Photo by Jim Coit

“A lot of times we had to tell people, ‘You’re not touchin’ the food until you take a shower.’ ”

Anyone who's ever thought of running a grocery store ought to know there's a way to do so without investing any money. This is possible at the Ocean Beach People’s Food Store, located just off the intersection of Voltaire Street and Sunset Cliffs Boulevard in Ocean Beach.

Jo Ann Diehl's free hours soon became bound to the store, when she and her family moved into a small house on the back of the property.

Photo by Jim Coit

Within a few months it is possible to advance from “volunteer” to “collective member,” and as a collective member, you’re in charge. You get to decide how much to pay yourself and when someone should be fired which products the store will carry at what price. You get to decide, for example, such questions as whether it is morally acceptable to sell fertile chicken eggs.

"I don’t think we should sell dead chicken embryos,” Jacqueline said softly.

Photo by Jim Coit

This was one of the items on the agenda of the last general meeting, held on a sultry Sunday night in August. Some of the collective members were privately betting that a protracted debate would commence when Jacqueline, a doe-eyed, ethereal blonde took the floor.

A crude wooden board is posted on the wall with prices.

Photo by Jim Coit

In a soft voice, Jacqueline pointed out that unlike the eggs sold in most commercial food stores, fertile eggs (like some of those sold by People’s Food) contain tiny chicken embryos which have begun developing. Yet the store was founded a dozen years ago with the resolve never to sell any dead animal products. “For that policy alone, I don’t think we should sell dead chicken embryos,” Jacqueline said softly. A low murmur swept the dozen young men and women assembled around the two front cash registers.

The original site, a one-bedroom house in the 4800 block of Voltaire.

Another young woman interjected a word of explanation. People’s Food had carried fertile eggs for a long, long time, she said, as a reaction against the abominable practices of commercial (infertile) egg farming — practices which include restricting the hens' movement so severely that their legs become deformed. Across the room, a bare-chested young man with waist-length blond hair pointed out that the store already was carrying one brand of non-fertile eggs, those of a San Pasqual firm called Veg-A-Pro. “Do we know about the conditions of the Veg-A-Pro chickens? Or do we have to worry about chicken abuse with them?"

Peanuts

Photo by Jim Coit

No, no, someone assured the group. A collective member had inspected Veg-A-Pro's premises and had found chickens walking around, unhobbled. Another person questioned why the store shouldn't continue to carry both the fertile and non-fertile eggs, and erect a sign to warn purists of the presence of the chicken embryos in the fertile ones.

People's Food collective. "I’m always wary of people coming into our routine and saying how groovy it is, and then a month later, they’re talking money. I mean, how many times has that happened to us?”

Photo by Jim Coit

This drew a testy rebuke from Rick, a three-year collective member, who reminded the group of a similar compromise in which a majority of collective members had decided to carry baked goods containing highly processed gluten and gluten flour, at the same time posting a notice which alerts customers that the store recommends gluten-free products. This approach was offensive, Rick argued. “You can say that we should let the customer make the decision, but a lot of times the decision starts with the right attitude,” he asserted. “We could put up signs about everything, but if we're the most progressive people, we have to start by taking a stance.” Swept by this logic, the collective voted unanimously to discontinue carrying the fertile eggs and to double-check on the Veg-A-Pro hens, just to make sure the store wasn’t abetting chicken cripplers.

This is what it’s like to “run” the Ocean Beach People’s Food Store — nothing at all like managing a Safeway, where a corporate vice president might ponder a question, voice his decision, and oversee his minions as they scurry to carry out his directives. At People’s Food the workers, as a body, are the bosses, and the store itself is organized as a nonprofit institution. People’s claim to distinction is that — somehow — it has survived longer than any other such collective in San Diego. “It’s a real magic little spot here in the middle of Middle America,” says one of the collective members.

Once, not so long ago, it would have seemed strange to hear Ocean Beach described as “Middle America.” But one by one the activists have left and the countercultural landmarks have passed away: the OB Rag, the OB Free School, the Community School. The Left Bank, once a cauldron of leftist idealism, has been reincarnated as Peninsula Bank. Only the venerable Newport Avenue head shop, the Black, and People’s Food have survived, remnants of an earlier ethos, a style whose time has passed.

Today the food store wears that style like a costume; even the building exterior has a period look, with the sun and a yin/yang symbol on the facade, and the side wall graced by a visionary mural which features scenes of pastoral nature and outer space. Inside the front doors. People’s Food is a hobbit hole of a business, dark and cozy and fragrant, a cornucopia of various products competing for shelf space. Here, electronic scanners that beep or drone in robot voices would intrude like aliens. Instead, a crude wooden board is posted on the wall near the cash registers; on the board, store workers daily change the hanging numbers which signify the prices of both the organic and “commercial” (nonorganic) produce.

Nonorganic fruits and vegetables are relegated to second-class status, tolerated only when the organic alternatives aren't available or cost much more. (“Organic” foods are cultivated without synthetic chemical fertilizers or pesticides.) People’s Food sells more produce than anything else, but its shelves hold an amazing range of other items. Customers in the dairy section can find some fifteen to twenty varieties of raw or rennetless cheeses, and more than just whole wheat bread is offered in the dimly lit baked goods section; also crammed into that corner are “wheatberry” and “squaw” and “anadama” and “granola pullman” breads. A plethora of pastries, packaged in hand-lettered labels and plastic wrap, looks homemade, like the offerings at a PTA bake sale. The cooking-oils shelf down the aisle from the baked goods holds safflower, sesame, sunflower, com, peanut, almond, avocado, apricot kernel, walnut, soy, linseed, coconut, and olive oils. At the same time, shoppers can stock up on all-natural, no-preservative barbecue sauce (fourteen ounces for $6.71), and instant vegetable bouillon imported from Switzerland, and “yomogi mochi with mug-wort herb” (traditional Japanese sweet brown rice “cakes”). They can fill their baskets with herbal nasal sprays, and toothbrushes made with “pure natural bristles,” and for their cats they can buy “natural and organic cheese snacks.”

Once upon a time, such a variety of products was not available, according to Jo Ann Diehl. Although all the collective members share equal responsibility in making policy decisions, Diehl fills a special role within the organization. She’s the only one of the original founders who remains active in the store, and “she really is the glue that has held everything together,” another collective member says. “Unlike the rest of us, she made this [working at the store) a career.”

Yet Diehl says a career in the grocery business was not at all her intention back in 1971 when she moved with her husband and three small children from Erie. Pennsylvania to San Diego. She was immediately attracted to the small-town atmosphere of Ocean Beach, with its many services and community activities within walking distance of each other. The family settled there, and soon Diehl began volunteering at the Free School, having taught fourth- and fifth-grade children back East. Associated with the school was a food-buying club. “It was based in someone’s garage, and you had to order what you wanted a week in advance. You had to pay in advance and you were limited to a small number of goods such as zucchini and rice. It wasn't a real satisfactory way to shop because you couldn't run out and get your milk and eggs when you needed them,” Diehl recalls. About the same time, she says, activists at the school became interested in identifying basic human needs and trying to find ways to help fill those needs in Ocean Beach; gradually the notion took shape of starting a store which would supplant the buying club and advance the cause of “getting good food to people.”

Diehl says the organizers started with maybe ten donations ranging from twenty-five to five hundred dollars, money which went to buy the first goods and pay the rent on a one-bedroom house in the 4800 block of Voltaire, just across the street from the Free School. The organizers’naivete actually worked as an asset in some ways, Diehl indicates; since no one knew how a food store should be run, everyone improvised, uninhibited. Bins of nuts, dried fruit, rice, granola, and a tiny selection of beans moved into the living room, where a counter near the front door held the store’s first “register” — a muffin tin with dimes, nickels, and quarters apportioned to the various cups. Someone donated an aging copper-colored refrigerator, “where we kept our ice cream and cheese. Customers had to go inside it and help themselves.”

When the store opened its doors on August 19, 1972, a similar self-serve philosophy prevailed in the dry goods sections, where shoppers bagged and weighed their selections, computed the price, and marked that figure on the outside of the bag. “We had one scale,” Diehl says. “I can still see it against the wall.” The single bedroom became the office, with one closet storing rice and beans and another holding eggs. In the kitchen area, workers cut and wrapped cheese and packaged nuts. More creative, says Diehl, was the biweekly concocting of the trail mix sold by the store. “Different people would make it up, and because everyone had different tastes it would be different all the time. One person would like raisins, so they’d load up on them, then the next week another person would go heavy on the walnuts. We’d stir it up with big paddles.

“A lot of people were volunteering help because they really liked the store,” Diehl says. In fact, she was one of only four workers who received any pay: one hundred dollars a month for a four-day-on, four-day-off schedule in which the “on ” days often stretched to ten or more hours. Even Diehl’s free hours soon became bound to the store, when she and her family moved into a small house on the back of the property; often people would knock on her door after store hours, asking if Diehl would mind opening the store to allow for the purchase of an emergency carton of milk or some other vital commodity. Yet Diehl today sounds as if she enjoyed the wacky unconventionality of the lifestyle and the philosophical issues which confronted the four collective members almost from the start of the store’s existence. “I remember at one point one of the members wanted us to stop carrying any mucus-causing foods such as cheeses.” The other three members prevailed in insisting on at least a modicum of accommodation to consumer demand.

Diehl says she herself never held any puritanical notions about diet back in the early days. In fact, she recalls driving out through Ramona shortly after arriving in San Diego County and stopping at a health food store when she and her children became very thirsty. “I remember seeing that they had strawberry kefir [a fermented milk drink much esteemed by health food connoisseurs] and wondering if it was anything like Strawberry Instant Quik.” Diehl bought a container and took a large swig, only to shudder at the taste. “I still don’t like kefir to this day.”

A short, slender woman whose candor sometimes verges on the blunt, Diehl is one of the few collective members who admit to eating meat on rare occasions. “I believe moderation is probably the best thing in all ways. If you have an urge to eat chocolate, I believe you should eat it.” Today she recalls some of the more fanatic collective members trying to convince her of the exclusive virtues of one dietary philosophy after another, sometimes the same person advocating a succession of three different, even conflicting, philosophies. Rather than tending toward such extremism, Diehl says, “I just consider myself a good, common-sense woman . . . just trying to do things right without hurting others or the Earth.”

Bolstered by some of that common sense, and subsidized by the cheap labor, the store operated profitably right from the start. Store records show that after six months of operation People’s Food was taking in about $450 a day. “We’ve always had a reputation for paying our bills on time, unlike some stores who string along their distributors for thirty or sixty days, or more,” Diehl says. Before very long, the store got so crowded it became impossible for workers to restock during business hours, and after about three years, the collective began eyeing a rental property one block south of the first location.

“It |the larger building] had started as a family billiards den, then it went to regular billiards, then it had become a bar,” says Diehl. Although some members of the community warned that any move would destroy the old-time, rustic feeling, Diehl says the need for more space was crucial, though she adds that the worst period in the history of People’s Food came while the collective members were renovating the new building and continuing to pay rent on and operate out of the first location. To raise extra cash, Diehl even took to stationing her two young sons in front of the store, selling its first avocado sandwiches. For months after the store finally made the move (in November of 1975), the workers would periodically push all the shelves and produce displays to the back of the building, in order to stage fundraising community dances.

By then the collective governing body had grown to encompass between ten and fifteen members, most of whom earned about $140 a month. “The customers who were walking in the door were making five times as much as we were,” says one member associated with the store during that period. “But we felt guilty about receiving any pay, and I think we were afraid we would be ‘corrupted.’ ”

This particular former member, Jackie Sanders, showed up at the food store shortly after arriving in Ocean Beach from New York, having heard that People’s Food was a good place to find work. “Lot of people got their start that way,” he says. “ ’Course, we got some real riffraff too. A lot of times we had to tell people, ‘You’re not touchin’ the food until you take a shower.’ ” Sanders worked with the collective for a year and a half.

Almost eight years have passed since then, and he now looks back on his tenure at the store with a mixture of affection and disillusionment. “As a collective structure, we were all equals and nobody could tell anyone else what to do. But the problem was there was a lack of respect for some of the responsibilities that went along with the privileges. . . . There were a lot of people who didn’t pull their share, who just wanted to argue or to naysay when you wanted to do anything.” If a worker failed to show up for a shift or took a three-hour lunch — not unusual occurrences — it was difficult or uncomfortable for anyone to voice a word of reprimand.

Sanders blames his own self-righteousness for causing some problems during that period. He recalls, for example, how he organized an in-store referendum in response to efforts by other collective members to broaden the base of products sold. Customers were greeted with a five-page, typed “ballot argument” that questioned, “Should we give up our role of being an alternative to Safeway ... in order to raise some quick capital?” In the document Sanders asserted that among the arguments against carrying Hunt’s tomato sauce and tomato paste was the fact that “they were made by Hunt’s. Many people do not want to see us carrying anything made by a big pig such as Hunt’s.” Chocolate milk was “a rip-off” and “dangerous,” he charged. “It says milk on the label but it isn’t very nutritious at all. It contains artificial flavor, as if you need more chemicals, and carageenan, which is under investigation for its link to peptic ulcers.” With similar agruments, he inveighed against red pistachio nuts, yellow cheese, potassium sorbate. Comet, Ajax, raw sugar, and egg nog — and handily secured the banishment of each of them from the premises.

Other times he chafed at the difficulty of effecting change when consensus was required on every decision. For example, workers had always used Magic Markers to write the prices on various items, but people commonly lost the caps, causing the pens to dry out, a small but steady source of waste.

Sanders says he suggested the purchase of a Dymo marking gun as a cost-saving measure, but it took him months of researching and arguing before the group finally agreed to spend the necessary $167. “That was a big capital expenditure for us,” Sanders says. He enjoyed less success in convincing people that the store needed to be cleaned nightly. “It’s a food store! But they’d say, 'Well, if you want to do it, you do it.’ So I’d wind up working eighty hours a week, doing my regular jobs and cleaning the store after hours.” He says cash controls were terrible; register workers would find themselves short of up to a hundred dollars at the end of a day because they used a collective “till,” rather than the standard practice of making each checker responsible for his or her own errors. “But to suggest that we shouldn’t use a community till would have smacked of bureaucracy. Or that we didn’t trust each other, that someone might be stealing. Only the problem wasn’t stealing — it was mistakes or incompetence!”

“Things were so loose eight years ago when I started that people were working in the store and living up on the roof,” recalls Alana Leeper, who today has worked at the store longer than anyone except Jo Ann Diehl. Like Sanders, she recalls that in the days shortly after moving to the current location, irresponsibility on the part of some workers was rampant. Yet this drawback never seriously discouraged Leeper; she says the first time she herself walked into People’s Food to buy a carton of yogurt, “I knew immediately this is where I wanted to be and this is what I wanted to do. ... It felt so different from walking into a Safeway or a Mayfair or even a regular health food store — they always have that sterile, white-walled look.” That first day, Leeper walked up to a worker and asked if she could help out. She began by bagging cheese for fifty cents an hour in food credits. A month and a half later she secured a full-time job.

A gentle woman who eschews red meat and practices tai chi, Leeper today extols the freedom afforded by her work at People’s Food, which has encompassed everything from managing the herb department to running one of the registers. “We’ve always made a point of allowing ourselves breaks when we need them. There’s a lot of space for rejuvenation and recovery.” In practical terms, she tries to take three weeks of vacation about twice a year. She praises the store’s policy of a thirty-hour workweek, which has been in force for some years. “We feel forty hours a week is too much stress.”

Along with several other current collective members, Leeper seems to approve of the changes that have reshaped those unrestrained years of the collective’s youth — changes toward more rules and structure. Today, she asserts, “If you’re goofing off. you’re hurting someone else and most of us are pretty bold about saying something. . . . We usually don’t let that slide by for very long. Even though there’s no boss to come down on someone, there are twenty-nine other people.”

Other structures have evolved unpredictably, sometimes meeting initial resistance with only deferred acceptance. One change first attempted years ago was the use of a half-dozen “focalizers,” a new-age euphemism for department managers. Although Diehl says the arrangement worked well, she says it stopped because the store lost some of the focalizers and the remaining workers were less experienced people who were reluctant to assume the greater responsibility. But early this year the idea was revived, and once again workers testify enthusiastically to the greater efficiency of the arrangement.

A similar change that came about five years ago was the agreement for one person to assume the day-to-day role of store manager. At first this flopped, according to Jimbo Someck, the young man who first filled that position. “I was a lousy manager,” he says ruefully. Even though he had pushed the hardest for allowing one person to handle overall daily decision making on store wide concerns, ‘‘I was so ingrained in a collective philosophy that it was really a struggle for me to take the responsibility.” He found himself timidly consulting everyone about each decision, the very process he had disparaged. Only after leaving the store and later returning and trying the manager’s job a second time did Someck feel comfortable making decisions on his own.

Someck left People’s Food again earlier this year to open his own natural foods store in North Park, Jimbo’s, but well before his departure Diehl stepped into his shoes as manager. She emphasizes that the title is far looser than in most conventional supermarkets; the collective as a whole still holds review power over every decision she makes as manager. Yet the position streamlines operations. She says she personally lobbied for another step to that end two years ago when she argued that collective members should be required to attend a certain minimum number of meetings or lose their voting privileges. Prior to that Diehl says it was common for collective members to show up at a meeting and question some decision they had missed at a previous meeting — forcing a repeat of often exhaustive discussions. “That was a case where I was really fed up with the way things had been going.”

For all these changes, the managerial process at People’s Food still seems an enterprise requiring patience. For example, the fertile-egg question at the last collective meeting apparently was resolved with surprising ease, but in fact subsequent investigation revealed that the Veg-A-Pro chickens were cooped, not running free, a discovery that will undoubtedly prompt further debate. Another agenda item demonstrated how tough it can be to reach a consensus among the fourteen people who now hold voting rights.

The item in question concerned an outside business consultant who had begun advising the collective some months ago. Alana Leeper had met the fellow at a tai chi camp and had confided some of the problems the collective was having with setting salaries. Fascinated by the alternative business structure, the consultant had offered free advice in exchange for the opportunity to learn about the collective. Several months had passed, and now he had suggested he would like to make his services available on call in exchange for a retainer of seventy-five dollars a month, plus seventy-five dollars’ worth of monthly food credits. Shelly Miles, the meeting leader, and Leeper (both of whom had been working closely with the consultant) felt this would be money well spent. What ; did everyone else think?

One member immediately questioned why the consultant couldn’t instead be paid for services rendered, rather than given a salary. Another young man bristled at the notion of receiving advice from someone grounded in traditional business structures. “We really gotta get the cooperative perspective on things. That’s what makes us so unique. . . . It’s just very different from what he’s probably used to.”

The bare-chested, long-haired blond reminded the group of the thousands of dollars spent over the years on inventory reports, documents from which the collective members had derived little benefit. “We could have not gotten the inventory done ever since the very beginning and nothing would have changed,” he complained. “I just really hate the thought of us spending money on these things. Other businesses have quarterly reports — but they do something with 'em. We don’t!”

Once again, someone repeated the suggestion that the consultant only be paid by the hour for things he actually did. Then another young man took the floor. “I think if this guy (the consultant is so into being a brother, he oughta get down to our level and get a wage similar to what we’re paying ourselves. ... I’m always wary of people coming into our routine and saying how groovy it is, and then a month later, they’re talking money. I mean, how many times has that happened to us?”

“I really think we should be telling him this to his face,” suggested Miles with good grace, considering her strong support for the suggested pay arrangement. This decision could wait until the consultant could attend a future meetings and hear the members’ concerns.

Miles and Leeper later privately expressed their belief that the consultant could particularly help by giving advice on worker salaries. “It’s been one of the most difficult things for us,” according to Leeper, with one arrangement after another proving unsatisfactory. She says at one time in the past, all workers received the same hourly wage, but that caused discontent because “some people were putting in much more time and energy than other people.” So currently the payment structure consists of multiple levels. Anyone interested in working at the food store must first serve as a volunteer, earning two dollars an hour in food credits. The length of such volunteer stints can vary from a week up to several months, depending upon when a paying job becomes available. When one does, the newcomer must work for $3.85 an hour (slightly more than minimum wage) until he or she has logged 250 hours over a three-month period, and then the person becomes eligible for status as a “collective worker” — a process which requires a vote of approval from three-fourths of the collective members. Collective workers get regular pay raises that, over four years, can take them to a salary of seven dollars an hour (and the group expects that figure will soon rise to nine dollars). Furthermore, after another 250 hours as a collective worker, individuals can be voted in as “collective members,” status which brings them the power to vote on issues.

Now this convoluted system is causing grumbles because it allows for all collective workers to earn the same salary after a certain amount of time with the store. (The exceptions to this are the focalizers, who earn slightly more, and Jo Ann Diehl, who earns $2.75 more per hour.) “It means that someone who’s working the register all day might be earning only $4.75 an hour, while someone else is getting six bucks an hour for making salads,” complains Rick Foreman. A clean-cut young man whose intensity sometimes comes across as anger. Foreman first discovered People’s Food back at the end of 1972, after returning wounded from Vietnam. “I couldn't even walk into a Safeway or a Mayfair . . . because of the vibes,” he says. In contrast, he says People’s Food seemed “scattered, but that’s what you needed because it was indicative of the times. The world was scattered.” He shopped but didn’t work at the food store for many years; instead he eventually wound up in an aeronautical engineering job at Rohr Industries, where he earned almost $40,000 a year and supervised 150 people. When Rohr’s links with the military began to trouble Foreman’s conscience too much, he abruptly quit one day, and soon afterward began accepting two dollars an hour in food credits from People’s Food. Today, among other chores, he serves as focalizer for the register workers and is widely acknowledged to have one of the most stressful tasks in the store. “You gotta deal with things like the O.B. Spaceman walking in with his cigarettes and bad vibes and throwing up his hands and yelling, I’d like to say something! ’ Sometimes we’ll have ten different types of melons and ten different types of squash, and the price of each of them might be different.”

Despite his prowess in the register work. Foreman’s first love is nutrition and healing. In addition to working at the food store, he’s a full-time acupuncture student and his diet nowadays is “more macrobiotic than anything else. Although in the past I went for years without touching cheese or dairy. I’m an extremist.” Like many of the collective members. Foreman takes in immoderate pride in the purity and integrity of the store’s products. “People can come in here and buy stuff basically with their eyes closed.” He tells how he lobbied about a year ago to ban the sale of organic coffee. “Some people were saying that because it was organic we were doing something groovy,” but Foreman says his well-prepared arguments about the harmful effects of any kind of coffee prevailed. Other such examples abound. A few summers ago one of the other members charged with the job of buying commercial produce noticed signs at the downtown produce market warning that certain fruits had been sprayed with the chemical EDB. which can cause sterility. That worker researched the chemical and soon persuaded the collective to stop carrying any commercial mangoes or pineapples. In yet another instance, one of the bagging-department workers learned that one supplier was using Mexican vanilla (which is commonly tainted by a dangerous pesticide) to flavor his soy products. People’s Food persuaded the supplier to have his vanilla chemically tested, and the test showed it to be pure. “But we posted the lab analysis to assure our customers about the quality. And once that supplier ran out of that batch of the Mexican vanilla, he switched to domestic sources.”

For all the puritanical retrenchments. People's Food has seen its share of dietary concessions over the years, outlawing organic coffee here but condoning organic potato chips there; eliminating commercial mangoes but tolerating the invasion of dairy products in the store's deli. “At first we were really idealistic in the deli,” says one of the pioneers in that department. He explains that the deli took shape after an in-store restaurant took up too much floor space. This worker says at first the deli loftily spurned the use of any dairy products or cheeses. “A lot of times, we (deli workers! would all be at a stage where we just wanted to do all raw foods. . . . But gradually we learned that you just can't make things that are too bizarre or else people simply won't buy them. And then they don't do anyone any good.”

Today the deli seems the least ascetic section of the food store. Early each morning four workers converge in an area barely three feet wide and no more than twenty feet long to juggle bowls and cutlery — chopping, peeling, slicing, mixing a daily supply of hummus, tabouleh, tofu salad, organic salsa and guacamole, sandwiches, and desserts. Over a long wooden counter, cardboard stars and planets and crystal amulets dangle from a homemade skylight; offbeat icons such as posters of Gopal Krishna and various beach scenes survey the culinary crush from a vantage point on the wall over the spices. Oils now season the salads (though to this day no oils lighten the baked goods because the workers believe the oils break down in an unhealthy manner when heated). The cakes and cookies contain malt syrup because, as one worker explains with chagrin, “If you're gonna do baked goods, you have to use some sugar. We didn't want to, but that’s just the way it is.”

Among the rest of the workers, the deli has the reputation for being the flightiest, most anarchic section of the store. It’s the deli workers who sneak out and turn up the stereo after the cash register workers have lowered the volume. In addition to the standard items the deli produces daily, the workers whip up an unpredictable array of other dishes. One recent morning one woman was seized with the urge to create an enchilada casserole, Japanese tofu noodles, and an amaranth-millet salad. The day's baker, inspired by a plethora of fast-ripening peaches in the store's produce section, was battling for space in the aging Tappan oven to bake peach cookies and peach cake.

The deli workers figure out how much to charge for all these products with a system that seems childishly, charmingly simple. When one of the workers, for example, decided to make Greek salad, she grabbed a red shopping basket and dashed through the produce aisles, selecting the necessary spinach, red onion, onions, broccoli, and other ingredients. Then she logged the retail cost of each item in a weathered notebook. Later she would take the total, add six dollars for each hour of work to produce the salad, multiply by 1.3, then divide by the number of salads produced, to get the price — $1.10 for a one-cup serving. Ragtag as it may seem, the system has seen the deli grow from one worker making a half-dozen sandwiches, some cookies, and a few salads each day, to a bustling attraction which brought in nearly $90,000 in gross revenues last year.

The thirty-percent markup on deli products is about the median for People's Food, according to Diehl. She says the store has always tried to add the lowest markup to those items that customers need on a daily basis. Thus the wholesale dairy product prices are increased by only about fifteen percent, while customers pay about twenty percent more for baked goods than the price for which the store procures those goods. Diehl says the markup on produce is roughly thirty percent; that for packaged goods is thirty-five percent, with bulk goods like rice absorbing a slightly higher increment to cover spillage. The store makes its greatest gross profit on the “taxable goods,” all those items such as the herbal shampoos and natural dental flosses, on which People’s Food adds a fifty-percent markup. Under that price structure, the store grossed about $1.5 million dollars last year, which provided enough capital to allow the collective at last to purchase the well-worn building on Voltaire Street which has housed the store for the last eight and a half years.

Diehl says People’s Food had gradually won the heart of the building’s former owners (who happen to run the neighboring appliance rental business). They encouraged the collective members to buy the building for $290,000, rather than take on a new lease, and Diehl says the former owners helped make the sale possible by accepting a low down payment and agreeing to carry the mortgage. “It turned out our payments were only about $1000 more per month than the new lease would have been.”

The collective members uniformly assert that the purchase of the building has revitalized the store. A new refrigerated storage room which workers had wanted for years finally was installed last month, and the collective at long last is planning to replace the building’s leaky old roof; jars asking patrons for donations to help cover the $15,000 expense recently appeared next to the cash registers. Yet this burst of enthusiastic activity shouldn’t obscure the financial restrictions on the food store’s growth. Because they lack a warehouse or large storage facilities, workers can’t buy in bulk at the kind of prices that allow supermarket chains to charge low prices. Similarly, People’s Food isn’t big enough to buy most of its nonorganic produce from the farmers themselves (as the chain stores do), but instead must buy through produce middlemen downtown. Then, too, the collective’s ethics often reduce profits to less than they would be in another enterprise. Rick Foreman points out, for example, that People’s Food carries only a limited vitamin selection because the store believes that nutrients are best obtained from “whole foods.” With a certain perverse pride, he notes that “the vitamin sections support most health food stores” — but not the Ocean Beach institution.

The soul of People’s Food seems to lie in its extensive produce department, and at no time does that soul seem so charged with vitality as on Saturday morning, long before the front doors open at 10:00 a.m. “There’s something really Zen about Saturday at People’s,” affirms Trent Weston, upon whose head falls primary responsibility for most of the food store’s organic produce supply. Weston states frankly that he came to People’s Food at a time when he was “down and out.” After graduating in 1972 from Cal Western with a sociology degree, he had traveled for a while then worked at a Mission Beach natural foods store. Five years ago, when he walked into People’s Food and volunteered to sort avocados in exchange for a dollar-an-hour food credit, Weston says he knew he “had no skills except in this type of menial work.” He soon joined the paid staff, and now he says the primary bond that holds him to People’s Food is the affection he feels for all the store regulars. Almost diffidently he adds, “I don’t like the idea of working for one boss who would be making money off my labors. I prefer working for humanity.”

By 8:00 a.m. on this particular Saturday morning, close to a dozen workers are on the premises and an old Beatles album is blasting over the sound system. In the commercial produce section, Jacqueline, the fertile eggs opponent, is piling up peaches that are so large they fill the entire palm of her hand. Another worker, the long-haired blond man, bought the peaches before dawn the day before from one of the produce wholesalers on Sixth Avenue downtown. Once, several years ago when the collective’s truck broke down, the workers tried phoning in their orders to the downtown wholesalers and having the goods delivered, as do the vast majority of the restaurants and small markets. “But you just can’t depend on the quality that way,” says one of the workers. “If you call and say you want eight boxes of tomatoes, they’ll take the first eight boxes off the stack. ” But on any given day at any given wholesaler’s the state of tomato ripeness can vary wildly from one box to another. “A lot of times I’ll pick through eight pallets of tomatoes just to get eight boxes that are right for us, ” the collective’s commercial buyer says. Ironically, he himself subsists primarily on a diet of organic avocados, yet that preference doesn’t inhibit him from fussily scrutinizing the nonorganic fruits and vegetables. In the sweet-scented warehouses, he hefts boxes of lettuce to divine which contain the weightiest, densest heads. He squeezes dozens of avocados in search of those just on the verge of breaking into ripeness. He fingers the surface of bell peppers in an effort to avoid those coated with various suspicious oils. “It might be fish oil or some petroleum derivative. They use them to keep the vegetables from dehydrating.”

Because the collective buys its commercial produce on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, the workers have time to arrange all those nonorganic fruits and vegetables long before the busy Saturday-morning openings. Many of the organic produce bins are still empty on this particular morning, however, one consequence of the dearth of organic food distributors. Trent Weston says when he began working with organic produce about three years ago, four different distributors served People’s Food. But a few dropped out; one major Los Angeles-based distributor just collapsed within the past few weeks. Now Weston must depend primarily upon one San Diego man who distributes the produce of local organic farmers, and upon Veritable Vegetable, a San Francisco-based women’s collective which trucks organic loads down to San Diego twice a week. On the Thursday before this particular Saturday, Weston conferred by phone with the San Francisco vegetable dealers, learning what products they would be gathering from statewide farmers; then Weston had alerted the collective’s commercial buyer as to what gaps would have to be filled by nonorganic purchases. This Saturday morning the Veritable Vegetable semitrailer, as usual, is due in at 8:30 a.m., “but they almost never show up until 9:30, sometimes much later,” Weston says resignedly.

Some of the bins around him already have been filled with products grown by local people. One holds purple basil grown by a North County woman who cultivates a small crop of exotic lettuces and specialty vegetables, which she sells to the Golden Door health spa and various restaurants around the county. “We’ve got some nice Red Delicious apples from Dr. Johnson, who has a farm in Valley Center. . . . Here’s some kabachi squash grown by Phil Arena, a longtime organic grower up in Escondido, and today we’ve got three types of peppers from Hugh McCoy in Alpine. He’s in his seventies and he also brings in figs, too. Also elephant garlic and some organic corn.”

Besides the small-time farmers, Weston seems to take a special deiight in buying excess fruit from the trees of people in the neighborhood; someone will bring in ten pounds of pomegranates, for example, or a few boxes of sapotes. “We ask them if they’ve used any spray, and we’re pleased to accept it even if they have, but our customers do at least want to know one way or the other.’’

Weston says he himself prefers to buy organic produce, though like several other collective members he seems most strongly moved by sociopolitical sympathies for the small independent operators struggling to produce their crops with ecologically balanced techniques. “Some people come into the store and say they can taste the pesticides [in commercial produce). But I've never been able to taste a pesticide in my life,” Weston says mildly. He states that “just because something is organic that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s better tasting. ... I can see an organic peach that’s flavorless and a commercial peach that’s ripe and juicy, and I'll buy the commercial.” However, Weston claims that over time he’s concluded that organic products generally are superior to their nonorganic counterparts. “There’s less water, more taste. They don’t rot as fast. It’s just a stronger, healthier product.” While commercial produce most often costs from a few cents to many times less than its organic alternatives, Weston says exceptions occur more often than one might expect. “For example, we recently had locally grown organic tomatoes for sixty-nine cents a pound, while the commercial ones were seventy-nine. . . . Local produce in season is the best buy.”

While waiting for the organic truck-load to arrive, Weston picks out cucumbers too withered to be salable, bell peppers which have obviously passed their prime. These he will add to the “free box” just inside the food store door, where store patrons are welcome to still-edible goods which nonetheless can’t be sold. At that moment, a deli worker waltzes past Weston and inspects the barren shelves of the deli case. She moans, “Yesterday this was completely packed! We're gonna have to make so much stuff today.” Over at the deli counter, another young man with shoulder-length hair works at juicing Thompson seedless grapes and Crenshaw melons on the verge of being overripe. “This would just be waste in a regular store,” he says proudly.

One worker behind the counter pipes up that he just heard how grapes dissolve deleterious “hard stuff” lining the walls of human intestines.

”Oh yeah,” the grape-juicer replies. “Among different kinds of fasts, grape juice fasts are right up there.” It’s almost 9:50 a.m. by the time one can hear the hiss of the semitrailer’s brakes. Up in the cab ride two broad-shouldered young women, both extremely short-haired, clad in shorts and running shoes. First they toss out boxes of raw and rennetless cheese, which a collective worker loads onto a dolly and wheels in the front door of the store, bawling, “We got mucus! Get your mucus!” By the time the truckers begin unloading the fruits and vegetables, ten o’clock has struck and a varied group of shoppers has gathered before the front doors. In they stream, blue-tinted matrons and young couples and wind-blown beach people, who now must weave between the ingress of items from the truck: 180 ears of organic corn, two boxes of Concord grapes, a box of Asian pears. Five types of melons, four varieties of plums, and pears, and peaches, and peppers, and potatoes, and more.