Our green grocer

Dear Editor:

What’s all this fuss about a plastic bag ban?

All plastic isn’t evil, just like all cars aren’t. It’s only petroleum-based plastic that wads up into a black ball when burned and never goes away. Plastic made of soybean, rape, or hemp oil is biodegradable.

It’s just that Big Oil has done such a devious job of marketing. They’ve convinced the plastic industry they must make their product with petroleum oil, just as they persuaded the automobile industry the only way to propel their vehicles is the internal combustion engine. Big Oil certainly seems hell-bent on destroying the planet.

Mana Foods doesn’t hafta worry about a plastic bag ban. Sontantar provides plastic bags to anyone who needs them, but they’re made of soybean oil.

That’s not the only way Mana Foods contributes to the environment. All their produce is organic and mostly locally grown, usually in Colorado’s largest organic farming area near Paonia. (provigil)

That means their produce doesn’t carry all kindsa pesticides and herbicides that kill lotsa living things we shouldn’t be killing. And it’s not shipped in from California or Chile. It’s insane to truck in food we can grow locally.

Then there’s the fact Mana Foods is locally owned. I went to the customer service counter at City Market recently and told them Mana Foods had two products that were vastly superior to theirs.

Mana Foods’ kefir has the consistency of a milk shake. City Market’s is no thicker than milk. You could hold up a carton on Mana Foods’ cottage cheese upside down with the top off and the product wouldn’t fall out. If you did that to a City Market cottage cheese carton, you’d have a mess to clean up.

“Tell Cincinnati,” I was told, “We don’t decide what we sell.”

On the other hand, if I can’t find an item I want on Mana Foods’ shelves, I’ll tell whoever’s on duty and they’ll order it.

Kroger’s recent imperious no free newspapers edict is another example of how big national corporations can’t serve local needs. Some cigar chomping CEO in Cincinnati doesn’t know or care what the impact of such a ban will have on the readers of The Sopris Sun. Mana Foods has, and will continue to have a Sopris Sun newsstand.

I don’t care what Citizens United says, corporations aren’t people. Kroger doesn’t give us the food we want, is making it more difficult to obtain our local newspaper, and is giving us a Starbucks and a gas station we don’t want. It’s time for a boycott. Don’t worry, Mana Foods will take care of us.

Fred Malo Jr.
Carbondale