Fertile Ground Food Cooperative

In this interview, I talk with Erin McClellan, founding member and Board Chair of Fertile Ground Food Cooperative. In response to a lack of healthy food in an African American community in Raleigh, North Carolina, Fertile Ground members have been working for almost a decade to open a community-owned grocery store with social justice values and economic justice as its guiding principles. Fertile Ground, expected to open in 2025, is a personal and political project for me. I was born and raised in Raleigh, my grandparents are founding and current board members, and I have been a member of Fertile Ground since its founding. First as a high school student and later as an undergraduate student in Durham, I knocked on doors and attended community meetings. Later still, as a PhD student during the COVID-19 pandemic, I served as a regular volunteer for Fertile Ground’s food distribution program. Throughout its twelve years of existence, Fertile Ground has learned building a co-op in a capitalist system is a long process that requires patience and strategy. At present, Fertile Ground remains in conversation with other food co-ops across the country (figure 5). The interview below has been edited for brevity and flow.As we assessed what the closing of Kroger meant for our community, we began to reject the US Department of Agriculture’s term “food desert.” We started to describe Southeast Raleigh’s lack of fresh and healthy food as being food apartheid. The reason southeast Raleigh lacks the necessary food is not a natural occurrence. A desert, on the other hand, is a natural occurrence. I like using language that is true. As Karen Washington and Ashanti Reese have argued, when we say “food apartheid,” we make it clear that we are dealing with and challenging a system that's been constructed.1 This system that had been constructed allowed for three Family Dollar stores to be built in Southeast Raleigh, while it was widely known that the majority Black community where these stores were located lacked access to fresh and affordable foods. While the Black community in this area cannot access healthy foods, fast-food restaurants like Burger King and Cookout are widely accessible. Given this intentional practice, it has not been easy to build a collectively owned grocery store. For most of its history, Fertile Ground has been all volunteer-led with no paid staff.In our thinking about what a food cooperative could look like, we were driven by a commitment to economic justice and the building of a new economy. We envisioned a grocery store that not only paid its workers a living wage, but where the workers owned and had a say-so in the means of production. We felt that folks need to be able to govern their own organizations, and not just be governed by them. We continued to conduct listening sessions in the community. Was there interest in a food co-op? Was the time ripe? At these sessions, we were able to figure out what we needed to do, how we needed to do it, and what people’s vision was for a store.The grocery store that we envision will have 80 percent clean and conventional food and 20 percent organic food. By “clean and conventional,” we mean no artificial flavoring or corn syrup. While healthy food options in the area are expensive and mainly unaffordable to working class communities, our healthy food will be affordable and accessible. We hope that most of our fresh foods will be provided by Black farmers in North Carolina and throughout the South.During our formative years in the 2010s, we were studying and talking to other co-ops and learning how co-ops encourage and help facilitate leadership skills, civic participation, policy and legislative advocacy, and living wages. On top of the readings, we also had conversations with other food cooperatives like Gen City Food Cooperative in Ohio, which ran a ballot initiative during a local election.As part of our educational commitment, we launched an online series called “Food for Thought” to educate our members on topics related to Fertile Ground’s history. We had sessions on the history of food cooperatives, the interconnectedness of capitalism and police violence, health disparities and COVID-19, the census, elections, and more. All of what we have been able to accomplish is an introduction to what we plan to have as part of our store when it opens

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• Partnering Toward New Food Futures

  Jaclyn Rohel•Gastronomica The Journal of Food…•2025

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