First Annual Boulevard Pumpkin Festival: A Cooperative Dining Experience

Greetings Coop Family!

I am pleased to be writing about a collaboration that has been in the works for months - The Boulevard Pumpkin Festival - which will be held this Saturday, October 26th from 12-6pm. This is an original vision between local start-up Experience RVA (myself and James Crenshaw) along with the Richmond Food Co-op’s Michele Lord and Susan Hill. After a long road, and a lot of hard work, we are extremely excited for an event that will feature delicious local food, a COOPERATIVE DINING AREA, craft beer, wine, live music, and a family friendly Kid’s Zone.

It has always been our vision to create a locally focused event to draw attention to the up and coming neighborhood of Scott’s Addition. As the Co-op grows we feel as though this was a unique opportunity to be integral participants in its transition from an underutilized industrial zone to a vibrant community. After all, this is our future new home!

At the Boulevard Pumpkin Festival this the Richmond Food Co-op will be running the Cooperative Dining area. What is the Cooperative Dining area, you ask? It is one of the best opportunities to expose our mission to nearly 10,000 festival-goers. We will have a full street on North Boulevard to get out en masse and spread the Co-op Gospel. This is a MEMBERSHIP DRIVE! We are hoping to decorate each table with a Co-op table top, get as much signage as possible, and utilize our burgeoning member/owners to be at the front lines talking about the Co-op, signing up new member/owners, and discussing the importance of the Co-op as an integral part of the Scott's Addition community.

Friends, this is a call to arms! We need you to fully take advantage of this opportunity by signing up with our Volunteer Coordinator Katherine Hill, katherinescotthill@gmail.com. I promise a great time with friends new and old, delicious Pumpkin food, and a membership drive to remember! 

Kindest Regards,

-Andrew LaBonte (Member/Owner)

Join Us: 1st Annual Richmond Food Co-op Member Meeting

We are so excited to be holding our first member/owner annual meeting tonight and hope to see you there!

When: Tonight — Monday October 7th, 2013 from 6:00-7:30
Where: Feedmore 1415 Rhoadmiller Street Richmond, Virginia 23220 Directions — HERE

We are looking forward to recapping just how far we have come since starting our membership drive back in February. We've had some exciting happy hours, potlucks, community forums and our first annual picnic. Of course, we have some business to take care of too and will be electing some new board members!

To recap, the following 3 members are up for election are:

Board nominees: Julietta, Tom and Kelsey

• Tom Karnes, professor at VCU. Learn more about Tom here.
• Kelsey Miller, local Tax Associate and Scott's Addition resident. Learn more about Kelsey here.
• Julietta Singh, English professor at the University of Richmond. Learn more about Julietta here.

In other exciting news, we have just been awarded with and are eager to announce a $10,000 seed grant from the Co-op Initiative, a cooperative assistance nonprofit. What does this mean and how will it help your Co-op? Find out tonight!

We also have plenty of committee signup opportunities. Are you awesome at outreach, event planning, or have you just been itching to get involved in a community garden? These are some of the avenues where we can use your help (and awesomeness). This is a great chance for you to get involved with your Co-op!

Then there is the fellowship. Fellowship is one of the main drivers of a good Co-op. What is the definition of fellowship?

Fellowship: friendly association, especially with people who share one's interests.

"They valued fun and good fellowship as the cement of the community."

So come spend some time with us tonight and meet other member/owners and share in our joint interest of community, local healthy food, and our vision for a Co-op in Richmond, Virginia. It's long overdue, don't you agree?

-Tim Vidra, Board Vice-Chair

Growing our Leadership

The Richmond Food Co-op grows every day.  Our recognition spreads, new members sign up, and current members become more involved.  Over the past year, this venture has expanded from a living room meeting of a dozen interested participants into a community of nearly 300 member/owners.  Our earned media record, relationships with national cooperative organizations, and popular chalkboard membership campaign all tout our success.  We were also just awarded a $10,000 seed grant from the Co-op Initiative, a cooperative assistance nonprofit.

Not bad, Richmond Food Co-op.

Now we are at the point to grow our leadership core.  This month, the board expands from five to seven members, and we will add a project manager position. 

I write to speak to the excitement and importance of the implementation of a paid project manager.  We have made incredible strides as a volunteer-run start-up.  The Co-op’s marketing and planning is a consistent part of many of our lives.  And now we find ourselves with a burgeoning business on our hands, requiring daily attention and maintenance.  Our attendance (thanks to a scholarship) at the Consumer Cooperative Management Association’s conference back in June taught us how tightly formal project management and successful start-up progression are linked.

Michele Lord’s transition from Board Chair to Project Manager is natural and necessary.  She has been at the helm of the Co-op, from idea to implementation, and is currently managing all member administration and communications.  Her new role will help advance the Co-op in several critical ways:

•                Increase our membership base

•                Strengthen the power of our member committees

•                Identify new allies and sources of support in the community

•                Stay connected with the national food co-op organizations

The Co-op is growing and growing up.  We celebrate this benchmark of our first hire as a sign of progress and commitment to opening this business as soon as possible.  We are on our way!

-Susan Hill, Board Chair

Meet the Board Nominees! Part 3

Want to Cook Everything Perfectly?

Anyone can do it. I am not talking about sauces, flavor combinations and presentation here, but about cooking your food to the perfect degree of doneness every time. This can be easily achieved by anyone regardless of their cooking skill using a technique called Sous Vide. I have been a Professor at VCU teaching chemistry to pharmacy students for many years. Since I am a chemist, I have a natural interest in cooking because the changes that occur during cooking are in fact Chemistry. This interest has led me to the study of  culinary arts and I have been certified in culinary arts and food handling for about 2 and a half years.  As a teacher at the University of Richmond Culinary arts program, I have integrated Sous Vide cooking into my class on The Science of Cooking For Non Scientists and have found it to be the most interesting techniques I have worked with. 

The technique involves sealing the food to be cooked in a vacuum bag and poaching it in a water bath at a very precise temperature. The vacuum bag is used to protect the food from air which may oxidize and discolor some types of foods. The water bath temperature chosen is the temperature that provides perfect doneness for the food being cooked and this doneness is achieved throughout the entire portion of food, not only in its center. In conventional cooking, since the foods are heated from the outside, one must overheat the outside of the food in order to completely cook the inside. Not overheating the outside of the food is important especially for meats, poultry and fish because the overcooked outside will be tough, less moist  and less flavorful. In addition,  food overcooked on the outside at a high temperature (think outside grill) will contain mutagenic and carcinogenic byproducts of such cooking.

This picture picture shows the cross section of a steak cooked conventionally and having a large temperature gradient along with the steak below it with that has a  small temperature gradient representing a steak cooked Sous Vide.  

The picture on the right shows the finished product of what a steak cooked Sous Vide would actually look like.

For fruits and vegetables, imagine the perfect amount of crispness in each piece of carrot  or apple even if the size of the pieces were not uniform to start with. Since the temperature is being held at exactly the temperature of perfect doneness, it is virtually impossible to overcook your food using Sous Vide. Some foods may become even more moist and flavorful if cooked for several days in the water bath. 

So, How do you get started? The first thing you will need is a Sous Vide cooker. These are available commercially - they can be a little pricey, but they are coming down in price pretty rapidly due to increased demand. Another option is that a Sous Vide Cooker can be put together from common household items that you may already have. You can construct a Sous Vide cooker using an aquarium heater, a crock pot, a probe thermometer and an inexpensive electric on/off controller. The crock pot cycles on and off to maintain the temperature set from the controller and read by the probe thermometer. The aquarium circulator is for keeping the water  in the crock pot moving for convection. Various instructions on how to do this are available online. 

The only other thing you will need is a vacuum seal bag. Again, you can go the expensive way and use a "Food Saver" type vacuum sealer, which you may already possess as a way to keep frozen foods fresher/longer. The inexpensive way is to use Ziploc Vacuum Freezer bags that have an air tight nipple  and come with a plunger to manually suck air out of the bags once sealed.  I have found that these work fine and are a very inexpensive and a suitable alternative for both Sous Vide cooking and vacuum freezer storage. 

As a Co-op member/owner (and Board Nominee) I hope to advocate not only healthy foods, but also high quality delicious and interesting foods such as fresh/local foods cooked by the Sous Vide Technique. Sous Vide cooking could be integrated into the Co-op's prepared foods, and represent a unique offering to the food conscious members of the Co-op community. The Co-op opens up an opportunity for us to come together as a community and share ideas about how to push Richmond's food future forward, and I am glad to be a part of that conversation. 

-Tom Karnes, Co-op Member/Owner

Meet the Board Nominees! Part 2

Why Co-op?

While I can’t speak for the nearly 300 member/owners who have already joined the Co-op, I can tell you that I see the Co-op as more than just an opportunity to cut down my walk to the grocery store. I see this as an opportunity to support my neighborhood and my city at large. I say Co-op because it’s the Richmond thing to do.

The way I see it, a Co-op is long overdue in Richmond. We’re a city chockfull of eco-friendly people who bike to friends’ houses to enjoy a nice Legend Lager and then recycle the bottle. We grow our own staples and then walk to the grocery store to fill in the gaps. We support the business owners we know, whether that means shopping at Plan 9 on Small Business Saturday (and every other Saturday of the year) or growing hops for Hardywood Brewery. We reuse and recycle by starting companies like Books, Bikes, and Beyond that keep us outfitted in Richmond-appropriate attire while supporting community literacy. We paint murals for change. We grow things together.

I could go on, but I think you get it and you've probably reached the real question: How have we not Co-oped already?

Okay, it’s also an opportunity to potentially cut down my grocery store walk by more than 2 miles. But that’s just a side benefit.

-Kelsey Miller, Co-op Member/Owner (and Scott's Addition resident)

Meet the Board Nominees! Part 1

Greetings Friends and fellow Co-op Member/Owners!

I am thrilled to be nominated for a position on the Board of the Richmond Food Co-op. There are many reasons for my keen investment in working toward the growth and prosperity of our co-op, all of which merge my intellectual and personal commitments. I grew up in Canada with a mother who was a political activist and who fought diligently against the unsustainable practices of the Manitoba hog industry. Through her work, I learned at a very early age that contemporary factory farming is at every turn unethical: Its treatment of animals is abhorrent; its environmental practices wholly unsustainable; and its stressful working conditions produce extraordinarily high rates of family abuse and suicide.  My father was an allergist who specialized in food allergies. From him I learned about the sensitivities that each of us face in relation to the sustenance of our own bodies, and the poisonous effects of mono-cultural production that affect us all today in the wake of globalization. My early childhood, then, was one seeped in food politics. 

My doctoral work in Comparative Literature built from this early interest in food to investigate how global writers use food in their literary works to illuminate myriad forms of oppression: State-sanctioned poverty, domestic abuse, animal welfare, and institutional forms of racism. I have published diverse articles on how literature employs food and eating to upset many of our most deeply held beliefs, including how Western rational thought has enabled our species to act in wholly self-serving ways at the expense of other species and the environment. At the University of Richmond, my course “Food for Thought” brings together literary, environmental, historical, anthropological, and philosophical discourses on food and eating to rethink the very basis our eating practices. If we agree that “you are what you eat,” then we also must consider that in eating we are always in a state of becoming something different. Eating, then, paves the way for new possibilities in the future and new forms of being human. 

For my family, which includes my partner Nathan Snaza and our 16-month old daughter Isadora Singh, having a thriving Co-op is vital to our investment in Gandhian thought and practice. Like Gandhi, we believe that a society that thrives on the subjugation of many for the betterment of some is a sick society. Food is the best way to gauge the health of any community: Only when all community members are well-fed can we begin to build abiding alliances between individuals and families regardless of race, class, sex, or religion. “Well-fed” of course does not mean “full.” It’s not enough to provide cheap fast-food meals for families; we must provide sustainable, healthy, and ecologically responsible food for everyone. My vision for our Co-op is one where we will come together as a diverse collective, learning from our differences but united in our mutual desire to nourish ourselves alongside of—rather than in spite of—others who may be less fortunate.

-Julietta Singh, Co-op Member/Owner and Board Nominee

Community Forums Return!

Back to school..back to work..back to life...back to your Co-op!

It's time to get back at it! With Labor Day fast approaching it may be time to say goodbye to summer, but it also time to say hello to the return of the Co-op Community Forums - a monthly opportunity for us to strengthen our shared vision and get one step closer to opening our doors. The Fall Community Forum series will be held on the third Monday of the month, September through December, and we will be relocating our meetings to FeedMore (1415 Rhoadmiller Road). The schedule each month will be an Information Session for prospective and new member/owners at 6pm, and a General Meeting for existing member/owners at 7pm. 

The information session will cover cooperative basics and provide an overview of this community grown venture. Anyone interested in learning more is welcome to join. We also encourage new member/owners to attend this orientation session once (and bring a friend!).

The general meeting for current Co-op member/owners is a monthly gathering for those who want to contribute to the process of starting this venture. Member/owners will have the opportunity to engage with committee representatives, contribute to projects, and receive monthly updates.

For all the details visit our website.

This is your Co-op. This is your community. Welcome back.