Sustainability

August Update

| Food For Thought, GM Report

First and foremost, I wanted to extend our thoughts and well wishes to everyone who has been impacted by the recent flooding across the state. At the BFC, we are coordinating efforts with other cooperatives including City Market, Middlebury, Hunger Mountain, Hanover, Monadnock, and Littleton to support local farms through the and other organizations. One big way you can help is Round Up for Change in August, which will add flood relief. The BFC will be matching every dollar raised for flood relief to double the contribution. Thank you to everyone in advance for supporting this fundraising and helping Vermont recover from the flooding.

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June Update

| Food For Thought, GM Report

I hope this month finds everyone in good health and high spirits as summer approaches. We are finishing up our fiscal year, and planning for next year and beyond is well underway.  At the heart of the BFC is a deep commitment to serving our community, and developing a clear vision and responsible financial plan is critical to our ability to do so.

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Just. Equitable. Sustainable.

I recently attended the Neighboring Food Co-ops’ Association annual meeting, and was captivated by the keynote speaker, Ruth Tyson, who is the Coalitions Coordinator for the Food and Environment program of the Union of Concerned Scientists. She was able to draw some very clear pictures of our agricultural food system and its prejudice. Ms. Tyson highlighted three relevant themes: Just, Equitable, and Sustainable. Finally, it seems we are beginning to connect the lines between food sustainability and social justice, and to illustrate this to a larger audience than before, as the results of consolidation and government misdirection become sadly obvious to most anyone who is paying attention. Her main takeaways for us were these:

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Tierra Farm: crushing the competition one cashew at a time.

| Bulk

Tierra Farm supplies lots and lots of nuts, seeds, dried fruits, granola, coffees and chocolate covered delights in all sorts of flavors and varieties to our Bulk department.  They’re easy to miss, since they generally use zero-to-minimal packaging, and the packaged goods we do carry from them are branded with our own Brattleboro Food Co-op logo.  But once you notice them, you’ll see them everywhere: in the Bulk bins, on the Bulk shelves, next to the registers, in the baby section.  And you might also notice that all their product is organic, peanut free, kosher, and non-GMO, and if you taste their products you’ll notice they’re all REALLY GOOD.  I fell for the Austrian pumpkin seeds when they were on sale a couple months ago…yeesh.

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