That’s how long (or how short) it’s been since the steering committee of the Wooster Local Foods Cooperative, Inc., came together and began meeting regularly. And now another newborn has entered the world, and its proud parents’  dreams have come true: Local Roots Market opened its doors on Saturday, October 31.

As you might expect, enormous amounts of hard work went into bringing our plans to fruition. When I last updated you on the cooperative’s progress, we still had hopes of opening in September, but the bureaucratic pitfalls and obstacles kept stalling us as we tried to reach that goal:

Red tape challenges: It took us a while to figure out how the business should be classified for licensing. We viewed ourselves as a farmers market, except that the producer members paid a “retainage fee” that covered the market representing them in sales, but that didn’t fit the Ohio Department of Agriculture’s definition of a farmers market. And though we had serious initial concerns about being classed as a “retail food establishment” (RFE), worrying that this would cause undue hardship on producers, we asked questions and got reassuring answers from the ODA and from the Wayne County Board of Health.

Cash flow crunch: Thanks to that delay, as well as to the as-yet non-receipt of our grant funds (now due to arrive in December or January), we found ourselves stalled on purchasing the initial equipment — sinks and coolers, primarily — for the indoor market. As a result, our RFE license has been postponed until December 1. On the upside, waiting until then will give us a longer term on that license, but in the meantime, we still applied for a farmers market license and will have our producers sell at an indoor farmers’ market (where they staff their own booths) during November. (And we’ve been given yet more display units and equipment by our local grocery chain, Buehler’s.)

Techno hurdles: The online order system had some major snags along the way, but with the help of an outside database programmer, we managed to work out the bugs and get the system ready for our producer members to enter their information. This delay eventually worked in our favor, too, since we will not be able to have pick-up days until we have the RFE license in December.

Anchors a ways away: We have not made as much progress in working out details for our proposed “anchor” vendors as we had hoped, but we decided to get started on our own, anyway, and hope to bring in a coffee kiosk in the near future as well as to develop an in-house butcher shop when we create our commercial kitchen. Both of those anchors will be responsible for funding their own ventures, which will also affect the timetable for each to begin business, but we believe that they will add a great deal of value to the market.

Is your head spinning yet? Then you have an idea of what the past few months have been like for us. The stress of working through these major issues has caused many an argument in our meetings, but since everyone involved genuinely likes, respects, and appreciates one another and keeps the cooperative in mind in making all decisions, we have been able to work through conflicts and find a way forward — even finding creative new solutions along the way.

Ta-Da List

• Along with a phone line, we now have Internet service in the building as well as a computer set-up for a market office.

• On another work day in October, members of the steering committee sealed the cracks in the concrete floor in one quadrant of the building, bringing it up to the standards required by the Health Department for food-handling areas.

• The steering committee decided to have another work evening in lieu of its usual meeting this week and spent the time vacuuming and then steam-cleaning the carpet; patching, sanding, and painting walls; and getting things tidied up.

• Volunteers, including students from the Organic Farming Program House at The College of Wooster, have helped to spread the word and to distribute flyers around town.

• The fantastic website continues to win fans, and our column in the Wooster Weekly News has helped to spread the information about the market and give readers more ideas for appreciating seasonal, local produce.

• The monthly newsletter has begun to expand as other members contribute articles and recipes, and we’ve come up with a list of monthly themes to give ideas to other contributors and to add to our educational mission. (For November, American Diabetes Month, we’ve had a pair of articles that emphasize eating whole foods — easily made part of a locavore diet — in dealing with this lifestyle disease.)

All of this work has finally brought us around to Opening Day. On Saturday, October 31, we opened the doors to the community on the final day of the Downtown Farmers’ Market and welcomed everyone in for an open house. Members of the steering committee offered home-baked cookies (using local ingredients, of course), coffee, and good local cider to guests as people wandered through the building and learned more about what they will see in coming weeks.

Upcoming events

• On Saturdays in November, Local Roots will be open from 10 AM to 3 PM for the indoor farmers market, featuring many of our 20+ producer members who have signed up to date.

• On November 7 and 21, Local Roots will host a film series (“Fresh Food, Fresh Ideas”) to offer an entertaining and educational look at the American food system and at how we can do better. The first film, “Food, Inc.,” will be shown at The Big Picture, our downtown movie theatre, with a discussion afterward in the Local Roots building. On November 21, the Local Roots building will be the site of the screening of “PolyCultures,” a local documentary that shows how organizations across northeast Ohio are taking back control of their food supply. The filmmakers, Tom Kondilas and Brad Masi, will be on hand to share their thoughts on what they’ve seen since the film wrapped up production.

• On November 20, from 7 to 9:30 PM, Local Roots will hold a holiday open house during downtown Wooster’s annual Window Wonderland event (when families take a stroll around town as businesses unveil their holiday-decorated window fronts).

• On November 21, the indoor farmers market will expand into the first annual Holiday Market, where shoppers can find not only good local produce for the Thanksgiving feast but also delicious baked goods (yes, the Baklava Queen, yours truly, will even bake baklava for the event) and gift items by local artists and crafters. Best of all, we will have a very special guest on hand: Ohio farmer and author Gene Logsdon will sell and sign several of his books, including “All Flesh Is Grass” and “Small-Scale Grain Raising.”

Yes, that’s a lot of activity in the first month of business, and it has meant a great deal of work for the past few weeks to spread the word and get everything prepared for all of these events. Since we recognize we’re going to have a slightly slower start than we had hoped for, we want to find other ways to bring more people into the market and to get them used to being involved in Local Roots. We still need to increase our membership — and to bring in more membership fees to keep running the market — so every chance we get to talk to potential members and to welcome new faces to the crowd, we’ll take it.

And while we take a moment here and there to celebrate the sheer joy in knowing that we did it, we also know we have a lot more work ahead — and that it’s the kind of work that is truly worth doing.

Photo of garage door painting by Gretchen Tefs; all others by the author.

Why? Because, as you understand if you live in a rural community, our grocery store is one of the most important businesses in town.

Our store means more than just ready access to food and toilet paper. Rural grocery stores are small businesses, providing jobs and generating tax revenue that support the community. Without a local store, the payroll and tax revenue that our food purchases generate go elsewhere. When you have to leave town to buy groceries, it’s easier to pick up hardware, fill prescriptions, and buy clothes at the same time. The loss of a grocery store affects other businesses in a town as well.

Having a grocery store also helps attract new residents to a town. Similar to a school, a post office, restaurants, and churches, a grocery store makes a community a more attractive place to live. Grocery stores can also be social places where you run into neighbors in the produce aisle, introduce yourself to someone new in town, or catch up on local happenings with the cashier.

Case in point: while shopping this Sunday, I finally asked Sally, a cashier, what the big blue-and-orange numbers in the window meant. “It’s the bankroll!” she said, and handed me a punch card. I am now entered in a weekly drawing for $600 worth of groceries, but to win I have to have visited the store that week to have my card punched. That’s one way to build loyalty, and I now feel less like a newcomer and more like a member of the community. I’m in on the secret.

Not all small towns are as lucky as we are. The lack of a grocery store means residents have less access to healthy fresh fruits and vegetables, and the elderly and others without reliable transportation will tend to buy their food at convenience stores with more limited selections or go for longer periods of time between visits to the store.

Small-town grocery stores do face some unique challenges owing to the size of the communities they serve and the amount of inventory they can carry. An increasing number of creative solutions are emerging to meet these challenges. The best examples begin within the community and help residents identify a solution that works for their particular locale. Here are ways that several rural communities are keeping the grocery store open in their town.

Local ownership:  When city leaders in Stapleton, Nebraska, found that 95 percent of respondents to a survey wanted a grocery store in town, a local resident stepped up to the challenge and with the help of two local investors, a new store was under way. Many rural grocery stores are already owned by local businesspeople who understand the importance of their store to the community. Communities that are losing a store owned by an outside investor or regional chain should look inward for someone from the community willing to operate the store.

Cooperative ownership: A half hour was too far to drive to buy groceries for residents of Walsh, Colorado, reports the Denver Post, so this town of 723 people decided to solve the problem themselves. Over 300 of them pooled their money to re-open the grocery store. A $160,000 interest-free loan helped restock the shelves, and they were in business. One secret to their success is community engagement – residents know that the success of this cooperative venture depends on residents spending their grocery money in Walsh, and the store can be more responsive to the needs of the community because its members are co-owners.

Youth affiliated: About 10 years ago, the Nebraska Sandhills community of Arthur, Nebraska, lost their grocery store. With residents forced to drive 40 miles for groceries and some elderly residents relying on neighbors for delivery, community leaders decided to act. They enlisted an extracurricular entrepreneurial business development program with high school students: eight students undertook market research, identified support, rented a building, and, by the end of the year, opened the Wolf Den grocery store. (The school mascot is a wolf.) The grocery store in this town of just 144 people remains open to this day.

There are times when I worry about not having access to organic produce, or that the grocery distributor will someday choose not to deliver to my town’s store and I’ll be forced to take my food dollars somewhere else. But for now, I choose to support my community by shopping locally.

Wish me luck on winning next week’s bankroll!

Round One: Jill Richardson v. Mark Mcafee

Richardson, who blogs indefatigably at La Vida Locavore, offers a provocative article this week on Alternet arguing that we “ditch the hysterics” over raw milk and work with regulators to form some sort of regulatory compromise whereby consumers can access raw milk more easily if they choose. As an example of difficulty in regulation, Richardson points to the large California raw milk operation Organic Pastures, which has drawn regulatory fire in the past. Among Organic Pastures’ offenses, Richardson writes, have been relying on other producers but not disclosing this practice:  “He outsources some of his production as his demand outstrips his supply. However, that means that he does not have direct control over all of the dairy products sold under his label, and it also means that his customers have relatively little information about where their raw dairy products come from,” she writes.

“Organic Pastures Dairy has never ever bottled one ounce of another dairies raw milk…not one drop. This is a blatant lie and an untruth spoken to try and hurt OPDC and mislead our consumers. I ask you to print a retraction or face a letter from our attorney,” shot backdairy owner Mark McAfee in the comments section.

Ethicurean contributor Amanda Rose has written here and elsewhere that Organic Pastures has admitted to outsourcing for cream, colostrum, cheese, and butter products [PDF], as late as March of 2009.

Round Two: Amanda Rose v. Ted Beals

Rose’s scrap began this summer in her Ethicurean post “Memo to raw milk advocates: Improve information, or get sued,” which remains the most-commented post for this blog. In it, she describes how food injury attorney Bill Marler had threatened to sue the natural-foods advocacy group the Weston A. Price Foundation over inaccurate information. For an example of this, she cited the idea of competitive exclusion – the advocates’ claim that raw milk has components that kill pathogens thereby rendering raw milk “uniquely safe.” The scientific research behind the claim is poor and offers consumers no guarantee of safe milk, she argued in a white paper she wrote on the topic.

Within weeks of Rose’s paper, WAPF self-styled raw-milk expert and retired physician Ted Beals wrote a response to Rose in the fall issue of the WAPF journal Wise Traditions [PDF], posted prominently on the RealMilk.com homepage.

“One of the basic myths of the anti-raw milk folks is that it doesn’t make any difference how few pathogens get into the milk…even one bacterium will rapidly multiply until everything is overwhelmed with bad bugs. All of the publications Amanda Rose selected demonstrate this scare tactic. Pathogens do not rapidly multiply in milk that is fresh and unpasteurized, they do not grow, in fact they die off.” [p 102]

In a detailed response Rose wrote on her other blog, Rose noted that Beals provides no data to support the claim of raw milk’s unique safety and responded that “raw milk, like all other food on the planet, offers no safety guarantees. It might kill pathogens; it might not kill pathogens…. Each pathogen…behaves differently in raw milk: some populations die-off over time, some grow for awhile then die off, some show no growth or death when put in raw milk. Temperature is also important; most pathogens will grow in raw milk left out on the counter at room temperature; Listeria may die.”

And what do we think? That ALL food carries risk, whether pasteurized or unpasteurized, organically grown or industrially grown. Raw milk can be provided, sold, and consumed as safely as hamburger — many would argue more safely. However, groups like the WAPF do no one a service by minimizing the very real risks. Consumers who want to be able to buy raw milk should be able to do so, just as they can choose to cook their farm-raised, grass-fed hamburger bloody if they like. (For now: many would like to see our entire meat supply irradiated in the name of consumer safety.)

With all of the threats of lawsuits flying around, we asked Rose if she has secured representation. “It’s really too soon for that. However, we do have a club, Raw Milk Sue-age,” she joked. “The way this is going, we may offer t-shirts on Café Press.”