A little bit of rumor-mongering, but considering that most of my information is from Abe, who owns the property, I think it's pretty reliable:

The old korean grocery space on Michigan Ave, a few doors west of Abe's, has apparently been leased for a Mexican grocery. The proprietor has at least one other store in the Detroit region, so he's got some experience, and plans to stock a good range of produce and meats and other fresh foods.

I, for one, will be quite happy if I can pick up my tortillas, epazote, and queso fresco in a short walk, rather than trucking out to Von's. Somebody give a holler when this place opens so that we can all go check it out.

We drove by yesterday, and I think my wife said that there was a sign in the window, stating that a Mexican tienda was coming soon... Would be nice indeed!

I hope it is not just me, but I sense a real turn around in Ypsi. It is finally coming into its own as a community AND a college town . I think our future is bright :)

Don't forget about the Ypsi Food Coop on River Street (across from Sidetrack) that has a wide variety of fresh produce and fruit, much of it local.

That's why I don't go there. While the goods are nice, the costs can be a bit prohibitive for all-the-time shopping, and even more so for those who may be on a limited income.

Lisele,
I absolutely love you !! :) Regardless of which ever view one has (I agree with Lisele, but I'm not saying so ":-)" ) Your response made me smile--So, thank you :)

Lisele:

While I see your argument and clearly understand what you are saying, there are people that simply cannot afford to get this "food grown in a responsible manner". It's a shame that it has to be like this—as I feel that everyone should have access to healthy food, at prices they can personally afford.

And sadly, it's realistically cheaper for people who are on limited incomes to eat at McDonalds on a regular basis—than it would be to regularly shop at the co-op, between membership costs and daily prices there.

Uh oh, it's a food policy war! Duck!

Lisele,

While I've read all the same things that you have, and certainly agree that our national food system is pretty screwed up, for all the reasons you mention, there are certain compromises that have to be made. One cannot always make the optimal choice, nor does positive change hinge on any one of us always making the optimal choice.

For my own part, there are some things I'll only buy from the co-op. e.g. Bread, because it's so darn tasty; coffee, because it's enough of a luxury item to buy fair-trade/organic rather than oppressing farmers for; eggs, when my local sources are going through dry spells, mostly because they taste better than the "normal" eggs at a place like Meijer, and are way cheaper than the "niche" eggs at a place like Meijer.

And some things - grains, pasta, soy milk - we buy bulk or by the case, keeping the price pretty reasonable. Between buying bulk staples and keeping mostly vegetarian, we can keep costs down pretty well. (Of course, buying staples and cooking nutritious meals with them requires access to a functional kitchen, cooking hardware, and storage space, which are real challenges for a lot of people, and also require relearning the cultural knowledge of cooking that we've had mostly stripped from us over the past few decades.)

But there are times when budget just requires that I head to ZZ's instead of the co-op to get my fresh produce. (That is, of course, assuming it's not the part of the year when all of our produce comes from within Washtenaw County via CSA or the farmer's market.) And I consider myself fortunate to even have that choice available to me.

So, while I can agree completely with you on this:

If you truly support radical agricultural reform, you have to put your money & heart into it.

I'd like to suggest that being sure to shop at the food coop alone is not the only or best tool in the policy box. (And, in fact, I think any strategy based purely on where you spend money is set up for failure - "they" can effect change by spending money much more powerfully than "we" can.) Now, I'm guessing that this little mexican-grocery-to-be is going to have produce that is (a) fresh, (b) not organic, and (c) not local. If I'm spending my food dollars purely in the interest of effecting maximum upstream change, then this would be a suboptimal place to buy my produce. On the other hand, if I'm spending my food dollars in part to support access to affordable, healthy food choices in downtown Ypsilanti, I think this place will see a decent amount of my business.

(And, in the meantime, I have money & heart invested in the Frog Island Community Garden, and have pledged a little bit of same to the Victory Garden project that Mark has proposed. And I know that you personally have also dedicated a great deal of time and energy to food system projects that aren't purely dependent on moving shopping around.)

I'm glad to have yet another venue for impassioned discussions of local food systems...

melissa, if he sends a big enough love offering to my paypal account, i'll perform "Pirate Jenny" at the heritage festival, from inside the rubber duck tank, assuming that chief hershberger isn't looking.

and can i just mention, that everytime these food conversations take place, i personally read "CSA" as standing for the "Confederate States of America".

You guys really need a new acronym.

First off, a disclaimer. My wife and I both work at the Coop, but that only goes to show that we don't have much money to spend on food in the first place. I've been going through our expenses for the last few months, and we spend about 95% of our grocery budget at the coop. Even still, we've been averaging just over $4/person/day. I heard about a project in Oregon where people are living on $3/day, which is about what you get with food stamps. So we're not doing too bad. The difference is that they all talked about living on tuna fish and water, and we actually eat very well.

How do we do this? Well, between membership and the employee discount (which anyone can get by volunteering) we do get 12% off, but that still puts us under $5/day. We're lucky enough to have the time, resources, and knowledge to cook from scratch a lot. With the pressure cooker, we can cook dry beans very quickly. While tortillas aren't that expensive, making your own costs pennies, and they are incredibly delicious (seriously, you can eat them hot off the grill by themselves with butter and finish the whole batch). A few nights ago we made fresh tortellini, something that is normally pretty expensive, and that whole meal cost half of what just a bag of frozen tortellini would be. We also don't eat much meat. So it does take some work, and you have to rethink how you approach food, but we're eating cheaper now almost completely from the Coop than we have at any other point in our lives, especially when we ate fast food all the time.

It's important to keep in mind that the Coop is not a for-profit business with heavy markups. Prices are a direct product of the collective buying power of the members. If more people shop there, prices drop. Even better if they become members. Membership isn't really that expensive ($20 a month, or about $.65 a day) and makes up for itself if you spend $200 a month. For, as an example, a single mother on a limited income, the membership discount would easily pay for itself.

So, if you want to live off of frozen burritos and tv dinners, shopping at the Coop probably will be more expensive. But if you want better tasting, more healthful food and the pleasure of making it yourself, it can definitely be done well.

(As an aside, I think that the bread Murph likes so much is what is baked next door from the Coop, in their very own wood-burning brick oven. Is that right, Murph?)

PS - if you wanted to go in on a CSA share together Melissa, I'd be game.

I was, of course, the person called out by Boxelder's Asa for calling his system "not community supported agriculture", but something more like a bulk farm stand. But, hey, if he wants to choose to give up the formal security that is the pillar of subscription ag, I suppose I'll let him call it whatever he wants.

To Mike, yep, the bread I love is the River St. Bakery stuff, especially the three seed sourdough. (There was a long thread dedicated to singing its praises on the previous incarnation of downtownypsi.org, in fact...)

And certainly I understand/agree that the co-op's prices include a usage factor: higher volume -> lower overhead, so more shopping there -> lower prices. This is, of course, a chicken and egg sort of factor - if price or perception thereof is preventing shopping there, how do you increase shopping to lower price?

Hey, Mike, we forgive you. I fought to institute the $20/year share membership fee (because I just LOVE to pay more) and even I didn't catch it. OK, actually I fought for the fee because it is used for infrastructure, like replacing the coolers, etc., and with a non-profit business, it's hard to accumulate funds to make those critical upgrades. Also, previously that share membership fee was collected from a percentage of sales which was just an accounting nightmare. Some people don't realize that the share membership fee was part of co-op membership all along -- we just made it easier to account for and more transparent. Also, contrast it with other local co-op's fees (like PFC's $60 annual fee) and you'll see that it's a bargain.

I guess I am just willing to pay for satisfaction I get from the fact that the food I buy at the co-op is not destroying the environment or critters I love. It just makes me happy and it's worth it.

Well, I loved that article (and everything by Michael Pollan), but what I got out of it was not that the poor "simply must have cheap calories." An excerpt:

"Yes, there are eaters who think it in their interest that food just be as cheap as possible, no matter how poor the quality. But there are many more who recognize the real cost of artificially cheap food — to their health, to the land, to the animals, to the public purse. At a minimum, these eaters want a bill that aligns agricultural policy with our public-health and environmental values, one with incentives to produce food cleanly, sustainably and humanely. Eaters want a bill that makes the most healthful calories in the supermarket competitive with the least healthful ones. Eaters want a bill that feeds schoolchildren fresh food from local farms rather than processed surplus commodities from far away. Enlightened eaters also recognize their dependence on farmers, which is why they would support a bill that guarantees the people who raise our food not subsidies but fair prices. Why? Because they prefer to live in a country that can still produce its own food and doesn’t hurt the world’s farmers by dumping its surplus crops on their markets."

Our current system does not offer choices -- that's just the problem. All that's available for the poor is cheap, nutritionally poor, processed, corn-syrup intensive, chemically-enhanced, never-to-expire, twinkie-like food products. Pollan's argument is that fresh local foods must be competitively priced with processed shlock. It seems to me that supporting choices (like the co-op) is a step towards that goal. I *did* eat there when I was very poor, not that it was so very long ago, I just had to be creative to do it.

Are you sure about that Murph? It's been a few years, but my recollection was that our proposed $20 annual fee was being compared to *annual* fees at 9 other comparable co-ops at Traverse City, Madison, Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo, etc. Even if $60 is the entire share membership fee at PFC, they naturally have many times the number of members that YFC has, so it's not surprising that it would be lower. In November 2002, YFC was paying out about $5,200 annually on discounts and getting only about $1790 in membership fees. Collecting an annual fee we thought would result in about $4000 in additional income (it was actually $8000 in the first year) for desperately needed upgrades on the coolers, electrical system, tiling for the floors, etc. If a member spends as much as $80 per month in coop purchases, they should recoup their $20 annual payment in the form of 2% discounts.

As an update, my wife and I discovered possible evidence of something apparently camin or comin soon to the space, but I can't quite say what, exactly:

I did see scaffolding and about five guys standing out in front of the building today . . .

They open this coming Thursday (May 31st).

Better yet the put it up on their website after I asked for a text copy of the article for the DDA website. Thanks Courier staff!

Here it is:
http://www.ypsilanticourier.com/stories/052407/loc_20070524009.shtml

Now open!

I'm told that they opened yesterday. My source was in near ecstasy over their meat counter.

I saw pictures and I am in near ecstasy over their meat counter.

They also had a hot foods counter that was pretty impressive, albeit a little understocked. Fresh and tasty tamales for a dollar each!! Decent selection of peppers and some good looking fruit and produce, too.

Looking forward to making chorizo con huevos tonight. Mmm...

Call me and I;ll meet you up there. :)

Oh, and Mark, I got that. (Nobody beats our meat!)