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The Bay Area Food Conspiracy Movement According to Wikipedia, "The Food Conspiracy Movement" was an organizing effort in the early 1970s among neighbors who pooled resources to purchase food directly from farmers and small distributors. Typically, in the San Francisco Bay Area, a collective of like-minded individuals would establish a phone list and create a list of available goods. Members would then volunteer for tasks such as taking phone orders, tallying shopping lists, shopping at the Farmers market and hosting the pick up spot in a basement or local garage. There would also be a quarterly dry goods distribution. The produce was supplemented by eggs and dairy products from various small distributors. Some food conspiracies went on to become coops and organic and bulk food distributors. The term food conspiracy has since been copyrighted by a Tucson food co-op. That's right, a counter-commercial endeavor now fully copyrighted for commercial purposes. But rejection of corporate food values wasn't born in the sixties and certainly will not be buried there. The cruelty and corruption in the American food industry had already been exposed to mainstream America by works such as Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle"in 1906, but it took another fifty years for America's insulated middle class to really began to understand the inequities and social injustice underpinning their food system. The 1962 publication of Michael Harrington's "The Other America" helped to raise consciousness just as the famine in Biafra and images of war and dire global poverty were brought for the first time into American's homes by their toddling gargantuan televised mass-media. Also, in 1962, the publication of Rachel Carson's "The Silent Spring" brought the revelation that America's food sources were saturated with fungicides, chemical fertilizers and pesticides and led many in that generation to question for the first time the basic assumption that science and technology were beneficial, or even necessary to food production. Corporate greed was made glaringly apparent to many Americans in the struggle between the field workers who harvest America's food and giant agribusiness corporations like Tenneco and Dow Chemical. The struggle of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union to improve basic working conditions in the rich agricultural valleys of California helped dispel the bucolic myth of the small family farmer and unveil the grim reality of the "Factories in the field". Meanwhile, a movement for vegetarianism was sparked by a deeper understanding of the sentient qualities of animals and the growing concern that meat-eating was unhealthy for both individuals and the planet. Today in San Francisco a few remnants of the original movement still thrive. Other Avenues Cooperative in the Outer Sunset opened in 1974 and about the same time Rainbow Grocery in the Mission was started as a bulk food-buying program for an ashram. The original goal of the movement in general was to use food distribution as a form of community organizing and political education. The Food Conspirators shared a common vision of a "People's Food System" that could sustain and support a community with respect for both humanity and the environment. For a couple of decades anyway, they made that vision manifest. |