The corporate Wedge
Natural foods buffs around the Twin Cities can't help but be familiar with the Wedge co-op in Uptown. It's probably the biggest one around town, and it the Twin Cities, that's saying something. Headlines yesterday reported that the Wedge is buying up one of the largest local produce suppliers in the area--Gardens of Eagan.
We've been talking some about alternative economies in my Geography class (exciting subtitle: "Spaces of Neoliberalization"). This seems like an interesting case to me. The Wedge to me is much like Minnesota Public Radio--a large non-profit that in many ways resembles its for profit cousins (in this case, Lund's or Byerly's). Sure, there's a bit more granola involved, but it's ambitious and not exactly geared at the hoi polloi. At least from a consumer perspective that's the case. However, using the kind of analysis posed by J.K. Gibson-Graham (whose text A Postcapitalist Politics has intrigued me), one might spot some clear differences in the economic and cultural skeleton of the place.
The question is this: what happens when these locally focused, not for profit organizations get big? To a certain extent they have to play by the rules of the marketplace. Yet in this case, the acquisition of this farm prevented it from being subsumed by even more capitalist residential development. And who really wants to see cookie-cutter townhomes on a former organic farm?
And so I have mixed feelings. Call me a cynic, but part of me feels that any large organization, no matter its mission, ends up in the same games of power and inequality. But to borrow a phrase from the best of the recent Series of Unfortunate Events books, even if it's not good, this move may be "good enough."