In working towards establishing a cooperative, one of the most important things that we can do is attract- or at least identify- potential new members.   Doing this isn’t easy.   When we do find interested parties, keeping them interested isn’t all that easy either.   Not many people who will ultimately be members of a potential cooperative will be interested in simply attending planning meetings for a couple of years, so the sooner we provide some sort of service (or an event or events) that are interesting, fun or useful- the better!

When I think about trying to reach out to neighbors to see who is interested, the simplest thing to do seems to be just to get out and go door to door.    There are probably better ways.   One other way would be to pay close attention to who responds to ilovelents polls relating to the co-op effort.   Even polls that aren’t directly related might help- and give us an idea about the kinds of services and events that we could use to build support.   My recent recycling poll might give us some clues for instance!   While approaching neighbors in general might yield some results- I think that there is probably a higher correlation of interest in the co-op among people interested in recycling more than with random people living in the neighborhood.   If we provided a service- a place in the neighborhood where people could drop off recyclables that aren’t taken at the curbside- the people that participated would probably be very likely to want to shop at a co-op eventually.    We’d just need a physical place to collect them at!

A collection site where people could drop off recycling at any time would be nice- having hours of collection would be good too- it would allow a volunteer to interact with the person dropping off their materials!   We could have information related to the co-op effort, where we’re at in the process, what we need to get done, what events are coming up- questionaires that ask their opinion and that help guide us in a direction that will most fit the needs of the community rather than our own thoughts and preferences!   I think this would be a simple and constructive thing we could do to move the process along a little quicker!   We would need a physical space to do this though!

Having a physical space would allow us other opportunities as well!   If we were collecting recycling once a week, we could also begin distributing food once a week- basically like a food buying club.    Maybe we could hold our meetings at the location as well!   We could start developing a small inventory!   Once we’re here- we have taken a big step towards our goals!!

I think that we should start working on ideas for spaces- maybe the house on Ramona- that would serve as an interim location and that would allow us to start providing some services prior to opening the doors of a full fledged cooperative.   I think that recycling would be a great place to start!

Jeff

Ever hear the rumor that maraschino cherries were made with formaldehyde?   I had- and apparently it isn’t true at all!   In any case- the first article I found just happened to be written by an Oregonian reporter a couple of years ago!   It’s worth reading.   If there was any debate as to whether or not we should sell the little guys- this should end it:

by Inara Verzemnieks, The Oregonian Newspaper, Portland, Oregon, February 12, 2006

Before we go any further, there is the small matter of pronunciation, which is really a big matter. How to say it?

Mara-sheeno or Mara -skeeno?

Take your pick. I’ve always been partial to mara-sheeno – it sounds to me the way the cherry looks — like the name of woman who is not afraid to wear leopard-print skirts and costume jewelry, who likes the way she looks and couldn’t give a rip what other people think. But mara-skeeno – That gets us closer to the cherry’s past.

The great-great-great-great-great grandmother of today’s maraschino cherries was the marasca, a small, sour, black cherry that grew wild in Dalmatia, on the coast of present-day Croatia.

There’s still the tiniest bit of family resemblance if you squint just right.

Back then, say a few hundred years ago, there really wasn’t a good way to preserve fruit, so as one story goes, anyway, after pickling the cherries in seawater, the locals would marinate them in a liqueur called maraschino, made from the marasca’s juice, pits and leaves. And lo, the first maraschino cherry was born.

Please don’t tell me you thought maraschino cherries grew on trees. (Not that you’d be the first to think that.) No, maraschino cherries are something made, transformed. They have always been about starting out as one thing and ending up another.

Eventually, well-heeled folks throughout Europe developed a taste for these maraschino-soaked cherries, and it wasn’t long before imitations started cropping up. Remember what I said about transformation?

The French, writes John Mariani, in The Dictionary of American Food and Drink, “flavored and colored their own local cherries bright red and called them maraschinos.” And then rich Americans tasted maraschinos in Europe — the Dalmatian original? The bright red French coquette? Who knows? — and took the taste home with them. Some got into the import business, but others decided to try to make their own version of the version they had tasted. The maraschino cherry that arrived here in the late 1800s was already becoming something else.

Back Into the Misty Myths of Time

By the early 1900s, maraschinos were all the rage in the United States, largely bobbing around in cocktails like the Manhattan. A New York Times story from Jan. 2, 1910, captured the nation’s maraschino-cherry mania:

“A young woman engaged a room at a fashionable hotel and, after ordering a Manhattan cocktail, immediately sent for another. Soon she was ordering them by the dozen. The management interfered and someone was sent to expostulate with her; also to find out how she had been able to consume so many cocktails. She was found surrounded by the full glasses with the cherry gone.”

Members of the country’s growing temperance movement weren’t too hot on a hooch-soaked cherry — especially when it started landing atop kids’ ice-cream sundaes — but manufacturers were using all sorts of things other than alcohol to make maraschinos, long before Prohibition passed. (So many cherries were being made with everything but the traditional maraschino liqueur, in fact, that in 1912, the Food and Drug Administration felt the need to decree just what could be called a maraschino cherry.)

By 1915, cherry consumption in the U.S. had gone through the roof because of “the fashion of adding preserved cherries, as much as for ornamentation as to give flavor, to many drinks and ices,” wrote U.P. Hedrick in a report of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station.

At that time, the maraschino lolling in your glass was more than likely made at a factory on the East Coast, from a brined cherry imported all the way from Italy.

That is until the day a tall, kindly man sporting a pencil-thin mustache arrived at Oregon State University, and that’s when everything changed.

Now seems like a good time to hit the road. Head down to Corvallis. Yes, you heard me. Corvallis. If Oregon is the spiritual and physical heart of the modern maraschino cherry industry, then Corvallis would have to be its honorary capital.

Maraschino Cherry Central. I kid you not. People write theses on this stuff down there. Really. Here’s one from OSU’s library, called Science, Service and Specialized Agriculture: The Re-Invention of the Maraschino Cherry, submitted in 1998 by one J. Christopher Jolly.

At some point, in the mid-1800s, Jolly writes, Oregon farmers figured out that the state has the perfect climate for growing cherries — light-skinned, sweet cherries such as the Royal Ann in particular — and by the early 1900s, they had gone on a bit of a tear, planting acre after acre of trees.

Unfortunately, cherries happen to be the fruit world’s equivalent of high-maintenance movie stars. They are temperamental, demanding, bruise easily. And without refrigeration, or some other kind of preservation, they quickly turn into a mushy, rotten mess. That presented the Oregon farmers with a real challenge. Obviously, rotting fruit doesn’t sell too well at the grocery store. So how could they get the most out of their growing harvests? They had to find some other uses for it. Pickling the cherries in brine, and then turning them into maraschinos, seemed the perfect solution.

There was just one problem: Maraschino cherry manufacturers on the East Coast weren’t playing. They claimed the Oregon cherries were too squishy, icky – only imports from Italy would do.

So this was the world that Ernest Wiegand, the man with the pencil-thin mustache, walked into when he arrived at OSU, then known as Oregon Agricultural College, in 1919. Wiegand was a horticulturist who had also tried his hand at canning, brewing, running a citrus farm and overseeing poultry production in Kansas before coming to Oregon. One of Wiegand’s old colleagues, Bob Cain, still lives in Corvallis. Cain is pushing 90 now. He and Wiegand were close; Wiegand, known to everyone as “Prof,” recruited Cain to join the faculty of OSU’s food science department.

“Now the story I’ve heard,” about how Wiegand’s path came to intersect with the maraschino cherry, Cain says, “goes something like this:”

The college president’s wife had a brother who just happened to be a cherry grower. The two of them were visiting one day, when the brother told his sister about the little problem of the squishy cherries.

“She told her husband,” Cain says. “And then he gets on the horn to the horticulture department and says to Prof, ‘Why don’t you see what you can do about this problem?’ “

From 1925 to 1931, Wiegand makes it his mission. He works every angle, burning through pounds of cherries, scribbling formulas in notebooks. And then, the great “aha!” moment: Wiegand realizes that if he adds some calcium salts to the brine these cherries soak in, it will firm them right up.

There’s some other tweaking, but that’s the big news.

It might not sound like much, but Wiegand’s simple solution — still used by maraschino manufacturers today, with a few minor adjustments — was a miracle as far as Oregon cherry growers were concerned. It meant that they could finally tell those East Coast manufacturers what to do with their Italian cherries.

And then, along came a tariff that just happened to make those foreign cherries super-expensive to import. It’s funny, isn’t it, the way seemingly random events line up in just the right way? A man tinkers with brine. The government approves a tariff. And 70-some years later we end up with:

• A building on OSU’s campus named Wiegand Hall (where Wiegand’s kindly-looking portrait — his thin mustache arches in the faintest smile — hangs just inside the front doors).
  
• A class at OSU called Maraschino Cherry 102, which examines the “historical, technological and scientific aspects of maraschino cherry production.”
  
• And the two biggest maraschino manufacturers in the nation — not to mention a third smaller, but still significant player, right here in Oregon.
  

Strange Tales of Blue Cherries

Remember those old, grainy films you used to watch in elementary school — like “The Cell: The Structural Unit of Life” — where the narrator’s voice always sounded garbled, and about halfway through, the picture inevitably started jumping around higgledy-piggledy until someone got up to fix the projector? Imagine you are about to watch one of those films right now. This one is called, A Tour of Oregon’s Maraschino Industry.

The first shot is of the industrial-looking exterior of a large factory complex in Forest Grove. This is Gray & Company, which is headquartered in Portland. They also have a factory in Dayton.

The next shot is of a large factory complex in Salem. This is Oregon Cherry Growers, a grower-owned cooperative, with another two factories in The Dalles.

The camera cuts to a man in a sweater and khakis sitting behind a large, polished desk. This is Ed Johnson, president and CEO of Oregon Cherry Growers. His co-op and Gray & Company are “the two 900-pound gorillas in the industry,” he says.

Getting exact numbers out of these guys is difficult because these are privately held companies, and they hold their cards close to their chest. But everyone seems to agree on this much:

Gray & Company, which also has a factory in Michigan, basically owns the retail market; go to the grocery store or Costco, look around, and chances are the maraschino cherries you see are theirs. Oregon Cherry Growers is king of the food-service market; a majority of bars, restaurants, cafeterias, nursing homes and hospitals serve their cherries.

Both outfits are dealing in millions of pounds of cherries a year. Their products are being shipped around the world, to Mexico, Dubai, Russia, Indonesia, Korea.

Cue familiar factory scene: flickering fluorescent lights, humming machinery, industrial-size jars of maraschino cherries sailing past on conveyor belts, tended by women in hairnets, wearing blue gloves and long lab coats.

“All this,” says Josh Reynolds, vice president and general manager of Gray & Company’s fruit division, “allows us to produce what I think of essentially as a piece of candy.” This is an important point. Nobody’s pretending that maraschinos are something they’re not. The word “fruit” is studiously avoided.

“Maraschino cherries are not an everyday item in the kitchen,” is how Bob Cain, the old maraschino man from Corvallis, puts it. “They’re not like a can of beans.”

“I like to tell people a maraschino is the nutritional equivalent of a Lifesaver,” Reynolds says. “You wouldn’t call it healthy, but it’s fine” for a treat. Reynolds is standing in a large room, filled with massive redwood containers that look remarkably like hot tubs. Except each one is full of 85,000 pounds of cherries, swimming in a brew of red food coloring and corn syrup. This is the room where cherries officially begin their transformation into maraschinos. It all feels a bit like a spa: dark, quiet, calm.

Let’s zoom in on one of those hot tubs. You’ll notice that all the cherries roiling around inside have their stems still attached. These are the movie stars of the maraschino world — the most desirable kind, destined for greatness in some swanky cocktail, or the pinnacle of some zaftig sundae. And they most likely came from Oregon.

How do I know this? Oregon actually supplies a good chunk of the cherries that ultimately become maraschinos, along with Michigan. But in Oregon, unlike Michigan, which uses machines to harvest cherries, most cherries are hand-picked, leaving the stems intact.

So far, all you’ve seen are red maraschinos. And maybe you thought that’s the only color a maraschino could be. But now up pops a hand holding a maraschino as bright as saffron. The cherry, and the hand, belong to Craig Bell, president of Eola Cherry Co., located in the middle of a vast cherry orchard in Gervais. Eola has a smaller share of the food-service market, but not an insignificant one — second, according to Bell. Eola, which exports cherries to 16 nations, has distinguished itself by creating electric blue, yellow, pink and orange maraschino cherries. “The silver,” Bell says, “we’re having a problem with.” This ability to dye cherries almost any color is another Oregon invention.

Remember Wiegand’s friend, Cain? In our grainy film, we would see him in a white lab coat, bending over a piece of paper scribbled with formulas. After Wiegand retired, Cain spent a number of years perfecting his mentor’s work. One of the things that he worked on was a “secondary bleaching process,” which allowed manufacturers to turn cherries as white as snow, a blank canvas on which they could apply any color they wanted. A beloved student of Cain’s once jokingly used the process on some plums, which he then dyed bright red and labeled, “Texas Cherries.” They never did take off.

Maraschinos Also Go Green

I haven’t mentioned it yet, but storm clouds have been brewing at the edge of this story. They started, really, the moment the maraschino cherry went from being a quaint delicacy picked and pickled by Dalmatian peasants to something a bit more industrial-strength.

“It is a tasteless, indigestible thing, originally to be sure, a fruit of the cherry tree, but toughened and reduced to the semblance of a formless, gummy lump by long imprisonment in a bottle filled with so-called maraschino,” groused a 1911 editorial from The New York Times.

Ninety-four years later, the Times was still complaining. “The culinary equivalent of an embalmed corpse,” sniffed a recent magazine piece, which instructed readers how to make their own approximation of the “ambrosial perfection of the original maraschino.”

That is, of course, the highfalutin take. Ambrosial? So just for balance’s sake, it seems only right to seek out someone from a real bar, where real folks drink. When asked about whether he hears complaints about maraschinos, Angelo Puccinelli, owner of Portland’s Matador, referred to affectionately in one bar guide as “Dive with a capital D,” quickly turns apoplectic. “If any one of my kids complained about maraschino cherries, I’d restrain them right there. Anybody that’s poured a fair share of drinks in their life would never complain about a maraschino cherry . . . it’s like getting mad at soda water. Get mad at somebody wanting sugar on the rim of their glass. Don’t get mad at the existence of the maraschino cherry. That makes no sense.”

So far, the maraschino has endured the knocks against it, but fashions change. Public perceptions shift. One day, everyone’s knocking back Manhattans and grooving on the way that neon-red cherry contrasts with electric green Jell-O. The next, they’re signing up for health clubs, limiting themselves to no more than 2 ounces of liquor a night, buying only organic, natural ingredients and pining for an artisanal past. If you’re a maraschino cherry man in Oregon, you’re watching all this and getting a little worried.

Story by Inara Verzemnieks, The Oregonian Newspapers, February 12, 2006?

One of the most important things for me is buying local. There are all kinds of reasons to buy things that are made or produced close to home.

Some reasons for buying local are economic- buying local helps the local economy. Buying local keeps and creates new local jobs (maybe I’d get one!) and keeps your hard earned money close to home- rather than sending it to Dallas, New Jersey or…. China? I’d rather buy a jar of pickle made in the Dalles rather than in India, and I’d rather buy a kitchen whisk made in industrial Northwest Portland than in China. I’d even spend a little extra money!

One problem with buying local is that in order to find things made as close to home as possible, you have to work really, really hard- and use a lot of gas! I’d like to shop someplace that made it easy for me by focusing- at least in part- on selling locally made goods.

Should that be the number one priority in a cooperative grocery? Maybe, but maybe not. There are other factors that are important too. Cooperatives are known for usually selling organics. They sell “natural” products. The best organics and natural products aren’t always made close to home. Is an organic peach grown in georgia better than a non-organic peach grown just down the street? I think probably. Where are the closest organic peaches grown? What about Mary Hill white peaches? I don’t think they’re organic- but they’re the best white peaches I’ve ever had! How do you prioritize?

Then what about cost? Organics are almost always more expensive. Locally produced goods should, one would think at least, be more affordable- they don’t take as much petrol to get from the tree to the table! It doesn’t always work that way though. Manufactured goods made just blocks away by people earning a living wage usually cost more than sweatshop produced goods in the third world. How can we prioritize cost? We want to be affordable!!

Other factors? Packaging maybe? One of my pet peeves is when you buy a product in a package that you have to send to a landfill. Sometimes there’s more packaging than product!!

Buying local. Buying organic. Providing affordable products with less packaging. It’s all important- so how do you chose a product to sell in the coop? Oh, and I almost forgot- QUALITY!!

One thing that makes the choices a little easier is that we can sell more than one of most items. We can sell one that is produced locally- but maybe isn’t organic and we can sell one that is organic, or is cheaper, or is better- or whatever! We should be conscious though of creating more of a choice with each combination of items that we sell. An example might be yellow mustard. We have a locally produced mustard called “American Picnic Mustard” made by Beaverton Foods- and it’s really pretty good! There is also an organic mustard that is actually pretty affordable that is made by “Natural Value.” It’s also pretty good! Both are quality products, we’d have a local product, an organic and affordable product, and both are of good quality.

Even choosing two- even three- products to sell won’t be necessarily easy. Perhaps we should have a rating scale for each product. In terms of “localness,” a product made in the Portland Area would rate higher than a product make in Eugene which would rate higher than a product made in Denver- which would rate much higher than a product produced in China! In terms of affordability, you could simply compare what you have available to you. The average cost of a jar of pickles is X. Some products are more than X, some are less. Quality is hard to rate- everyone has an opinion! We can do tastings for products- and maybe advertise that to draw people into the store! Make events out of it! “Come into the store on Saturday and sample 14 brands of dill pickles!” There are even… degrees? of organicness! It isn’t organic, it’s “transitional,” its certified, and whatever!!

In any case, an affordable, quality, organic AND locally produced product should obviously be our first choice. A product made in Portland or near by should be a priority. As well. The farther away it’s produced, the more we should consider alternatives or second choices that take other factors into account.

Any thoughts?!!

Cheers to all of you!

Jeff

There are a number of steps that we need to take to get a cooperative grocery going. Personally, my head is swimming through all the things that we have to do! Maybe it would be a good idea to create a table that lays out the things that need to be done in a timeline of some sort! I know that it would really help me. Something in sort of a checklist format? My own task right now is simple enough. I have to come up with a couple of formats for a flier for the workshop/community meeting coming up in a couple of months. It would be nice to have a place to check it off once it’s done! I think that being able to visualize where we’re at would be both motivating and grounding! How could such a check list fit into this website?

Jeff

I’m just getting the feel for this new website so this is a bit of an experiment- sorry it it’s a little off topic!

I had some packaging thoughts today that I thought might be relevant eventually. Years ago I worked on a campaign- I think it was in 1996? 1990? In any case it was called the Oregon Recycling Act. If failed- barely. One thing it would have done was to create standards of recyclability for packaging. At the time packaging was getting a little out of control, to say the least. It’s still pretty bad- maybe we’ve gotten used to it!

Excessive packaging is a huge environmental problem. Sometimes the volume of the packaging is actually *greater* than the volume of the thing that you are actually *purchasing*!! That drives me crazy!! Not very many people actually make their purchasing decisions based on how LITTLE the item is packaged or how much of the packaging is recyclable- I wish they would. Fewer yet would actually write a company and complain about the packaging! I have!!

One of the things that has had me going lately is the use of styrofoam meat trays. You can’t buy very much meat at, say, Fred Meyer without getting a meat tray that has no place to go but the landfill. Are there alternatives? New Seasons doesn’t use meat trays! Either does the meat market on Division- what is it called? The something Steer? Maybe this is a bad example to start with, but it does illustrate a point. What alternatives are there? What did they do before the styrofoam meat tray was invented? You picked out your meat and they wrapped it in paper! Viola!!

The examples from today:

Oatmeal cartons. The cartons are generally round paper cartons with a lid. The tight-fitting lids are now a plastic ring with a paper insert. You can recycle the carton, but you have to throw the mixed-material lid away. What did they use to do? The entire lid was paper- crimped to make a top that slid on! Was this good enough? It was 100 recyclable- no waste at all! But no- they had to change to force us to throw *something* in the landfill!

I won’t get into the juice cartons this time… OK.

French bread wrappers: another example from today- why do you really need a plastic “window” to see the bread? Can you recycle the bag as paper if it’s 25% plastic? I don’t know- so I usually throw it away. When it doubt, throw it out!

Newspapers used to get shoved into paper boxes- now they are always bagged. You can recycle the bag, but what’s the point!! Is this an improvement?

I think in a lot of cases, we’d be better off if we went back to the way things used to be done- and the way things used to be packaged. These few examples from today are just a few of the reasons why we have a huge waste problem in the US and in the world. So what do we do?

I would like to suggest that when it comes to product selection, we include packaging in the criteria when selecting products that we sell. I know it’s a ways down the road- but it doesn’t hurt to start thinking about it now! And this will give me a chance to practice writing articles for this great new blog!!

I hope you’re all doing well!

Jeff

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