Pity the Park Slope Food Coop. Drubbed almost annually by some crabby reporter in the New York Times, satirized by author Amy Sohn in her last novel, Prospect Park West, the 38-year-old cooperative grocery store in the heart of gentrified Brooklyn suffers from an image problem. The conventional wisdom is that it’s a bastion of smug bourgeois bohemians flitting around organic produce aisles in yoga pants, proclaiming their virtuosity on everything from international politics to composting. It’s an image that hasn’t been helped by the coop’s latest media storm: a proposal by a tiny cohort of members to have Israeli products pulled from its shelves.
In truth, the coop’s nearly 16,000 members are actually a varied bunch, representing a cross-section of Brooklynites seen in few places outside of the subway. Yes, many are like me: a white, liberal, college-educated parent who lives in brownstone Brooklyn. But the aisles are also populated by Rastafarians in knit hats, silver-haired women surviving on Board of Education pensions, artsy kids who live with 10 roommates in Bushwick, and a sizable number of Orthodox Jews loading up their carts on Thursday nights in preparation for Shabbat. Read more »
