Doug Black welcomes KEPW to Growers Market

Presenter: Independent producer and host of the KEPW program Talk Is Cheap, broadcast every Saturday afternoon at 4 p.m., here is Curtis Blankinship: 

Curtis Blankinship: Growers Market is an all-volunteer, not-for-profit food-buying club for buying organic and natural foods. The market is run entirely by volunteers with a consensus-based democratic process.

Their purposes are to provide quality food at an excellent price, support sustainable agriculture, and promote social change within our community and beyond.

The top floor of their building is made up of offices rented to nonprofit social change groups. The board of directors of the Growers’ Market, which includes representatives of both the food-buying club and the upstairs tenants, meets once a month, and these meetings are open to anyone who wants to attend.

I have used Growers Market building at the north end of Willamette Street for activist meetings since 1985, but I’ve neglected the market part of the Growers Market. So I went through the membership orientation with long-term member volunteer Doug Black.

Doug Black: We were founded in the late 1960s when much of the countercultural revolution was undergoing its naissance, its birth. We moved here and we bought this building in 1971, so we’re going on 55 years old later this year, and we’ve had many many great people come through over those years and many of them are still here (like myself).

We’re all volunteer except for a part-time paid building manager and their maintenance person. So when you see people around here, there’s no hierarchy. It’s more just based on experience and some wisdom kicking in. And when you see someone, you can generally approach most anyone and ask if you’re feeling a little unclear about what’s going on.

So we’re all on an equal footing here. We work by consensus decision-making as well. There’s no kind of, as I say, no hierarchy, no kind of boss that we stress.

So this is our mission statement, which kind of oversees the loose way the operation of the food-buying club: ‘The food-buying club’s primary purpose shall be to assist the community in obtaining adequate nutrition through educational information and by making healthful foods available at low cost, especially to the poor and the elderly to whom high quality nutrition might not otherwise be available.’

Okay. Our ethics are (pardon the pun) very firmly rooted in making available organics. Organics are the sustenance of the earth. That’s where we came from. That’s where we’re going. Petrochemicals will fade into the past.

Also, stressing local, locally grown, locally manufactured or packaged. I’ll point you out few of those local businesses. And also, the reduction of packaging, so we encourage you to bring your own bags, jars, bottles, etc.

Okay, upstairs, we own the building, so we rent out space upstairs. As you know, you’ve probably spent time up there. For the general public who’s never been there, there are some really cool, low-cost, low-revenue nonprofits that we think reflect our mission toward the public as to what we would like to see in businesses. Go upstairs and check out the information table sometime. It’s the big meeting room, community meeting room directly above us.

You can also sign out on an old-fashioned analog calendar, a meeting calendar, you can sign up for meetings there. The one caveat that we have for community is that you do not do a fundraiser. There’s no fundraising allowed here, no passing of cash or money.

Curtis Blankinship: Just briefly, though, this has been instrumental since the 70s in organizing actions, including the Warner Creek thing, and the Growers Market was instrumental in all of this.

Doug Black: Yeah, there’s been a lot of progressive organizations here. There was the anti-clearcut referendum group Gary Kuchar ran for many years. They had an office upstairs that had the ballot referendum.

Curtis Blankinship: Mine Freedom’s been there for years.

Doug Black: Yeah, they’re the oldest long-term tenant that we have in the building. But yeah, it’s a great nexus for progressive causes in Eugene. That’s no doubt.

The main entrance is on Willamette Street between the two restaurants.

Curtis Blankinship: It’s not your average corporate shopping experience.

Doug Black: These are do’s and don’ts. We have very limited back storage space to hold the vegetables.

So if you figure out just shortly before you come to the market, say on a Thursday afternoon, that you’re going to have a big party at your house and you need to make a gallon of guacamole, please do not, expressly do not take a whole box of avocados because we anticipate on a yearly cycle and a monthly cycle how much we’re going to be spending for produce. You could quickly exhaust our order.

We instead encourage you to go and shop at another locally-owned store like Red Barn or Kiva or Sundance. They would love to have your business as well. There’s more than one organic community store in town.

Curtis Blankinship: You’re getting different distributors than they do?

Doug Black: We use one wholesaler that’s very common with grocery items across the United States. That’s UNFI, United Foods. They deliver to us weekly.

There’s also Organically Grown Company. Most of our produce comes from Organically Grown. They have an office warehouse in Eugene. We like dealing with them.

That’s a good notice for your listeners because they have a pretty good awareness of how the American food system and the food diet is grossly out of line with the climate and how it’s driving the climate to change because we, on average, the ratio I heard years ago, probably still current, there’s 10 calories of energy that go into growing and delivering to your plate, one calorie of food. 

That’s a totally obscene relationship. 10 to 1 to get you your food.

So what we do is we stress, as Organically Grown does, to shorten that distance between the producer. meaning the farmer and we the consumer and/or the store that it’s being delivered to.

Curtis Blankinship: Right, you want things less than 500 miles away, ideally.

Doug Black: It’s the average. It would be nice if it came from only the Northwest, which is what they strive to do. Of course, winters are not going to work that way. California is where most of this comes from.

But, yeah, it’s a screwy ratio that’s just hammering the climate. So we have to be aware of that. And I think the best thing we can do in addition to this is to encourage everyone to find a city plot for the gardening or to grow their own foods at home as much as they can.

Curtis Blankinship: And use this to supplement your own food growing.

Doug Black: Absolutely. That’s what we do at home.

Curtis Blankinship: You’re probably going to have to do that, coming soon.

Doug Black: You might, if this current memo of understanding dissolves, we’re back to running out of oil. So let’s see what happens.

Curtis Blankinship: You need to know what tare is.

Doug Black: That’s our tare scale, you know, what a tare scale, a tare is, a tare weight?

Curtis Blankinship: Yeah, it’s the weight that you don’t charge for.

Doug Black: Correct. It’s for the container or the bag and you don’t want to get charged for that, especially if it’s glass, It’s very dense. So that’s where you weigh it out first and that’s also another thing you want to write down, besides the unit price, you’ve got to write down any tare weights so that they can punch it into the scale up here when you getting ready to pay. Unless you’ve got a photographic memory, you’re going to want to write it down.

When we started in 1971, there was no other place you could go. This is the way food-buying clubs and food co-ops, what their base foundation was. When we started, it was because and shoppers couldn’t find organic food. We were the place that they would go to. This is where you would go to find organic, non-petrochemically-grown food. And that’s the way it was.

In the last 55 years, we’ve had so much change in the marketplace, not just in Eugene, but across the United States. The industry, the availability of organic foods has just skyrocketed. So we’re, in essence, by default, kind of, in a way, competing. I say that very loosely, competing with other stores in town that carry a good variety of organic foods.

Our revenues and our sales have not stayed constant over the last 50 years.

Curtis Blankinship: And then we need these things because this creates community.

Doug Black: Absolutely. It’s not an anonymous place you go. If I do have to go to another store, rarely do I meet people I know when I go in those stores. Here, I’ve got friends, you know, I’ve known these people, I’ve made friends with here, that have been, you know, 27 years.

Curtis Blankinship: Much more connection than you would in a regular store. (Absolutely.) Even a regular health food store.

Doug Black: So it’s healthy in that way. It gives you peace of mind, and it gives you more connectedness and mental health, really, to know that you know where your food’s coming from and you know where the people are from that are helping you get your food.

Curtis Blankinship: You can find out more about Growers Market by going to growersmarket.net or calling 541-687-1145. 541-687-1145.

Presenter: You can hear Curtis Blankinship and Talk Is Cheap every Saturday afternoon at 4 on KEPW 97.3 Eugene Peaceworks Community Radio.