Building a healthy business – SPOKANE SMALL BUSINESS CLOSE-UP: Grocery store takes a socially active approach to organic food

BUY A BOX OF FRUIT and vegetables from PEACH Safe Food and help make the world safer for our children. An overstatement? Perhaps. But spend an hour with BrightSpirit, an activist who has devoted her life to educating people about the toxins in food, and you may start to believe in her vision for the world.

Alison Boggs
Staff writer

http://www.spokesmanreview.com/news-story.asp?date=010204&ID=s1465431&cat=section.business

This month marks the launch of a new service for the small, nonprofit health food store she founded in downtown Spokane. Customers can order a box of fruit and vegetables online at http://www.peachsafefood.org and it will be delivered to their Spokane home or business.

The boxes cost about $30 and the organic items are hand-picked by the grocery store’s staff. Providers, including some local farms, also are screened to ensure they meet PEACH’s guidelines for nutrition and chemical-free production.

The first box advertised on the Web site contains: an avocado, bananas, two squash, four pears, one green pepper, five apples, one head of lettuce, a pint of cherry tomatoes, a pound of red onions, two grapefruits, four potatoes, 1.25 pounds of Satsumas, two bunches of spinach and a recipe.

To order a box of groceries, you must be a member, which costs $35 yearly. Since its inception two years ago, the market’s membership has grown from 14 households to 276.

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At a glance
Address: 1029 W. First Ave., Suite 100

President: BrightSpirit

Employees: 30 volunteers

Projected 2003 revenues: $60,000

http://www.peachsafefood.org

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Money spent at the market goes back into buying food and supplies. But membership money is spent on an educational agenda aimed at teaching people everything from what chemicals are used in the growing and packaging of their food to what the alternatives are to incinerating trash.

"We want to see patterns of consumption change. I’m not interested in small victories. Let’s change the entire system," said BrightSpirit, 41. She changed her name legally when a nickname stuck, thinking it fit her and would help people remember her cause.

The small organic grocery has been open for two years and started when nine families got together and began ordering organic foods together. The effort grew into the grocery and membership has expanded ever since.

But BrightSpirit has no desire to be a grocery store owner. She sees PEACH Safe Food as a way to connect with people and get them to care about what they put in their bodies. She wants people to ultimately have enough information to make educated decisions on what they buy. In the meantime, she said, people can trust that the products they buy at PEACH are safe and healthy for their families.

PEACH stands for People for Ethical Alternatives for Children’s Health.

"I am an activist," BrightSpirit said. "This is using food as a form of social activism."

To that end, the box delivery system was a way to reach more people and to make the system easier for people to use. For every 28 deliveries requested weekly, PEACH will hire a staff member, turning many of the organization’s 30 volunteers into paid staff.

And in an attempt to practice what they preach, BrightSpirit said, the workers will be hired at a "living wage" of $12 an hour.

BrightSpirit’s motivation for healthier living came with the birth of her first child. Suddenly, she said, she had this tiny being that relied totally on her. She started worrying about what she was putting into her daughter’s body.

"You’re looking at food and clothing and gosh, what’s in the air?" she said.

She went on to study biology at Texas Womens University, and that launched 20 years of personal research into the pollutants in our air, our food and the products we use. She was shocked to discover the level of chemicals in average consumer products and foods, even in packaging on supposedly organic items.

"I felt so cheated," she said.

Eventually BrightSpirit became an organic farmer in Davenport, Wash. Poor and with six children, she was receiving food stamps and benefits from the state Women, Infants and Children program. She was dismayed to learn she couldn’t use her vouchers to buy organic products, so she launched what became a two-year effort to convince the state to accept organic products in the WIC program.

It culminated with what BrightSpirit says was a pivotal moment in her career. Eventually the WIC program allowed vouchers to be used for organic milk, due to the extensive letter-writing and petition campaign pushed by BrightSpirit and others.

Kim Wallace, director of the WIC program, said it was "uncommon for a person with a particular strongly held value to be as tenacious" as BrightSpirit was. Wallace was also impressed with BrightSpirit’s willingness to pursue change through WIC’s established procedures.

"This was the first time an organic product was included in the WIC program in Washington," Wallace said. Concerns about adding organic products mostly center around cost. However, Wallace said it was a risk WIC was willing to take, largely because of all the petitions, letters and emails presented by BrightSpirit’s group from people saying they wanted organic milk.

That success made BrightSpirit believe in one person’s ability to effect large-scale change. "I was floored. I’m just this poverty-striken farm mom and I’m talking to these important people."

One policy of PEACH is not to criticize products without offering alternatives. For example, BrightSpirit said, instead of using chemical-laden window cleaners, people can use vinegar and water or lemon juice. PEACH publishes a monthly newsletter, PEACH Pulp, in which it offers product reviews and alternative choices, along with recipes and other items.

BrightSpirit also teaches classes on how to research the ingredients in products. She teaches her volunteers not to judge their customers’ food choices because everyone makes change at their own pace.

One day, she hopes to develop a database with information on thousands of products, where people can research the items they use and consume.

"The work," she said, "is vast and synergistic and really bigger than life, considering how young it is."