Cooperative food market coming to Manchester, NH
Friday, November 13, 2009 at 8:10AM My wife bought $15 worth of organic red bell peppers at Stop & Shop earlier this week.
In case you're wondering, $15 will get you all of six - count 'em six - organic red bell peppers. That's a per pepper price of $2.50! And as I documented in a previous post, Stop & Shop is, if you can believe it, the cheapest place in town to buy organic food.
Clearly, buying organic food in Manchester, NH, is an expensive proposition. And forget about buying local food, as the Downtown Manchester Farmers Market has incredibly inconvenient hours, at least to those of us who work Thursday afternoons between the hours of 3 and 6:30.
Which is why I am excited to hear that the School of Community and Economic Development (CED) at Southern New Hampshire University is spear heading the creation of member-owned and operated cooperative food market here in Manchester, NH, that will provide, in the words of Veronica Kamerman, assistant to the CED dean, "access to good quality fresh organic food stuffs, by local growers and suppliers at prices that consumers can afford."
"People are becoming more and more conscious about what they're eating and buying in stores," she told me yesterday. "We think this has huge, huge potential."
And best of all, CED has the knowledge and capacity to pull this off.