Pcc -- This Growing Cooperative Lost Its Political Edge, But Not Its Crust

Sep 19, 1993

John Hinterberger

ALL I WANTED WAS A LOAF of bread.

But it had to be the right bread. I had a day off, a small pot of leftover pizziola sauce, some fruity olive oil and a decent bottle of a Northwest red table wine. It was time for lunch.

I knew the bread I wanted, and none of the nearby grocery chains was likely to have a loaf of it. I wanted - no, I craved - a few rustic slices (or pulled-off chunks) of a country Italian bread, preferably baked locally by either La Panzanella or the Grand Central Bakery.

I knew one store a dozen miles away that carried both bakeries' products. It was the View Ridge branch of Puget Consumers Co-op. It may not have been environmentally gentle of me to drive 20-plus miles for a loaf of bread. But I drove. Nobody at PCC would have to know.

Just as I was pulling into the parking lot, an imported sports car was departing. The vanity license plate read "PROLE." Neither the driver nor the convertible looked terribly proletarian, but looks and politics can be deceiving. Maybe the guy was on parole.

The PCC stores have long fascinated me. They are, I believe, one of the few large-scale food enterprises in the area strongly dictated to by the collective (the word is apt) philosophies of its member-shoppers, almost all of whom belong to the stores at which they shop.

Actually, it is really the other way around. The stores belong to them; brown rice, brown paper towels, brown eggs and all. They even carry something called Brown Cow Farm Yogurt. How, now.

I went into the store, past bulletin boards carrying sales notices for everything from almost new massage tables ($200) to futons ($80) to sailing canoes, conga drums and Rolfing Services Reasonable, along with a flier on "The Truth About Circumcision. (It is NOT Christian)."

All to buy a loaf of bread.

I picked out a fresh, dense loaf of Ciro's (La Panzanella) Ciabatta and browsed the store. PCC has come a long way from the Renton garage it originated in more than three decades ago.

It is a spiritual (and perhaps political) child of the '60s, decked out with '90s modern merchandising. For all of that, it is still a market with a mission.

The PCC started out in 1961 as a food-buyers cooperative - a club, really - with 30 members. They pooled their funds, bought in bulk, distributed their products and with their savings, solidified their co-op. In a sense, it still works the same way. But bigger and perhaps less narrowly doctrinaire.

"In 1966 and '67," said Teresa Steig, PCC's Member Relations Coordinator, "they expanded from the single garage to 15 different `depots' around the Puget Sound area. The whole enterprise had evolved from around a socialistic viewpoint.

"They were dedicated to people having hands on, working together, involved in their day-to-day lives. They could have chosen any way of expressing that viewpoint, but they chose food."

In 1967, the growing membership opened a storefront location in an old commercial building in Madrona. It eventually closed. But a larger store at the corner of Northeast 65th Street and 20th Avenue Northeast opened in 1970. It is still in operation.

"Most people consider that our first real store," Steig said. "Kind of our mother-ship store."

Those were days of brown rice and knobby organic vegetables, earth-mother dress and street-tough politics. I lived nearby and visited frequently. Always wondering why, if organic vegetables were so special, they couldn't be made to look more robust.

A change was brewing.

"It probably arrived in the late '70s and early '80s," Steig said. "In 1978 we opened a store in Kirkland and in 1980 another in Green Lake. We finally had to come to grips with the fact that we were a grocery business. It was really a mental change as much as anything else. We had a focus on community and a focus on consumer education. But we were a grocery business and the writing was on the wall."

In 1985, the Seward Park store opened; View Ridge in '87; West Seattle in '89 and last year in south Everett.

"The intention was to offer quality foods to people at fair and competitive prices. We never say we cost less than anyplace else. We try to price at, or slightly below, typical supermarket prices."

The membership, too, has changed - mellowed perhaps. Probably most of its 1990s members are less intensely political than the founders, Steig guessed.

"The majority are probably far less politically motivated," she said. "But for some there is the belief that food is something so powerful in their lives that it could well be one of the ways they act out their social values."

Social philosophy is nothing new to human digestion, as any perusal of religious dietary proscriptions demonstrates. The whole grain-based nutritional systems of Graham (as in cracker), Post and Kellogg proceeded from strong (and sometimes fanatic) notions of the interaction between healthy bodies, healthy minds and wholesome societies. The American breakfast industry was born with their theories - and still takes up vast arrays of shelf space.

What is remarkable about PCC to an outside observer is that 99 percent of its shoppers are members.

Some 35,000 consumers in the Greater Seattle area have either paid or are in the process of paying a $60 purchase of stock. One share of stock. It makes them, legally, owners of the stores they buy from.

The $60 share of stock is redeemable. That is, if you want to quit or move out of the area, you sell it back to the co-op. About 30,000 past Puget Consumers are either moved-away or fallen-away co-operators.

What are the attractions?

The stores are very congenial - almost clubby. Clerks (who get membership privileges) tend to be uncommonly well-informed and useful. A routine request for an explanation of what Rocky Jr. chickens and fryers were, for example, led to a friendly, informative discourse on the virtues of soy and corn-fed California chickens from a young man who obviously knew and enjoyed his work.

Deli-prepared foods are high-quality options, although it makes one wonder why the back-to-the-earth movement isn't cooking from scratch as much as it once did.

Wild-rice salads, Asian capellini, Southwest corn pudding, roasted-beets salads and good selections of olives both imported and domestic sell for $3.25 to $4.99 a pound.

"People still want to eat quality," said Steig, "even if they don't have as much time to prepare it.

You can buy heavy cast-iron pots at the PCCs if you do have the time. Entire walls are given over to bins of grains and rices (13 kinds at one count and no representation given to Uncle Ben), beans, nuts, granolas (granoli?), whole-grain pastas and vats of organic, non-spray honey.

The originator of all this is one John Affolter, who was the manager of the first food-buying club for seven years. He views the growth and sophistication of PCC - and its apolitical drift - "with surprise and chagrin. With results both good and not good."

He had envisioned, he said, complete service centers, with gasoline service stations and larger stores, "modeled after the Berkeley cooperatives. But the climate here," he said, "is not as political (as Berkeley's)."

He would have liked to have seen more political, consumer-linked activism and managers, "But I am pleased in some respects."

Interesting stores with a fascinating, home-grown history.

I paid $1.87 for the loaf of Italian bread, took it home, tore off the heel, dipped it in Italian olive oil, dipped it again in the pizza sauce, bit, chewed and took in a swig of red wine to complete the sacrament.

For the moment, not pausing to consider the politics of the baker.

Ah well, at least the sauce and wine were red.

John Hinterberger's food columns and restaurant reviews appear Sundays in Pacific and Fridays in Tempo. Michael Blackburn is a Seattle Times photographer.