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Catalyzing worker co-ops & the solidarity economy

Oregon Super-Cooperative Takes Aim at the Corporate Food System

Narendra Varma loves chocolate. However, he’s also co-founder of Our Table Cooperative, a farm and grocery cooperative that aims to provide locally sourced, organically grown food to the city of Sherwood, Oregon. That means his love of chocolate is complicated.

“I just pretend that chocolate somehow magically appears on my plate,” Varma says. That self-admitted delusion doesn’t extend to coffee, which he doesn’t drink and therefore feels comfortable labeling “some nasty thing that has to be imported from all over the planet.”

But people all over the world want chocolate and coffee and other things that can’t necessarily be grown in their backyard. Varma and his co-founders struggled with the question of how to provide those staple foods to their customers.

“It was a very interesting, soul-searching moment for us internally,” he says. “What does local mean?”

Read the full article at YES! Magazine

 

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