Co-op aims to provide low-cost fruits, veggies - Salt Lake Tribune

Co-op aims to provide low-cost fruits, veggies - Salt Lake Tribune

Holly Chapman hopes enrolling in a food cooperative will help her have a healthier diet.

"It actually seemed like a good way to make myself eat more fruits and vegetables," the Salt Lake City resident said on a crisp Saturday morning while waiting to receive her first "bountiful basket." And the pitch of getting $45 to $50 worth of fresh produce for $15 is also a plus, said two women nearby, who stood with about 140 other people carrying laundry hampers and boxes to cart away their allotted food from the Bountiful Baskets Food Co-op pick-up site at the West Bountiful City Hall.

It's that goal of eating good food coupled with saving money that has led Bountiful Baskets -- a Phoenix-area initiative -- to grow from two sites in Utah last March to roughly 36 this year, from as far north as Richmond down to St. George, supporters say.

Though she's surprised by the program's popularity, SariAnn Stone, who started the Brigham City and Clearfield sites last year, says it makes sense.

"With the economy the way it is ... when you're struggling to put food on the table, you're not going to go to the produce, you're going to go for something cheap and something that will last in your pantry," said Stone, who wanted to start the co-op in Utah after moving away from Arizona, where she first became involved in Bountiful Baskets.

The co-op was formed about seven years ago by Tanya Jolly,
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who lives in Mesa. Two years later, Sally Stevens brought the program to her nearby community, but they say Bountiful Baskets has grown most in the past 31/2 years. Back then, there were about 120 families participating; now it's thousands, they say. Locations have sprouted in Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Washington state.

Jolly and Stevens try to help others form and lead their own sites; Bountiful Baskets is a nonprofit that relies on volunteers.

The two say they were inspired after longing for the farmers' markets they knew when living in California's Bay area. They were used to fresh, locally grown foods, but in Arizona, trying to find deals meant they had to rely on coupons and cheap prices for mostly processed and pre-packaged goods.

"It was hard to balance," Jolly said. "Do we go with the inexpensive, or eat what we want: the fresh produce?"

As their families got bigger and older, they needed more food, but fruits and vegetables were hard to buy in bulk.

"This is a nice way to feed a family on a budget with healthy food, instead of food you kind of feel bad giving your kids," Stevens said. She added that the produce may not be local, but Bountiful Baskets does aim to supply regional items.

And Jolly said the push for healthier food is starting to get more attention, especially as people hear about medical costs and realize a large part of being healthy means eating healthy. "You don't get to be a couch potato all the time and take a multivitamin and be healthy."

One way to look at the cost of food goes beyond comparing the price tags between an apple and potato chips. Instead, it's a comparison between nutritional values, said University of Utah's Julie Metos, director of the nutrition master's degree program.

"Produce is a great nutrition bargain, even at grocery store prices, for the kinds of nutrients that you get and the kind of disease-prevention qualities you get," Metos said, who encourages people to buy as much fresh fruits and vegetables as they can afford. The minimal recommendation is to eat five to nine servings of fruits and veggies a day.

Metos has seen other food co-ops recently started by food banks and low-income resource centers. She said there's a resurgence in movements that were popular in the 1970s to cut out grocery store "middle men" in favor of other collectives, such as farmer's markets, co-ops and community-supported agriculture, where people buy "shares" of a farmer's yield and receive weekly shipments.

For Salt Lake City resident Elizabeth Garcia-Leavitt, the swiss chard, romaine lettuce, cucumbers, lemons and eight other types of fruits and vegetables she packed into her canvas bags seemed to make Bountiful Baskets more than a one-time endeavor.

The $15 price tag "considering these two bunches," Garcia-Leavitt said picking up asparagus, "is incredible."


How Bountiful Baskets Food Co-op works

Participants log in to the food co-op's Web site on Tuesdays to sign up to receive a shipment of produce -- the food delivered is a grab bag of fruits and vegetables that depends largely on what the wholesaler has available. A regular basket, which features about 12 different kinds of produce, such as bunches of asparagus and bags of russet potatoes, costs $15. Bountiful Baskets organizers say that, depending on seasonal availability and sales, the amount of food delivered would cost between $45 and $50 at a grocery store.

The money from participants is pooled to buy a shipment of produce from Phoenix-based Kodiak Fresh Produce. The food is delivered on Saturday mornings to various locations, where volunteers evenly separate the food in baskets to be collected by each participant. Some sites only have bi-weekly shipments, others do weekly pickups.

More information and site locations are available on Facebook or at bountifulbaskets.org.
Locations

West Bountiful, West Haven, Washington City, Uintah, Tuacahn, Syracuse, St. George, Springville, South Ogden, South Jordan, Smithfield, Roy, Richman, Provo, Harrisville, Plain City, Parowan, Ogden, Newton, Mendon, LaVerkin, Kaysville, Hyrum, Hyde Park, Hurricane, Hooper, Herriman, Garland, Enoch, Clearfield, Cedar City, Brigham City, Beaver
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