Page 14 RAIN January 1977 should be required reading for all food co-op staffs, one of many fine articles in an issue focused on food cooperatives. Food Co-Op Nooz, $3.00 per year from: Food Co-op Project 64 East Lake St. Chicago, IL 60601 The food co-op movement in this country is in a period of tremendous, turbulent growth. New co-ops and buying clubs are being formed every day. Warehouses and trucking routes are being established to support and coordinate the rapidly increasing flow of food through the system. Other supportive enterprises, such as bakeries and publication collectives, are springing up, as well as the establishment of collective farms. Yet, with all of this growth, there are also serious problems confronting the new co-op movement, including political dissension and the hard realities of economics. The Nooz is a bi-monthly newspaper for the national food cooperative movement. Published for people actively involved in co-ops, it offers an insider's view of what's going on throughout the country, with background reports on various communities, news of recent events and analysis of critical problems within the movement. The annual subscription includes a comprehensive Food Cooperative Directory, a listing of nearly 2,000 food stores, warehouses, bakeries and resource organizations in the United States and Canada. ··---. cpf 1 Turnover, Newsletter of the People's Food System, $3.00/year from: Newsletter Collective 3030 20th Street San Francisco, CA 94110 The People's Food System of the San Francisco Bay Area is comprised of ten co-op and collective stores and fourteen support collectives, including staple and produce warehouses, a bakery, herb, cheese and yogurt collectives, and an egg farm called "Left Wing Poultry." They are consciously setting out to create a model of a worker and consumer controlled economy. The Food System is seen as an important experi-· ment in collective economics, and Turnover reports on its development and its role within the community. In addition, the newsletter carries incisive articles on the politics of food, reports on the farmworkers' struggles, information on the foods available through the cooperative system and information on nutrition. The newsletter is very well done and provides an excellent view of one of the centers of the movement. On the Market c/o Citizen Action Press 443 Russel Blvd. Davis, CA 95616 A monthly newsletter to provide a medium of communication for farmers, truckers, warehouses and food cooperatives in Northern California. Loading Dock is a similar newsletter just begun for Oregon and Washington. Write c/o Starflower, 385 Lawrence, Eugene, OR 9740?. Scoop, Cooperation in the North Country, $6.00/year from: 2519 1st Ave. South Minneapolis, MN 55404 Another center of co-op activity is in the "North Country"-Minnesota, the Dakotas, Michigan and Wisconsin. It has also been a center of intense controversy in the past couple of years, especially in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. An intense political struggle erupted there in the spring of 1975 over control and direction of the movement, testing the community's cooperative principles to their utmost. The past two years have been extremely difficult ones in the Twin Cities, and the conflicts there have had a major impact on the cooperative movement around the country. The Scoop is an independent newspaper that provides lively and critical accounts of events in the food system of the North Country. REGIONAL NETWORKS As the alternative food system has evolved over the past few years, there has grown a higher level of integration between elements of the movement, first within urban areas and then extending out to incorporate major regions of the country. San Francisco, Austin, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Boston, Madison and Washington, D. C., all have extensive "networks" of co-ops and buying clubs supported by warehouses and numerous producer collectives. Much more extensive regional networks have also grown to inter-connect cooperating communities around the nation, with the warehouses having become important centers for the trucking and distribution of ever-increasing amounts offood. Beyond Isolation, Las Truckaderos, 2nd ed., 1976, $1.00 from: Free Spirit Press Main P.O. Box 24112 Oakland, CA 94623 This pamphlet is one of the first major theoretical pieces on the development of a regional network within the alternative food system. Truckers have become the main "curriers" in the food system, carrying the latest news and information from warehouse to warehouse and from co-op to co-op around the country. Beyond Isolation was based on the experience of Las Truckaderos, an alternative trucking collective, as ~hey visited collective warehouses up and down the West Coast in 1975. It includes brief descriptions of several colfective warehouses in the region, noting their isolation from each other, and then goes on to critique several of the "contradictions" within the movement. This second edition of the pamphlet is especially valuable because it includes a sevenpage supplement with reprints from several sources of feedback on the ideas presented, especially on the question of co-ops versus collectives. It's a mighty good introduction to the internal politics of the new food system. A new publication is also in process.
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