It Ain't Easy Going Locavore in Park Slope

Gadzooks and concord grapes, Erica isn't fooling when she bitches about how crowded the Grand Army Greenmarket is getting. It was thirty deep to buy eggs on Saturday. The fish line, I get, but I don't know if I have it in me to wait ten minutes on a line for eggs. And where have my dairy dudes gone, by the way? Kid Deux and I were excited to buy some cinnamon toast butter but they were gone.

The Food Coop isn't much better per my exhaustive infipstigation of ideal shopping hours. There aren't any! The lines are so long and some people so persnickety--yes, you get yelled at if you have one too many items on the express line. I had to cover a disciplinary hearing of a coop member getting sanctioned for her many crimes of uncooperative behavior, among them skipping the express line to go straight to a cashier with more than three items. Yes, I AM so serious. 

I've kept this to myself in my failed efforts to get Erica to join the club. But now I find out from the Wall Street Journal (via my google alert), that she can't even join if she wants to unless she gets online at precisely the right moment. Yes, even without you uncooperative people, the food coop is a popular place...

a new policy limits new members to 70 per week and spots are snagged within minutes. "You have to be online at 3 p.m. on Tuesday or Thursday," said Jana Cunningham, a membership coordinator at the Coop. "The window is only like 60 seconds."

What? 

So, I would like to take a moment to praise another Park Slope institution that gets short shrift and has not been given the respect it deserves. Key Food. Yes, bitches, I said it. And I stand by it. I love Key Food.