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A Director's Chairby
Lynne Lekakis “To Meat or
Not to Meat” …that is the question As a human
being, I am a quick problem solver. As a Board member, rarely get to be
that.
Our committee structure solves our problems. Our membership votes on
our big
moves. We spend a lot of time thinking about what would be best for the
Coop, what
would be best for the members, as that is our first priority, serving
the
members what they want. Trouble is:
We’re all members. We all want different things. The
Collective Management Team and the Product committee were not able,
after countless
meetings, to come to a compromise about the wording of the meat and
fish
referenda. As Nate explains in his article, the CMT favors a simple
question. He explains why very well. Read his article. We’ve heard many
thoughts against the simple approach: 1. We already sell meat and fish.
2. We
have struggled for the past 29 years with ambivalence about the product
line
and to put something forth that would introduce another go-round of
interpretation would not be prudent. 3. There are so many strong
feelings out there
about meat and fish that not to include some restrictions on how we’ll
carry
and present it will just cause our already present rift to split wider,
rather than
come closer together. To me, it’s semantics. Personally, the more I
hear about
it, the more I favor restrictions because I think it will appease more
people
who have issues about it, and that’s what I think our job is as Board
members,
to ensure that more members are happy. But the Board isn’t even of one
mind yet
on this issue. We are listening — and trying to come up with an answer
that
will make the most people comfortable. (There is one more meeting to
talk about
this if you haven’t attended one already — Sunday, September
11,
at 5:30 pm at the Unitarian Universalist Church, Carnivores
eat meat. They would likely be happy to buy meat that is not mass
produced,
shot up with chemicals and slaughtered inhumanely beside their sick,
doped-up,
falling down brethren. Right now, that’s their basic choice in other
supermarkets; and though most have started offering “organic” meat, has
anyone researched
how it’s raised? Does anyone care? If we want to offer them something
better, something
greater, then we have to ensure that what we get isn’t just as bad as
what they
can get elsewhere. If we’d like to hold to a higher standard, the only
way to
do that is to have one. |
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