On a recent March morning, as a nor’easter walloped an idyllic Brooklyn street with snow, members of the Park Slope Food Coop ambled inside, shopping for bargains on broccolini and organic wheatgrass. I was here under somewhat false pretenses, as a reporter from out of state to tour the co-op—the truth, but not the whole truth.
At the door, a young blond woman told me I wasn’t welcome to roam a single organic-mango punctuated aisle unless under the supervision of a co-op member. She instructed me to take an elevator upstairs, where I would find a customer service desk. There, I met several members. I told them I had traveled here to take the political temperature of Clinton Country. This place, I explained, seemed to be the epicenter of liberal consensus.
The Park Slope Food Coop—a 17,000-member-owned and operated food store with a vaguely communist-sounding name—is a Sam’s Club Republican’s fever dream of where card-carrying members of the East Coast elite shop for groceries. For starters, I could locate no industrial-sized containers of ranch dressing.
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