Fresh & Easy, a middle-class grocery that should accept WIC, but not necessarily unions

An opinion piece in Tuesday's SF Bay Guardian got me thinking...

It's true that Fresh & Easy is a middle-class person's grocery store.  Its prices are matched against Safeway, not FoodsCo, and its organic, pesticide-free offerings are matched against Trader Joe's and Whole Foods, not Super Save.

I've been fortunate as an adult and have never needed the support of a government food stamp program, but growing up in Canada, we relied on the monthly "baby bonus" check from the government, which my mom always used to buy groceries.  As such, I have benefited from and definitely appreciate the need for programs like WIC in ensuring mothers and their children are fed.  One of the purported reasons for putting the store where they did, besides making money for Fresh & Easy, was to bring fresh food to a veritable food desert and a less-wealthy community.  Realizing that WIC is something that this community relies on heavily and adjusting their policies to meet that community's needs is simply the right thing for Fresh & Easy to do.

The union issue is a non-issue, as far as I'm concerned.  Workers at Southern California Fresh & Easy's have repeatedly said no to unionization because they're well paid, have decent work environments, and are given opportunities for advancement.  Over the years, the labor unions have ensured that state and local laws have been written to protect workers to such a degree that the unions themselves are less necessary today than in the past.  The fact that more than half of the employees at the store live hyper-locally is a huge boost not only for those people and their families, but for the community, and the only reason I can see that the unions are complaining is that they're not getting union dues from these folks.

I have to agree whole-heartedly with Ms Gray-Garcia's suggestion that we need to have more community vegetable gardens.  Quesada Gardens Initiative is a perfect example of what needs to happen throughout the Bayview, Portola, and Mission neighborhoods in this regard.  The only large hurdle with this is and always will be in finding people to bring the land to life, tilling, planting, and tending the soil to produce the vegetables needed for the community.  I just don't know that there are that many garden project leaders out there to do it.