The Last Heretic at the Park Slope Food Co-op
The Last Heretic at the Park Slope Food Co-op
Give me kale, or give me mental health
What year is this? I wondered as I entered the Park Slope Food Co-op for the first time in several months. It was January 2024, and I’d missed a few shifts, first due to work travel and then due to medical leave, post-hysterectomy; one cannot lift crates of chocolate tofu pudding while recovering from abdominal surgery, after all. I needed to work an extra two-hour-and-forty-five-minute shift so I could be reinstated.
The scene was positively 2021: carefully restricted numbers of shoppers, faces swaddled in masks, or “masks”—a bandit-style bandana over the bridge of a nose, soggy tie-dyed stretchy face coverings slouched atop the lips. Simulacra of PPE. I shrugged, adopting the kind of Western-style libertarianism I wished I had: to each his/her/their own! But also: this was weird. And also: Jesus H, can people really be thinking they’re protecting themselves from something with a swatch of fabric over the face, after all the research that’s come out in the last three years?
Despite my distaste for the co-op—not the food, but the mood—I was spending my first free day, my birthday, making up shifts because my husband loves the co-op, and if I was suspended, he couldn’t shop, either. Them’s the rules.
It’s a terrific grocery store, and you always run into people you know. It has a fine selection of organic produce, the chocolate is cheap, and the meat is local and grass-fed. But it’s also lab rat-type atmosphere, too many bodies crammed into a too-small space. Too many rules. Everyone above the age of 18 in your household must work: stocking shelves, cutting giant wheels of parmesan, breaking down boxes, walking people with carts full of curly kale to their cars, and walking the cart back. If you give birth or adopt and ask for parental leave, they will photocopy your child’s birth certificate because they think people will lie about expanding their family to get out of shifts. One would need to show proof of divorce to electronically detach from those who share your address. In fact, that’s why I rejoined the co-op in the mid-2000s after many years away: my then-boyfriend, reluctant to wed, wanted us to join the co-op together. In Brooklyn, that’s very close to marriage. And if anyone in your family is suspended, none of you can shop.
The fascist hippie atmosphere has been well-chronicled in the mainstream media, not because anything about the place is newsworthy but because a disproportionate number of media workers reside in the area and belong to it. Including me.
Halfway through my shift, what seemed to be a sweet-faced—or at least a sweet-eyed—thirty-something staff member in a loose black mask came up to me and said, “It’s Thursday.” I blinked and cocked my head at him. Indeed! Not only a Thursday, but my birthday, in fact! “Thursday,” he said again, sliding a black papery/plastic mask toward me on the conveyer belt. I was working checkout, ringing up the daikon and celeriac, which meant I was quite visible—not stowed somewhere in the nether reaches of the store. “Mask day,” he said.