To Your Health, Moscow
The lyric wail of an Irish fiddle emanates from speakers near the ceiling. Below, a clerk turns pages in a reference book, trying to answer a customer’s question about the difference between pure-pressed and cold-pressed. Outside, a painted herd of Holsteins grazes on the parking lot fence.
The Moscow Food Cooperative is not your average grocery store. It is celebrating 25 years of strongly held opinions about food.
The co-op sprung from the wave of back-to-nature lifestyle ventures sweeping the country in the 1970s. It was founded in 1973 by four University of Idaho students: Rod Davis, Jim Eagen and Dave and Katie Mosel. Eagen, who now lives in Boise, still stops by when he passes through Moscow.
“They said they hope to make expenses but will volunteer their time to bring down food costs,” reported the Daily Idahonian in an article on the store opening. Today it is one of three cooperatives remaining in Idaho. The others are in Boise and Sandpoint.
The Moscow Food Cooperative has evolved beyond the modest beginning that saw it do $200 in business its first month and the hard times of the early 1980s, when em ployees took unpaid summer leave and a garage sale was held to pay the bills. Today it has 1,680 members and does slightly more than $1 million in business a year.
Most of the members, who pay $10 annually or $150 for a lifetime membership, live around Moscow and Pullman. But members range from Spokane and Coeur d’Alene to Grangeville. Life membership buys them a discount and a vote for the co-op’s board of directors.
“Everybody who shops here is interested in good foods,” general manager Kenna Eaton said. “We don’t really have much else in common besides that.”
At one time, the co-op was the expression of a lifestyle as much as a store. Its early history, found in the files, is written in pencil on recycled paper. But blue denim work shirts and rope sandals no longer are the uniform of the day. By the late 1980s, co-op membership diversified.
“We get old people, young people, students, families, university staff, farmers,” Eaton said. The co-op swung a wide enough loop that during Desert Storm two petitions, one for and one against the war, hung side by side on the bulletin board.
People shop here because the co-op offers unprocessed, organic foods; because customers can buy in bulk; because they can stock up on brewer’s yeast or molasses or other staple foods from their youth; because the co-op can accommodate practically anyone’s food allergies; because it buys as much as it can from local producers. And mostly because it listens. If you’ve got a theory about nutrition you can bend someone’s ear here.
“People come in and tell us the craziest stuff,” Eaton said. “We’ve got a member who thinks she can regenerate limbs by using aloe vera.”
The co-op has also been helped by the efforts of natural food producers to develop fare more savory than the dirt it was grown in.
“When I first started eating natural foods,” Eaton said, “it all tasted kind of brown.
“The quality of food has improved so much. They’ve worked hard to make it taste good.”
One item in good supply at the co-op is irony. The store has moved several times. The site it occupies now formerly was a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.
But there’s a spirit here rising from the celebration of food.
A cooler of fresh vegetables is a splash of color in counterpoise to the warm, dark tones of wooden shelves piled high with packaged goods. Sunlight gleams through a window and highlights bulk beans and grains in clear plastic bins, creating a stained glass effect in infinite shades of tan and brown.
“I go away and I come back, and I notice this,” said Eaton, who settled in Moscow because the co-op was here, and who has been manager since 1981. “I think ‘Wow, this is a nice little store.”’