Ypsilanti Food Co-op – Ypsilanti, MI by Patty

Saturday, September 1. Ypsilanti also has a fabulous co-op in the historic section of town called Depot Town. It’s been there since 1975 and offers a variety of local foods squeezed in a pretty small space. They don’t waste an inch though and during our tour the coop’s outreach coordinator Adam pointed out local peaches, potatoes, watermelon, tomatoes, beans, zucchini, dried beans, sugar (made from beets), syrup, honey, tofu, chicken, pork, eggs, milk, and even soap (made from local goats milk.) There were also several items that were really local - from Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. It was an impressive list of local food and I haven’t even gotten to the bread and granola yet, which they make next door.

In addition to their impressive array of local products the co-op is also embarking on an ambitious effort to improve the sustainability of the store itself. They supply a portion of the store’s electricity from 4 solar panels on the roof and have gauges for customers to see how much power the panels are generating at any given time as well as how much they are using from the electric company. The solar project is even more impressive when you consider that the co-op is located in a historic district where regulations make it very difficult to alter the buildings to add things like solar panels.

While we were tooling around the co-op we got to meet Peter Thomason, a local urban farmer. That’s right – he farms on his 1/10 of an acre yard in Ypsilanti. He sells peppers and other vegetables to the co-op and at the farmers market and he just got 12 chickens who are about to start laying eggs. Because Peter has been involved in a well-publicized struggle to get approval from city officials to have chickens in the city, these birds are pretty famous. They rode in a custom-built mobile coop in Ypsilanti’s Heritage Festival parade and they even have their own bumper stickers – I heart Urban Chickens.

Then we went next door to the River Street Bakery where the co-op makes a couple hundred loaves of bread every week as well as pretzels, granola, and cookies. They use a wood-burning oven that burns old shipping pallets. And it burns so hot that the day after they bake bread, there is enough heat left in the bricks for them to make cookies, brownies, and granola. We finished our tour in the parking lot, checking out the discarded pallets that fuel the bread oven and the impressive recycling operation the co-op uses to sort their waste. Then it was off to our next stop, a tour of community gardens in Ypsilanti with Growing Hope. (But we weren’t really done with the co-op, since we had the local peaches and locally-made tortilla chips we bought there on the bus ride to PA.)

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