We hope you’re hungry, Bushwick!
Our resident food co-op announced Wednesday that, following a very successful start to its June Recruitment Month, it will now be able to extend its hours for the summer. The co-op, previously open only three days a week, will now be open Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays & Sundays for longer stretches than had been possible before. Wednesdays at the co-op will start at 3PM and last until 9PM (a whopping six hours!), Thursdays will be open 4-9PM, Saturdays will be 11AM-4PM, and Sundays will be 2-6PM – all starting at the end of June, which makes a full 20 hours a week that you could be shopping for affordable, local, organic and/or otherwise wholesome food just a few blocks from your place.
It remains to be seen whether co-op hours will continue to expand if their membership numbers keep rising. A circulating notice to members about recruitment notes that if each current member of the co-op got a single additional person to join, the co-op would be able to add another day to its schedule and be open five days a week!
For those of you who are thinking about joining but need a tiny additional push to make the commitment, consider this: for a one-time payment of $50 plus four hours a month to sustain your membership, you can be part of a comparatively unfussy co-op that may one day be the stuff of food movement legend. In a recent long-form piece for BKLYNR, Hillary Busis reports that members of the Park Slope food co-op compare their neighborhood in the early 1970s (when the co-op was founded) to “present-day Bushwick, remembering it as a working-class enclave where cheap, healthy food was scarce.” Feel free to snark off about gentrification or institutions that infight about ineffective boycotts of Israel, but that comparison is apt. Snark won’t make the produce at Associated any fresher or the prices at Brooklyn Natural any less prohibitive. And bear in mind that, stereotypes aside, the Park Slope Food Co-Op has been wildly successful in its mission, so much so that there is an enforced limit to how many new members can be oriented at once and free spots in orientations fill up within minutes of getting posted on the co-op’s website.
Aside from that, the Bushwick Food Co-Op is making it easier and easier to keep up to date with Co-Op goings-on. In addition to their regular site, they maintain a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr, updating them all regularly with Co-Op news & photographs of and recipes for delicious things they have in stock (we are currently drooling over the “Eggocado”). There are also plans in the works to set up a schedule of classes and workshops for cooking and general food knowledge.
So get in on the ground floor, and get something good for dinner!!