A Local Yokel Browses the Bulk Section

by Suzanne Miller

My local food coop has a fabulous bulk section.  Fair-trade coffee, lots of organic grains, hard-to-find flours, herbs and spices… the selection is fabulous.  And someone there has a sense of humor:  the bin number for refined white sugar is 6666.  Hee.

I like buying in bulk.  It reduces food waste and packaging.  The prices are great.  I buy as much as I need and if I’m feeling really on top of my game, I bring my own glass jars from home and skip the plastic bags.

So I thought it would only be natural for the coop to label the origin of the bulk products.   Buying locally and in bulk?  Double whammy goodness.

Well, I was wrong.

Labeling encourages informed food choices.  Usually food coops support informed choices.  I was told that one food coop – I think one in Berkeley that’s no longer in business – pioneered the now-standard practice of putting the cost per weight on labels.  For those of us who skipped calculus, it lets you do apples-to-apples price comparison of a 1L container of juice to one with 20 ounces.  I love this story:  the meat department at my coop started labeling how fish was caught.  Well, guess what happened.  People stopped buying unsustainably harvested fish and the Coop stopped selling it. 

C'mon... informed food choices driving market demand?  Everyone wins.

So I was confident my request to label bulk food in the suggestion box would be welcomed and maybe I’d get a thank you for connecting the sustainability dots. 

Uh, no. 

First off, my question wasn’t answered in the newsletter, it was answered on the suggestion box bulletin board.  That’s a coop’s way of letting you know exactly how important they think your request is.  My ego bruise aside, the answer wasn’t satisfying.  The editors basically said that since the source of bulk food changed from time to time, they couldn’t label the bins with a city or even a state.

Well, phooey.  This isn’t acceptable to me.  You can write a label in 10 seconds – fewer if you’re not concerned with legibility.  The produce section writes city of origin labels all the time.  In fact, they write the name of the farm on the label for local produce.  Grant you, there are far more bins in the bulk section than there are types of produce.  And my guess is that the bulk section isn’t staffed as well as the produce section since the food isn’t as perishable.  But I think the administrative burden to put some origin labels on just the top 25 selling products would be fairly trivial – especially for a coop that still has volunteer workers.  Just change the label when you restock the item.

No, I don’t think there’s a conspiracy (yet!).  But I found it curious.  Eating local is not limited to the produce section.  Check out the bulk section in your store or coop and see whether origin labeling is feasible.  Maybe stores should have their own Sell Local Challenge and rethink sourcing.

Suzanne lives in Northern California and never, ever grazes in the bulk food section.  The corn chips are stale.

Comments

[jen maiser]

A friend sent me this story (pdf) from the Corvallis food co-op newsletter. While it doesn't talk as much about actual labelling, it does touch on trying to source bulk foods locally. I have often wondered the same myself in our co-op. Though a small percentage of the bulk seems to be labelled.

[Justin H.]

Furthermore, why do they have to label all of the bins? Just make the info available in a flyer or on a small board in the area. If the location changes between a handful of cities, just circle which one it happens to be this week. How about color-coding the local-sourced items on the board with green circles or something so they're easy to spot? They're just not thinking very hard.

[Liz]

I agree that there should be some type of labeling. I frequent my co-op's bulk bins a lot, and recently found out that most of the dry beans are from China. It was truly shocking.

[Tea]

We all seem to be thinking the same this month--I asked my health food store if they would increase their location labeling in the bulk section (some are, some are not). I haven't been back yet to see what the response is.