Newsletters

At last another newsletter – not quite the quarterly event that we hoped for but better now than never.

And this time we have received contributions from people outside of the co-op – thank you. Please feel free to pass on anything that you would like to see aired to a wider audience. There is no editorial policy, but we reserve the right to edit anything Bridge Street Workers Co-operative find offensive. As a collective we neither condemn nor condone views expressed herein – as individuals we listen and make our own decisions.

Bridge Street Workers Co-op News.

A very brief summary.

Our partner the Wild Carrot café closed last Christmas. Over the three years of its life a lot of good food and times were had there. Mistakes were made, (some) lessons learned, and friendships formed. However, cooking and serving are highly stressful so it was no great surprise that people burnt out, or looked at different options.

Justin left us in August, four years after he helped set up the co-op. He has moved to Brighton believing it’s a warmer, trendier place – is he right? Julie has rejoined the co-op, and two babies have come along; Rianna one year old and Jai eight months old. They’re both gorgeous and light up our lives. Health and happiness to them.

On a business level we are on a sound footing. We feel that there is still much that we can do to reach more people and persuade others that we are an independent store well worth supporting - especially as we can save customers money (don’t buy the myth of great savings at your supermarkets!).

We continue to back the public, and put safety first by refusing to stock anything genetically modified. Please don’t believe the cynics – with steady public pressure it is easy enough to avoid GM products. Please give it serious thought, and then refuse to buy GM!

We’ve sourced a new organic co-operative and as a result we’ve got even more competitive prices, a wider range, and a lot more UK produce. A lot of it is now harvested and in our shop within a day.

Socially the co-op also appears strong. We can even go out and not discuss the business now (well almost). Allotments and shed building promise to encourage more sharing. Then there’s the future planned expansion of the shop. So, onwards and upwards.

TREAT YOURSELF TODAY

Have you tried our organic speciality breads from the Authentic Bread Company?

Rosemary Fougasse, Olive bread, cheese and walnut bread, rosemary foccacia, sun-dried tomato ciabatta and lots more!

ORGANIC VEG BAGS

Take home a selection of high quality delicious tasting organic veg, packed ready for collection or delivery on Friday just in time for the weekend. Join our organic veg box scheme and support farmers who are committed to sustainable farming methods. Call in at the shop or ring up for more details.

Have you picked up a free copy of our shop directory?

Peaches

China is the only place where peaches grow wild. The peach is called Tao in China and written references to it date back to the 5^th Century BC. It was a symbol of immortality. The peach tree of the gods grew in the mythical gardens of Itsi Wang My, and bore fruit only once in 3000 years. The monk Ling Yun received enlightenment through contemplation of its flowers. This tree was none other than the Tree of Life.

A Japanese folk tale tells the story of an old woman waiting by a stream. She finds an enormous peach and takes it home to her husband. When they split it open a tiny boy rolls out. They bring him up with deep love and affection and when he reaches manhood he defeats the demons on the island of devils and brings their treasure to his beloved parents.

Peaches are rich in Vitamin A, potassium and niacin. More to the point, they are absolutely delicious and yummy to eat.

Here are a couple of recipes: -

River Café Grilled Peaches with Amarretto

8 ripe peaches

1 vanilla pod

2 tablespoons of caster sugar

120 ml (4fl0z) amaretto

Oven gas mark 5, 190 C, 375 F

Cut peaches in half, remove stones. Place cut sides down on grill and grill until slightly charred. Slice the vanilla pod lengthways and pound with mortar and pestle with the sugar. Put peach halves sliced side up in baking dish, scatter vanilla sugar over and pour on some of the amaretto. Bake approx. 10 minutes. Pour over the rest of the amaretto to serve with crème fraiche.

Peach & Banana Ice Cream

4 ripe peaches.

Concentrated apple juice

2 bananas

1 lb. low fat yoghurt

Peel and stone peaches. Peel and chop bananas. Liquidise peaches, yoghurt and bananas. Sweeten to taste with the juice. Half freeze then whisk well, half freeze then whisk well again and freeze till solid. Serve with toffee or fruit sauce.

My Favourite Foody Peach Thing

Make thin pancakes and to fill them with thinly sliced peaches sprinkled with a little sugar and cinnamon. Or drizzle on maple syrup and leave off the sugar.

Now if you want to get really decadent put some Green and Blacks organic vanilla ice cream on top of the pancakes. Extremely splendid!

Happy Eating, Ruby

PS – Thanks to Resurgence whose article on Peaches provided the above interesting information.

POLITICIANS QUOTE

“This is really unprecedented. Clearly we don’t understand all that is going on here.“

Bridge Street Workers Co-operative V. the Supermarkets

Bridge Street Workers Co-operative was established with the aim of providing an ethical, ecologically and socially committed organisation that retails vegetarian whole-food products with the highest quality of service. Whilst supermarkets may also be in the ‘food business’, their primary concern will always be maximising profits for shareholders which makes for crucial differences. We think our co-operative should be supported and this is why:-

Ethics

Ethics is at the heart of our business. We aim to prove that a business can be viable yet socially and environmentally concerned. That is why we aim to provide fairly traded products, and insist upon cruelty free cosmetics. We actively campaign on issues like GM foods, and organics, and are proud to think that with other like minded organisations we helped raise awareness and stimulate public concern. Over such issues however, supermarkets are slow to react to ethical issues, only taking action when consumers vote with their feet and shop elsewhere threatening profits and market share.

Of course, Bridge Street needs to make a profit to be viable (and after four years I think we’ve proved we are a hard working viable business) but all our profit is reinvested by expanding employment opportunities, expanding employee knowledge, or by bettering employee conditions (such as family friendly policies). Furthermore, we actively aim to provide ethical whole-foods at the cheapest possible prices, sourcing products from ethical wholesalers, and restricting the retail mark up on all our goods. Supermarkets may state they offer cheap prices, but in reality it’s less than 100 of perhaps 8000 of their products that are actually “on offer”. As for ethical sourcing – just try asking a member of their staff for information on their products to see how little they know about their wholesalers! This may not be their fault, but their company does not encourage widespread employee empowerment.

Environment

Crucial to an ethical business, is its ability to trade sustainably, reducing its environmental impact for the benefit of future generations. At Bridge Street we limit packaging - all of our cardboard is recycled, and virtually all the packaging we do use is fully biodegradable. Our Eco-friendly cleaners and household products are genuinely guaranteed to biodegrade without harm to the environment. We re-use egg boxes and plastic bags (whereas supermarkets re-cycle plastics bags, using further energy to produce nice crisp new ones again!), and offer a refilling service for frequently bought products like washing up liquid (one customer even mistakenly used this for their clothes washing with excellent results!) Supermarkets, on the other hand, absorb vast quantities green space, wrap dozens of versions of the same product in excessive packaging, encourage car transport rather than bus use (Bridge street workers is right next to the bus stop), and effectively promote excessive consumption, rather than meeting basic needs, through their skilled subversive marketing ploys.

Local

More than anything Bridge Street Workers Co-operative is a local store. We contribute to the health, vitality and individuality of Buxton town centre. We support local groups or campaigns such as the Stanton Moor protesters (see separate article), and actively seek out local growers and producers. Supermarkets are national, even international organisations whose effective monopoly of the food retail market produces an unhealthy control of food producers, farmers, the food produced and the prices paid with scant regard to local conditions.

Service and Knowledge

Finally, we believe our service is friendly, personalised and honest. We will not sell anything we wouldn’t buy for ourselves and we would not give inappropriate advice. Co-op members rotate jobs to ensure complete knowledge of the whole business whilst gaining personal empowerment and job satisfaction. We research our products and our wholesalers thoroughly, and keep our knowledge updated. We are happy to locate and order specific products for our customers and provide advice on the use, application, cooking, eating, or drinking of any stock (particularly the organic wine!). The very size, which makes supermarkets giants in food retailing, means they can never compete with Bridge Street Workers in terms of such specialisation, knowledge, expertise, and personal service. Since David beat Goliath, we think supermarkets have good reason to fear the Bridge Street Workers Co-operative. Well, almost!

The following article appeared recently in the Independent

Home Cooking Has Caught a Deadly Chill

by Janet Street Porter

Have you ever visited a branch of Iceland, the supermarket that recently announced that it is going completely organic? Iceland’s chairman, Malcolm Walker, is a manipulator of the press in the Alastair Campbell league. Nothing he does can be executed without a high-minded Mission Statement. He claims that his company has bought up 40 per cent of the world’s organic vegetables to satisfy his customers’ demands. I don’t want to be a snob about this but a typical Iceland customer doesn’t immediately seem to be one that would go to the wall for an organic tomato.

In my local Iceland branch, very little fresh food is on display. It is a temple to the deep frozen chip, with a nastily lit interior, and is silent but for the hum of energy consuming freezer cabinets. Shopping here is a strangely vacuous experience – one is denied the sensory pleasure of touch and smell. Everything is cold and wrapped in plastic, and it looks nothing like food as I recall it. In the GM free world of Iceland (lots of signs there on the subject), there were 19 different kinds of frozen potatoes - from bubble and squeak, to hash browns, to “mega waffles”, to “Croquettes”, to “smiley-face” potatoes, to southern fried wedges, to “stringfellow” chips, and “chip shop chunky chips”.

Even meat is presented looking a million light years away from the way meat looks in a butcher’s shop. There are chicken “nuggets”, “stix”, “burgers”, and even turkey “dinosaurs”. Beneath a sign proclaiming “up to 50 per cent more meat in our takeaway meals” I find packets of chicken madras – 20 per cent chicken – and chicken in black bean sauce – 30 per cent chicken.

Another Iceland sign announces: “we promise to work with every primary school in the UK to promote good healthy eating.” And a few yards away you can purchase an “all day” breakfast of baked beans, mushrooms, bacon and sausages, or a pina colada party cheesecake or a “sin” chocolate dessert.

Iceland press releases talk of “fighting battles” for it’s customers, but the one battle it clearly decided to give up on is the concept of home cooking. Iceland has reduced food to re-heating and abandoned any concept of encouraging customers to create their own meals. Almost everything is reduced to mini-morsels, smiley faces, and instant grill-able steaks. Real food seems so messy and difficult somehow.

I could go on deriding Iceland for it’s shameless exploitation of our worries about GM food and obsession with organic products, but that’s not the real issue. Iceland has worked out, that while we might all watch Jamie Oliver and Delia on television, most of us do not actually want to follow their example. Sainsburys may be signing up the gorgeous (to some) Naked Chef for millions, but will it turn us into a nation of cooks? I doubt it.

Television cookery is kind of visual porn, where someone whipping up magic meals can turn you on, just as cookery books become bedtime best sellers.

The truth is that from cradle to grave we eat mightily unhealthily and many of us act as if we regard cooking as an extinct skill. We live in an era of snacks, take-aways, and eating out. The deep freeze and the microwave are our gadgets of choice. A recent survey of British children showed that one in five ate no fruit in a week, and three in five ate no fresh green vegetables. Children exercise less and they are more obese.

As a nation we are deeply hypocritical about food, placing convenience and price well above healthy eating, despite the TV programmes we watch and all the recipe books some of us read.

So a couple of cheers to Iceland for their commitment to organic food. But, as long as most people want to eat stuff that has to be fried or is coated in breadcrumbs, are we really making any progress? At Iceland lamb and beef are reduced to steaks and a turkey has to be a “crazy creature”. Long live English cooking. It died along with our taste buds, a decade ago, but lives on via television as an arcane craft. The hum of the freezer has replaced the chat with the greengrocer.

STOP PRESS

Brand new range of take out

Zedz delicious muffins

Chocolate

Choc & Orange

Carrot & Orange

Lemon & Poppyseed

Date, Coconut & Banana

All gluten free & vegan

Stanton Moor & The Nine Ladies

Stanton Moor and the Nine Ladies Stone Circle will be familiar to many of you. This is a ‘Scheduled Ancient Monument’ within a National Park which may contain as yet undiscovered archaeological remains. One may therefore expect that it would be a place safe from development and/or exploitation.

However, there is already an application (NP/DDD/0299/082) by Stancliffe Stone Ltd. to re-open two dormant quarries – Endcliffe and Lees Cross – with plans to quarry for the next 40 years on the hillside below Stanton Moor and the Nine Ladies. This covers some twelve hectares and would, as you might imagine, have a huge impact on the hillside and local wildlife as well as access to the ancient monument. The quarry development would also bring heavy and constant traffic through local villages with the associated unpleasant effects of noise, and dust pollution. The quarries are currently dormant so no jobs will be lost if this application is not approved. The question is being asked – Is profit a good enough reason to disregard these considerations?

A direct action camp has been established near the proposed quarry site with tents, tree houses etc. Donations of food or money are very welcome. If you think you can help in this way you will find a box at the Wild Carrot to put donations of food in, and a collection tin on the counter. Firewood is also needed, but you would need to take that up there yourself.

GM Foods and You

“In the argument over GM food we should bear in mind that; even if GMOs were benign and safe, which we do not believe - whose idea was it to have companies like Monsanto, DuPont, and Novartis, whose origins go back to cancer causing saccharine, gunpowder and toxic aniline dyes respectively, in control of the seed plasm that provide the world with 90% of caloric intake? I don’t remember anyone making such an utterly daft proposition. There was no commission, no referendum, and no plebiscite. It is the very opposite of the biological diversity which is at the heart of the ecosystem’s resilience and sustainability.”

PaulHawken Co-author of Natural Capitalism

“This is really unprecedented. Clearly we don’t understand all that is going on here.” The Guardian

Wild Carrot Take out

From Forrest Foods

A wide range of savouries including Mexican and Italian style pastries and wraps.

From Real Bread

Fine range of crumble slices in lots of yummy flavours

From the legendary Bombay Sweet Centre

Huge onion bhajis and samosa

From Screaming Carrot (all Vegan)

Eccles Cakes

Chocolate Biscuit Cake

Cheesecakes

Pizza

All our take out food is free from artificial colourings, flavourings and preservatives.

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