Member Worker Profile:
Dennis Phayre

by Deborah Trupin

Dennis Phayre was elected to the Honest Weight Board in April 2006. Many members, like me, may have known or recognized Dennis as the owner of the Lark Street vegetarian restaurant, Shades of Green. As I prepared to interview Dennis, I anticipated that he would talk about how his involvement with Honest Weight stemmed from his work with Shades of Green. In fact, his association with the Co-op goes back much further and is much deeper than I expected. In the course of the conversation, I began to think that perhaps most of Dennis’s life experiences had been pointing him toward becoming an Honest Weight Board member.

Dennis joined the Co-op about 20 years ago when he moved to Albany to attend the University at Albany, SUNY. He was at first a shopper in the Quail Street store, but he already had had cooperative experience as one of the original members of the student-run co-op on the UA campus. Dennis remembered that walking into the co-op was a powerful education about the options available for food and health. After graduating from the university, Dennis joined Honest Weight, working first as a cleaner in the Quail Street store.

Dennis studied anthropology and spent a summer in Mexico and a semester in Costa Rica as part of his studies. Among the things he experienced there were eating patterns based on lessprocessed foods — diets that were closer to the land. Dennis focused his studies on food ways and alternative healing systems, as he wanted to understand what other cultures’ healing approaches had to offer.

Honest Weight has played an important part in this search, but it also played an important role in another part of his life. Dennis met his wife Nieves while shopping at Honest Weight! Dennis and Nieves have two children — Lucas, 10 and Isabella, 7 — who can often be seen with them at Honest Weight events.

After college Dennis, his brother-in-law and Nieves opened a juice bar on Lark Street. That small juice bar eventually became the restaurant Shades of Green. Dennis said that, through Shades of Green, he began to increase his understanding of the relationship of food to culture and to the health of the planet. He noted that in running Shades of Green he thought not just about feeding people, but about how the food he bought and served affects the environment, and the lives of the people who grew and produced the food.

Since closing Shades of Green in 2005, Dennis has had more time to devote to the Co-op and decided to run for the Board of Directors last spring. He continues to apply his passion for the “politics of food” to his work with Honest Weight. Dennis thinks a great deal about how to integrate economics, eating habits and collective participation in constructing communities. Right now, the focus of his thinking is on Honest Weight. Dennis remembers what a powerful educational experience it was when he first walked into the Co-op. He wants to help the Co-op to continue to be that experience for others.

Dennis believes in the mission of Honest Weight, as expressed in the mission statement and core values. He said that part of the challenge for Honest Weight is to build an integrated model in which all aspects of the Co-op, including how and where we obtain our goods, our employment practices and what social programs we support reflect the mission and values. Looking to the future, Dennis said that Honest Weight needs to clarify the vision of what we want to become and noted that he is looking forward to working on the next phase of developing this vision, which should begin at a retreat this winter. He does not think that size is the most important factor in the future of Co-op.

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