Food co-ops maintain their mystique by presenting themselves as distinct from conventional grocery stores. What’s being sold in stores like Whole Foods or the Boise Co-op is atmosphere as much as product. It’s the mist covered produce, smartly designed product packaging and total lack of primary colors, all kept stocked by hip looking employees who each seem to be biding time before their next backpacking trip across Southeast Asia or their band’s next tour. It somehow feels healthy, and responsible, just being there.
The distinctness of the co-op, however, is not limited to product packaging or its choice of employees (the co-op type, all of whom are dedicatedly uniform in their expressions of distinctness). The co-op’s otherness is achieved in part by its appropriation of foods from around the world. The co-op aisles are filled with “ethnic” products which are sometimes intermingled with the more conventional American foods, and sometimes grouped together under generic aisle markers. The presence of this “exotic” food at the co-op is an integral part of the way the co-op locates itself in relation to other grocery stores; this location happens on what I’ll call the Foodtinuum.
Ethnic food in the co-op functions as an exotic form of its other products, which are already distinct from foods at conventional grocery stores: conventional red tomato sauce is bad; organic garlic and basil tomato sauce is better; Thai curry sauce with lemongrass and coconut cream is best. By purchasing these exotic foods, the responsible consumer is not only withdrawing support from the conventional production of food, they are progressing beyond conventional cuisine in general – they have moved from the far right of the Foodtinuum, where processed red sauce comes in a dull red can, to the far left where the product has been exoticized beyond recognition; to reach Foodtinuum nirvana is to purchase a product your friends have never heard of, and whose label you cannot read.
The appropriation of these exotic foods onto the Foodtinuum is problematic considering both the colonial history and economic globalization that enable the red curry sauce to be a profitable option for those who stock the co-op’s shelves. Entire food cultures, and the often troubled stories of how elements of them made it across the world and into fashion in American food blogs, “New American” cuisine and onto co-op shelves are lost in the simple fact that, well, curry is just more interesting than spaghetti (a once exotic food that has effectively crossed the Foodtinuum).
The narrow focus on staple foods from numerous countries acts as a sort of colonization itself; curry from Thailand, kim chi from Korea, egg rolls from China, sushi from Japan, refried beans from Mexico; from vast, diverse and holistic food cultures the co-op distills its selection to the foods that caricaturize each country in the Western mind. These food cultures and their representative staples are mocked by the aisle markers used to organize them: “Oriental,” “Hispanic,” “Ethnic” (the last being a catch all, especially for those foods that have been generalized beyond their origins – i.e. curry powder, an American generic for the various curry pastes used in different parts of the world).
The appropriation of new foods into the spectrum is necessary to keep the exotic sufficiently exotic. This is especially challenging as organics make their way into conventional grocery stores. It is now common to find partial or whole aisles dedicated to “Natural” foods at conventional stores; interestingly, this is also the best place to find “ethnic” foods as well. The co-op must keep up; as staple foods from around the world make their way across the Foodtinuum and into big, warehouse grocery stores, other, less familiar foods must be promoted as obscure.
For example, have your tried Kombucha? It’s fermented tea from Asia; it’s like regular tea but better. You can get it at the co-op.
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