Flying the Coop

Park Slope and the high cost of political hummus

Have you been following the drama at the Park Slope Food Coop, whose membership recently voted to boycott Israeli-made products (while continuing, as I understand it—write to tell me if I am wrong—to sell products made in China and other not exactly democratic countries)? It’s quite a thing. (It just merited a Times op-ed by ex-member Rabbi Rachel Timoner here.) If you want to know more, I invite you to read this piece, which I just edited, by novelist and journalist Amy Sohn, a heartbroken longtime member of “the Coop” who even wrote a humorous novel about the beloved Brooklyn institution.

Before I send you off to Amy’s piece, I want to offer my own thoughts on co-ops. I was raised in a co-op, sort of: Mudpie was an anti-racist, anti-sexist child-care cooperative that flourished in Springfield, Massachusetts, from the mid-1970s until it folded in the aughts. When my parents joined, in 1977, when I was three, there was a robust requirement for parents to donate time; there was one full-time teacher, but the assistant-teaching (or babysitting, really), the cleaning, the yardwork, the accounting—it was all handled by parents, donating their several hours a week.