18 Aug Tue 2009
You Can't Even Give Away Organic Produce!
The August 17th issue of the Seattle Times had quite an interesting article on the problem of giving away organic produce. Imagine that! You can't even give it away! No wonder I cannot sell all I grow!
As you may or may not know, Seattle has a community garden program called P-Patch. Neighborhoods have to have a certain number of community gardens per resident population. One neighborhood, the Delridge area in southwest Seattle, formed a cooperative to educate residents about adding fresh produce to their diets. Like many low-income areas in US cities, you can find all kinds of convenience stores and fast-food joints, but it is difficult to find grocery stores, much less fresh food. If you want cigarettes and Mad Dog 20-20, no problem. If you want to buy a carrot, get out of here you commie! This year, the Delridge Produce Cooperative received $15,000 from the City of Seattle and started a four-week demonstration project, giving out FREE organic produce from the Delridge P-Patch in four locations. Yet people wouldn't take it. To quote the article, "Passers-by waved off offers of peaches, apples and homegrown squash." Now, imagine that. You can't even give away fresh organic produce - even those items to which people are accustomed! We're not talking tetragonia or aronia, here - we're talking apples, potatoes, cherries, zucchinis, tomatoes and plums which were displayed in the accompanying photo.
Why? I don't know, nor do I even have a theory. However, here is a story for you from the past. Back in 1969 I went on the road for the first time and discovered underground newspapers out on the west coast. I sold the Helix in Seattle and when I got back to Minneapolis, I started selling them on the street. I started with the Helix, the Willamette Bridge (from Portland), the L.A. Free Press and later added the Chicago Seed, the Berkely Barb, and two Minneapolis papers as they started up, the Minneapolis Flag and Hundred Flowers. ("Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought contend." - Mao) That winter I got a table assignment at the West Bank Student Union at the University of Minnesota and sold my papers while sitting down. This limited my performance art somewhat [You may not realize there is quite a bit of performing to selling papers on the street.], but it kept me out of the weather.
Now, one day I decided to see how people would react to free money. [I got the idea from a friend of mine.] I taped a few nickels, dimes and quarters to a blank sheet of paper and wrote in big letters, FREE MONEY - TAKE WHAT YOU NEED. I put it up on a bulletin board a little distance away in the hallway where I could observe people's reactions. Pretty soon there were lots of people stopping to look, but no one took any of the money. Was it just the squarehead uptight Minnesotan suspicion at work? Don't know. Eventually a janitor came by and took it down. !!! That is assuredly the squarehead uptight Minnesotan suspicion at work!
Anyways, trying to give something away that is good for you is not a foreign concept to me, but it still amazes me when people spurn the good and true and free and independent things in life, relying instead on the corporate-branded, TV-inspired, insipid nonsense. Oh, well.