money. (There’s a whole set of questions here about sustainability and self-exploitation that it doesn’t seem to occur to her to ask.)
And she has only the sketchiest idea about produce. “Because much of the food is organic,” she notes, “the inventory must be checked often for spoilage.” Um, all fresh food needs to be checked often for spoilage, and there’s plenty of organic food made to be shipped and stocked over distance and time. This perpetuates another myth, that food grown without synthetic chemicals is somehow less long-lasting or reliable or safe (the disingenuous idea behind the industry pushback against Michelle Obama’s White House garden).
I hear these ideas locally, too, when we’re trying to get a few more people to shop a little more at our little grocery store in Orange, Mass. That’s why it bugs me so much when I see them amplified in a large-circulation mag. I take heart from the on-the-ground communications coming from some actual retailers, like the amazing daily e-newsletter put out by the New Lebanon Farmers Market, a farm stop in eastern New York state. They’re doing a great job of educating their customers about what it takes to make this kind of business work. Food & Wine might learn a thing or two from them too.
