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Day Around the Bay
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Officer-Involved Fatal Shooting in Bayview [Updated]
Sunday: Watch Women's World Cup Finals at Public House
No discussion of the Labor Movement in food-obsessed San Francisco would be complete without a mention of Rainbow Grocery, our own "independent, collectively run, worker-owned and operated" grocery and general store.
Rainbow's history is a rich and fascinating one. It began as a bulk food buying program for a San Francisco Based ashram in the early 1970, and by 1975 had opened on 16th and Valencia as a community food store, part of the People's Food System (a network of small community food stores throughout San Francisco and part of a political project using food distribution as a form of community organizing and political education). Eventually, the Rainbow collective broke with the governing body of the Food System. In 1993, in order to subsidize their growth and construction, the the collective acted to re-form as a cooperative corporation, legally defining once-and-for all that Rainbow is owned by its shareholders, which are its workers.
The decisions of the cooperative have not always been popular. In late 2002, some shoppers discovered that two of Rainbow's departments had levied long-standing boycotts against products from Israel, as a protest of that country's policies against the Palestinian people. Bowing to pressure from the Jewish community in December 2002 the collective voted to reverse the boycott and altered its rules structure so individual department heads could no longer institute boycotts without store approval. In August of 2003, the cooperative voted definitively on the issue of an Israeli boycott, and voted against it, affirming their desire to be all-community-inclusive.
In present-day San Francisco, Rainbow occupies a unique place among "health-food" stores. While big corporations such as Whole Foods carve out places for themselves in the new agribusiness, Rainbow remains comitted to their purposes of not only providing organic, sustainable vegetarian foods, but of a nonhierarchical, diverse, and community minded workplace.
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