Georgia Avenue Food Co-op
Posted by Sonja
I had the great pleasure of visiting one of the Georgia Avenue Food Co-ops last week. The first co-op was started 17 years ago by Chad Hale and Brian Lowring, current and former pastors of the Georgia Avenue Church in the Grant Park/Summerhill area of Atlanta. The number has now grown to four co-ops serving 200 families. Designated members collect food for their co-op each Tuesday and Thursday from the Atlanta Food Bank, then distribute it among the families in the basement of the Georgia Avenue Church. Most of the families are headed by women, including many grandmothers raising grandchildren. I found myself inspired and encouraged by their example of cooperative economics.
We talked about food scarcity, high food prices, mass hunger and riots in some places, and the instability of governments trying to make food available to hungry populations. I shared with them my thoughts on the links between energy — particularly oil — and food. We know the price of oil makes transporting food more costly, and that biofuels based on corn have caused some people to drive on what all of us eat. Fertilizers and pesticides also have oil and natural gas as primary components and are more expensive these days.
Oil is linked to everything, of course, from transportation to utilities to household products to furniture to clothing to jobs. For the last few years, the petroleum industry simply hasn’t been able to get more of the black stuff out of the ground. This is happening at a time when demand for oil is skyrocketing as people in China and India (the residence of one out of every three human beings on the planet) want to live as we do in the U.S. We’ve been finding less and less oil for the past 40 years, and global production of oil is peaking now.
The phenomenon has been well known, although only now that we’re in the thick of things can you discuss peak oil without being called a conspiracy theorist. You still won’t find much on CNN or the rest of mainstream media because the only response is for people to buy less of everything, and mainstream media doesn’t want that.
I shared my thoughts about “agency” — the ability to act — and the need to take personal responsibility for our households as things get more difficult. And we need desperately to connect with and learn from our neighbors, who are enduring the same crises. You only need to recall the response to Katrina to know there will be no magic bullets emanating out of Washington, no matter who wins in November. The government is not going to help because it really has no palatable solutions.
So we talked about the need to change our lifestyles, to “power down” and dramatically reduce our use of oil and other forms of energy. And we need to organize and educate ourselves to find solutions, which is blackEnergy’s purpose. You see, black people are the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to decreased access to energy. When the U.S. gets a cold, we catch pneumonia, whether it’s recession or the effects of global peak oil in the most energy-intensive nation on earth.
But because people in black communities get hit first with any crisis, we have an obligation to lead. I urged the co-op to start thinking about other solutions, such as community gardening, or even rooftop gardening, and making sure our young people know how to grow food. But time grows very short. We have to get serious and get started now.
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